Devolved decision making revolutionary in Manchester

What is it like for a local team to hold money and make decisions on their own behalf?

 

By Paul Connery

It’s about five years ago now, when we started in Greater Manchester.

 

It is a big area. It has 10 local authorities. Lankelly was doing stuff in Gateshead and York, Oxford, Barking and Dagenham. Those areas would meet up, maybe twice a year, with Lankelly, just ripping it all apart and putting it all back together again. 

 

There was a feeling that Greater Manchester needed more resources, more capacity. We had relationships with Lankelly and so we were pulled together as a team.

 

It was all people Lankelly knew and had relationships with and who were based in Greater Manchester. 

 

That team included Rose Ssali, Afshan D’souza-Lodhi, Matt Kidd and myself. Carrina Gaffney and Karen Compton from Lankelly came alongside us.

 

We got to know each other. We were doing all of it online. We built a really strong team, a strong team ethic. We pulled together what we knew and went out to our contacts to see what sort of structures were there, who was there, where the gaps were, and where the issues were.

 

It was one of the first areas Lankelly tried devolved decision-making. 

 

We were lucky with Lankelly. They told us there was no rush, to go out, explore, find out what we need and that whatever we decide, they’d back it. 

 

Learning to hold the responsibility

 

I think we had about £250,000 in total. We were just given free rein to use that money as we thought best, as a group. None of us had ever worked as funders before, so we really felt the responsibility of it, of holding that money. And you know, who are we to hold it? 

 

We went through a lot of processes around that, of feeling comfortable making those decisions, because we knew we were going to do a fund, some groups weren’t going to get funded, which is difficult when you’re not used to it. 

 

We took our time with it. We gave a lot more support than a lot of funders. We were very visible. People could reach us and speak to us.

 

We had to work through it. We were holding a lot of power. I think there was added pressure because we had access to a kind of decision making our peers didn’t have.

 

We just had to take our time.  It was challenging. Maybe that’s where some of the forging of the team came from. We were going through it together.  We knew we were doing it to reach groups that didn’t have funding, so we were doing it for a positive thing. 

 

But Lankelly was supportive. They told us this is just the way it is. Just go with it.

 

We knew Lankelly was testing: What would it be like for a local team to hold that money and make decisions on their own behalf?

 

There was a lot of responsibility there. We wanted to try and make it transparent, visible, and to work in a way that perhaps could be replicated, or might allow Lankelly to do the same for other groups or areas. 

 

Once we got into it, and we felt like we’d gone out and done research into what the need was, we did arrive, I think, at the best use of funds.

 

It did highlight that we had certain issues around money of our own from our own lives. Then we were suddenly faced with the responsibility of holding this money. This is what Lankelly had been doing for a long time: Well, you can have some funding, and you can’t. That is quite a challenging thing to hold. That’s where the team really bonded. We had to lean on each other. And some people were a bit less comfortable with that than others. We had to door our own inner work around how we personally feel about it.

 

The feelings underneath that came up about power and responsibility were surprising. We just had to bite the bullet. We’d come to the agreement that we were going to do this. So we had to step through it.

 

It was COVID, and there were extra challenges a lot of small projects and groups were facing at that time.

 

We must have spent months doing all the scoping work, speaking to people, going out there. And what we came up with is very simple. 

 

We kept the bids process really simple, because not everybody would have been used to writing bids. English wasn’t everyone’s first language. We said they could speak to us on the phone if they wanted instead, or they could do it as a video. We kept it really open. If anyone wanted to speak to us, we’d go through the process with them, holding drop ins for people to meet with us. And so we really did add in more than most funders were doing.

 

We just kind of said, ‘well, what do you need? And how can we help?’ It wasn’t like ‘you must do this, this and this’, or ‘we want you to achieve this’. There were no outcomes from our perspective. It was just: What do you need? How much do you need? 

 

And, obviously we couldn’t always give how much was needed. 

 

Afterwards, groups who had got the funding said it was almost revolutionary to them. 

 

For them, it was so different. The relationship we built up with them over that process was different. That helped validate it all for us, and we were getting that feedback. People were responding, and we could see it was going to some groups that just never had it before, and just maybe would never be in a position to go for a lot of funding. We knew then we were getting the right people

 

It was full trust, really. Even if we never hear from them again or never see how they spent the funding, it was like, “well, that’s going to happen sometimes”. 

 

Trust is key

 

And at the end of the fund, people would ask if we wanted them to do a report.

 

We said, no, it’s fine because we had a dialogue with them all the way. We just kept it open as we went.

 

We were following the devolved decision-making process Lankelly had started. 

 

Trust is key. Being really open. Don’t have it all outcome based or think you know what they need or what’s right for them in their communities. 

 

Don’t have it all outcome based or think you know what they need or what’s right for them in their communities. You’ve got to trust.

 

You’ve got to trust. If somebody works in a local community, they know what the needs are. They know what the community is, live what the community needs, more than we would. 

 

The big advantage we had is Lankelly’s trust in us. Once we felt comfortable with that trust, we were then able to pass that out into the network. 

 

Trust is absolutely vital. If you don’t have it, I don’t know if you can do it like this.

 

Lankelly alongside

 

Carrina and Karen, and then later Rachel, as Lankelly representatives, were part of the group. We still needed them in the group as part of making decisions, but they were in a minority in the group. There were six of us initially, and only two of those were from Lankelly Chase.

 

I never got the feeling they were pushing a Lankelly agenda. 

 

They brought a lot in, knowledge, contacts, and they really helped, as part of the team, to get us to where we got to, generating ideas and believing in what we were doing. I’m not sure we’d have got to where we were without them. 

 

Some of it was a bit of hand holding at the beginning. They certainly did lead more in the beginning in terms of the team building and getting to know each other, which then allowed us to step into it more as we got more confident in it.

 

I felt we were a team of equals, a proper team working together.

 

What’s next?

 

I understand the reasons why Lankelly decided not to be a philanthropic organisation anymore, and I really wanted that decision to have a big impact on the funding sector or environment.

 

Lankelly, in my experience, has been unique in what they offer. For that uniqueness to be gone, to just disappear in that way, is a massive loss to the sector. 

 

I would like to see the Greater Manchester group carry on. There’s a group of people called temporary stewards that are holding it here.  

 

I think it will be nice for it to be able to carry on, but I don’t think there should be an expectation that people can do it for nothing. That likely means bringing other funders in to create an opportunity for that group to have some funding that they can make decisions around.

 

The work’s been done to create a group that could make decisions. So, it’d be great to test that out. 

 

To trust them, really trust them, to do something.

 

 

 

Story Weaving by Peter Pula

 

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