Paul Streets: Bringing unlikely partners together

This article was first published in Third Sector.

The strengths and challenges of traditional funding is that it often only targets individual organisations.

That works when you are focused on addressing specific issues such as domestic abuse but is less effective when you want to deal with systemic issues.

That’s because communities work with multiple players to address entrenched issues and social justice funders must also do this if they want to get beyond the symptoms of failure to address root causes.

Not many national funders have the resources and capacity to operate at depth in many communities.

And communities are understandably frustrated after decades of experience with top-down, time-limited imposed solutions that don’t last. Sustainable solutions have to be locally owned and home-grown.

It’s a problem we and many funders have been struggling with, which is why six of us have come together as LocalMotion to work as partners with six locations in England and Wales (Oldham, Middlesbrough, Enfield, Carmarthen, Torbay and Lincoln), focusing on some of the broader challenges that push people to the doors of the individual organisations we fund.

What’s interesting is that an open approach with a long-term commitment to work with people seems to bring unlikely partners to the table.

Earlier this year, I visited Middlesbrough, where people from across sectors including public health, the local council, voluntary organisations and Teesside University are working together with LocalMotion on a common commitment to the town.

Their aspirations are focused on boosting the local economy, improving community wellbeing and connecting across sectors. The organisations collaborating on this are working on a long-term action plan for Middlesbrough.

One of these members is AV Dawson – one of the larger small businesses in the town, with a history that goes back more than 100 years.

It employs about 200 people, 96 per cent of them local. We saw the same from Teesside University, where 70 per cent of students come from the local area and the majority are the first in their generation in tertiary education. The same was true for the local police.

At the other end of the lens, we met smaller voluntary organisations anchored in their local communities supporting local women, refugees and disabled people or focused on the poorest neighbourhoods and people facing food and energy poverty.

LocalMotion is one of a number of approaches we are taking to this with similar aims, where our primary role is supporting local relationship-building – not providing funding.

In all of these approaches it becomes clear that the real power is in bringing different worlds together around a shared commitment to their shared home.

If our interest and commitment as funders enables that, and our funding can be used to help facilitate it, it will be well spent.

And by working in six places with common questions we can amplify the impact and learning by creating a movement of people committed to the places in which they each live.

But it requires patience.

It’s hard enough to find the right organisations to fund specific issues. Even harder to work across a wide range of local partners seeking a common tangible focus that can work for them all – and be patient enough to let the process play out in a way that can land for them all.

Being a funder enables you to see places in a different light.

As someone who originally hails from Scarborough, just 40 miles down the road, I am ashamed to say I arrived with my own childhood prejudice about Middlesbrough as a broken post-industrial town.

Somewhere I drove around, not to. This attitude is endemic in public policy in Britain with our negative language of ‘left behind’ and ‘levelling up’.

Seeing a place through the lens of those who live there opens up your eyes to see these industrial towns as places with not just a proud past, but a pride and commitment to future potential – vested in those who have chosen to stay and commit to the place or have arrived to make it their home.

In Middlesbrough, as in several places we work in, their commitment is amplified by the arrival in recent decades of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution who have been placed there by the government but have made the town their home.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Towns with an industrial heritage have often welcomed immigrants and benefitted from the entrepreneurial spirit it brings.

As you walk from the station you find a statue to the founder of ‘modern’ Middlesbrough – Henry Bolckow – a German immigrant who founded its iron industry in the mid-19th century and became the town’s first mayor and then MP.

In recent years it has become one of the key Home Office dispersal centres – as reflected in one of the local schools, where there are more than 40 first languages other than English.

Immigrants, whether forced or voluntary, come with hope and aspiration as they seek to build a new life. And with that comes promise and prosperity.

I left Middlesbrough upbeat about the town and with greater clarity about the role that relatively small amounts of funding can play in providing the time, space and capacity to look to an optimistic future locally led and delivered.

If, that is, we can give time, patience and reframe the negative Whitehall stereotypes of places we too easily write off as ‘left behind’.