Power shift in Greater Manchester

Changing the power dynamic in funding relationships

 

By Afshan D’Souza-Lodhi

 

 

It’s worth trying to understand where the power lies. Often we think the power lies with the philanthropic organisation, because we equate money to power. In the case of charities and funders, the power actually lies with the person, the organisation, applying for the funding, because without that work being done the money is not going to get given out. 

 

The funder has a need, which is to give money out and disseminate it to do good, whatever that means. So really, as an applicant, I have all the power.

 

I’m doing this work already, they should just be giving me the money to do it. And I think it’s repositioning that. It’s asking questions. 

 

If a funder tells me they need to know exactly how many people turned up to our sessions, I ask why. 

 

Is it now a quantity thing? Do you want bang for your buck in terms of people, or do you want quality of work happening? 

 

You know, if two people turn up and they’ve had the best time of their lives, and their entire trajectory changes, and they go on to build these two amazing organisations and change half the world. Does that matter to you? Or would you rather have 50 people in the room you didn’t get to cultivate a really good relationship with?

 

What do you want? Quality or quantity? 

 

That’s the thing. Before, we never asked the funder why they wanted us to send them reports and evaluations and receipts. We just did it as it was a given.

 

Working with Lankelly Chase to devolve decision making and sharing power, we were asking those questions. We were shifting the power dynamic. That’s a trajectory that I felt like we, the Greater Manchester System Changers, were on. 

 

Really, right now?

 

Then Lankelly says they’re not doing funding anymore, which I 100% respect as a decision, because it’s a ballsy thing to do. My initial reaction was but couldn’t they have done it in five years, in 10 years time. Couldn’t we have waited a bit longer? Right now? Really, right now? 

 

What I’m hoping is going to happen, and I think is happening, is that 70 partners, as we’re calling them, in Greater Manchester will go out and be having these conversations on a local level. 

 

Why am I being asked to do all this paperwork and evaluation by a funder who is just going to change and shake up the whole thing? Even if we do nothing from now on, going out and knowing we have an ability to question a funder, to say no to a funder, to ask for more money from a funder, and that we have power within that relationship, that itself is going to slowly change the funding line.

 

We’re doing this inward looking: How do we support each other and keep each other alive?

 

It would be really easy for us to just slip back into old patterns, apply to a funder for conventional funding and falling into old relationship dynamics.

 

But, there is an appetite to do more.

 

People are being more collaborative and supportive. Rose Ssali’s network is testament to that, what she’s doing with SAWN, what we’re calling an Island of Sanctuary in Greater Manchester. 

 

We’ve got these networks in various places around Manchester that are coming together. They’re having a conversation on: How do we collaborate? Do you need to buy land? Do we need to buy a big property together? How do we do community wealth building?

 

This wouldn’t have happened before in Manchester, because everybody’s very competitive, because we’re all individually working in silos. Funders have put us in competition with each other.

 

The shift we’re trying to leverage is that we all have a little bit of resource, we all have a little bit of knowledge. If we pull that all together, and then we go to a funder and tell them, “Hello, we have this thing over here.” 

 

We have all the power to do that. And that’s partly what our transition in Greater Manchester is about, harnessing the power and the collaborative energy of the 70 partners, and going to somebody and saying, “Okay, give us £5 million over three years. Give us a whole plot of land and a whole lot of building and a whole lot of structure, and let us figure out where the money goes because within the 70 organisations, we’ve got a lot of knowledge of Greater Manchester and beyond. We know what work is happening, how to do that work best. We are the people at the ground level doing the actual work, as opposed to sat in an office doing paperwork”. 

 

Managing somebody who’s managing somebody who’s managing somebody who’s managing somebody who’s doing that work, doesn’t work. 

 

What works is that direct contact with people with lived experience and making real life change.

 

What can funders do?

 

Be more trusting. To think about why they’re asking for evaluation reporting and to what end.

 

I know that those reports don’t get read. They’ll sit in an email somewhere and then get deleted after seven years. And they are a lot of work. People are being paid to write evaluation documents that don’t get read. I just don’t understand why. 

 

So the first thing is: Why are you doing evaluation? If it’s to understand trends, you can do that in a conversation. You can bring all of the organisations you’re funding into the same room and go, ‘Hey everybody, why don’t you all talk about the work that you’re doing?’ Build connections. Build some networking. Build some co-learning between people. 

 

You can, as an organisation, as a funder, spot the trend and go, “Oh, we’ve noticed there’s a group of people around you doing this. There’s a group of people doing that.” 

 

You can be alive in conversation. 

 

People will only put in an evaluation form what’s going really, really well. Even the stuff that’s going badly, they’ll talk about in a way that makes them look good.

 

Whereas in person, or in a conversation, people will tell you what’s really troubling them, and they’ll ask for help, and they’ll ask for support. If you have a good relationship with people, they’ll trust you more to tell you the truth.

 

Then you might realise that, actually, in 50% of the organisations you fund people require mediation, because when you’ve given them money, money causes problems, and now they’re stuck. 

 

In Greater Manchester, we had to have mediators and had to go out and train people in Deep Democracy and conflict resolution so we could build a group of people that could then go into organisations and practice as third-party mediators and do conflict resolution. We wouldn’t have known that had we not done the learning spaces, had we not just had conversations with people. That knowledge wouldn’t have come through in the evaluation forms.

 

The best thing that could happen

 

Success would be knowing that the 70 organisations and partners we’ve worked with are taking the energy of the shift in power between funder and fundee. They have more power than they think they do.

 

We have the ability to solve a lot of issues, are able to resist on a different level, and do real systems change by creating a brand new structure and infrastructure. I talk a lot about communes. I really want a commune.

 

So, the other end of the scale for success would be that we all come together and buy a massive plot of land and we build off of it, or we buy a massive structure in the centre of Manchester and we all house our 70 organisations in it, and we show what collaborative work and community work really looks like in Greater Manchester when funders are not asking us to compete. 

 

Then we’ll have funders coming to us. We’ve got funders already coming to us and saying, “that’s really sexy and cool. Can we get in on it, give you money to give out?”

 

And we’re like, “Let’s think about it. Do we want to be affiliated with you?” 

 

That’s the shift in power. 

 

By building these structures, through collaboration and community, through co-learning and co-working we can get to a place where a government can really be of us, as opposed to a hierarchical institution that sometimes wants to support us. 

 

I think we can resist oppressive forces. There will always be an oppressive force. I feel like it’ll always be something that we’re resisting, but these structures and collaboration will allow us to resist that.

 

 

Story Weaving by Peter Pula 

 

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