The chief executive of a charity which organises business mentors to work with struggling charities and social enterprises felt let down when he read the sting in the tail of the Social Action Fund application form.
By sponsoring a diversity of innovative approaches to motivate ‘the giving of time, money, knowledge and assets’ the Fund seeks to promote projects within communities, not least in the spirit of the Olympic legacy. So far, so good. This new £20 million-plus initiative is clearly worth having and might have been dreamed up by any third sector or civil society minister over the years.
So why is it that the two hallmarks of this scheme that stand out the most are smoke and mirrors?
Firstly, £20-24 million is not the definitive ‘£24 million’ that was announced a month before the scheme opened for business. This, explains the enigmatic Cabinet Office, is to ‘ensure flexibility’.
Secondly, under the Compact which guides relations between the voluntary sector and government, there is supposed to be a decent period of time for consultation and responding to new funding streams. In the case of the Social Action Fund, which launched in early October and closed for bids on 2 November, the Compact has not been observed.
A second round of bidding from a fund of unspecified size is expected some time next year.
Third, there is a minimum level of bid of £100,000, which is a major disincentive for small, local organisations to scale up existing initiatives or experiment with new ones. The demand for applicants to have a two-year track record is sensible but this is going to be a big boys’ club.
Fourth, haven’t we already got Olympic legacy funding in place? Doesn’t it already include many thousands of new volunteering places for people to do wonderful things either directly or indirectly related to the Games themselves? Considering how much money was diverted away from charitable causes in order to fund the Olympics in the first place the Social Action Fund could be seen as a further diversion.
The fifth argument is what got the chief executive’s goat and it is pretty fundamental.
The government has said that it wants business to play its part in the ‘big society’ and quite right too. Employee volunteering is an under-utilised resource in this country. Much current practice is superficial, with companies measuring inputs (how many hours were volunteered) rather than the more meaningful outputs (what happened) or impacts (what changed).
There is a strong argument for a major boost in employee volunteering with the American experience showing what is possible. It can be a positive influence in communities, a potent human resources tool within business and a significant element of employee engagement and contentment.
So why are employee volunteering projects specifically excluded from the SAF remit? Boosting employee volunteering would have been pushing at an open door. Instead, by targeting the Fund on community volunteering in which Britain already excels and where initiatives of this size may well be subject to the law of diminishing returns, an opportunity is being missed.
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Tom Levitt is former MP for High Peak and writes a monthly Third Sector column for Progress
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I work in a large(ish) CVS, and regularly attend the All Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society and Volunteering. This summer has seen an insane flurry of short-term central funding, much of it large-scale, and – as this article points out – required working to ludicrously short deadlines. NESTA hosted the “Innovations in Giving Fund” (IiG) – a fund for promoting Corporate Social Responsibility and Employer-Supported Volunteering. The fund was open to “all sectors” – including private businesses, and had a 5-week deadline, and required ideas that could be “scaled-up,” preferably to national level. However, the Transforming Local Infrastructure Fund (TLIF) was going on at the same time – and any bid we submitted to the IiG fund would have been shaped somewhat on whether we got TLIF fund – but TLIF will not be announced until Jan 2012. Then, as the article points out, the Social Action Fund was announced – asking for bids of a MINIMUM of £100k, and again asking that ideas be “scalable” – preferably nationally. Again, we would have loved to have bid, but ideally would have wanted to know the outcome of TLIF first, as that has the possibility to fundamentally alter the way we are structured and deliver services. The deadline was just over one month. It felt as though all these major funding opportunities had just been “put out there” – with no thought given to how they might join up and impact on each other. Small, local organisations – particularly in rural areas, face significant barriers in coming together and organising efforts in such a tight time scale. My feeling is that, whatever the rhetoric from the Office for Civil Society, this government is NOT helping local-level community activism, but is shaping grant processes and commissioning in a way that is counter to the Compact, and – arguably – favours larger private companies who can offer larger economies of scale and that can readily mobilise to seize tender opportunities. Finally, at a TLIF briefing, the message was very clear from the Office for Civil Society. These latest funding rounds will take us up to 2013. Beyond that, community organisations will be expected to be “self-sustaining” without “state aid”. Or, to put it another way, running like private businesses.