Mark Goldring is the Director of Asylum Welcome, a charity supporting refugees and asylum seekers in Oxfordshire, which has been supported by the Foundation for four years. As their grant comes to an end, Mark shares reflections on his experience and how other small charities can get the most out of the Foundation's support.
02 August 2024
Asylum Welcome supports asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants living in Oxfordshire, offering information, advice and practical support. We also advocate for the people we work with, by seeking to influence local and national policy, as well as raising awareness of their experiences, as I shared about in a previous blog. The Foundation has supported us for the past four years as we have grown our staff team, expanded our reach and developed into a more dynamic and diverse organisation.
The Foundation's powerful contribution to reducing exclusion and poverty and promoting a more just society is their commitment to nurturing a stronger civil society of diverse mission-driven, small organisations. Having myself moved from working with very large charities to small ones, and now being without the specialist teams that you come to take for granted, the Foundation’s commitment and approach has been invaluable.
Mark Goldring, Director, Asylum Welcome
The Foundation offers its charity partners a combination of an unrestricted grant, access to expertise and organisational development support, and a Regional Manager who genuinely wants the organisation to succeed. Together, these can make a well-balanced contribution, enabling charities to better deliver their mission. But to get best value, the charity needs to be proactive in making use of this support.
The combination of these elements has certainly made a difference to Asylum Welcome – we are now doing more, doing it better and better prepared for the unknowns that tomorrow will bring.
Every organisation needs a clear mission, and to be true to it I believe that some core or unrestricted funding is needed to deliver it. These funds can be bolstered with restricted funds, but without some unrestricted funding charities are often only able to respond to what donors or commissioners want. I believe that some of a charity’s funds are best raised from their local communities, though how much will depend on which community and which cause. The Foundation’s ability to complement this public contribution with core funding is invaluable.
Dynamic small charities experience growing pains. We also have needs and opportunities that we struggle to address without help and which we cannot afford to pay for. Expertise carefully sourced and paid for by the Foundation has helped Asylum Welcome strengthen multiple areas that we identified as needing attention. Consultancy support has helped us clarify our strategy, listening to outside and user voices more systematically than we would have been able to by ourselves. It has assisted us to make things happen, most notably guiding the steps needed for a merger with another organisation. This merger has already helped us meet more clients’ needs more effectively.
Consultancy support has also moved our work towards being with (rather than only for) our clients and people with lived experience, and has transformed the way that we work on local advocacy. And, as we have grown, the organisational development support offered by the Foundation has enabled us to strengthen the management skills needed by and for our increasing staff numbers and to scope and select a new database and how we will use it.
An advice appointment at Asylum Welcome
Volunteers refurbishing a donated bike
Over the last four years Asylum Welcome has grown fourfold. Although only a tiny fraction of that money has come from the Foundation, it’s no exaggeration, as we approach the end of our formal partnership, to say that the Foundation has done more to make Asylum Welcome the dynamic, diverse and effective organisation that we hope we are on route to becoming than any other single partner. The real measure, of course, is whether we are providing a better service to our clients. And how we measure that needs to be the focus of our next development project - funded, we hope, by the Foundation.
This progress doesn’t happen by accident. Both parties need to work for it. The regular visits and discussion with our contacts at the Foundation about what is going on and our evolving needs (not primarily about how we have spent the grant) give an opportunity to reflect on areas we want to improve. Knowing that we are about to have a meeting, the aim of which is to offer support in areas that we want to improve, is a positive stimulus for internal reflection and discussion. And, what can be better for staff confidence than seeing needs that they have helped identify being acted on?
It’s a dilemma for any funder to decide when to move on to other grantees. I’d love to see the Foundation continue to support organisations as we grow beyond £500k in income. But choices have to be made, and the onus is really on charity partners to make the best of the support while it’s on offer.
Find out more about Asylum Welcome by visiting their website: www.asylum-welcome.org
