Funding Upstream – a first learning session with donors

Last month Foundation Scotland hosted a discussion involving some donors and colleagues from the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, Friends Provident Foundation and Two Ridings Community Foundation.

The purpose of the conversation was to consider the implications of funding upstream – what this means, why it’s important and some of the challenges. The session was part of our wider ambition to engage more donors in supporting groups to tackle the causes of issues in a community that prevent it from thriving and not just the symptoms.

Stewart Wallis OBE, Executive Chair of The Wellbeing Economy Alliance, explained the pressing urgency for an economy purposefully focused on wellbeing and how the philanthropic community can contribute to this.

Abigail Gibson, Head of Funding Strategy at Friends Provident Foundation and Harriet Johnson, Head of Programmes and Partnerships with the Two Ridings Community Foundation both shared stories and learning about the challenges and opportunities of funding where results are less visible or immediately tangible.

Harriet talked about a Leadership Programme which the Two Ridings Community Foundation runs with the aim of building ‘connected, collaborative and generous leaders’ – but which wasn’t designed with specific metrics or performance indicators. Whilst this caused some unease internally, two national funders have since commented on the improvement in applications from the area and are clearly now working more collaboratively and strategically.

When you invest in people, it can be transformational for the individual, the organisation they lead, the work the organisation does and then the difference it makes to the community.

Participants shared their excitement and concerns about what they’d heard:

• It’s not an either-or. It’s helpful to think about where on the spectrum of prevention organisations and groups are working, and that maybe Foundation Scotland has a role in providing support to help some groups move more upstream whilst not turning off the critical downstream services they provide.
• Supporting work that is trying to tackle issues rather than just treat symptoms is risky, as outcomes and impact are less predictable. So it’s important to do more relationship building and more monitoring and connecting with the groups that you're funding. And this might be challenging to maintain at scale.
• Just by thinking more upstream, you can achieve a double impact with your funding – you can alleviate an issue for a short period but also enable the organisation or project to consider some longer-term work in this area focused on, for example, awareness raising, linking with others and/or campaigning.
• Building genuine partnerships seems key under the banner of this question: 'how do we work together to have the most impact?'

In terms of influencing policy, the participants agreed that a lot of the social and economic change that we need to see has to come from government and that perhaps there is a role for community foundations to use our influence to try and support that change. And that we need to plan how we will progress this work so we can help philanthropists understand where they can fit in and provide support to help move that forward.

In the new year, we hope to continue the conversation by visiting some funded organisations with some of the donors who attended the session to hear and learn about taking a more preventative approach.