Post session 7 - Survey responses (anon)

Blue­print Feedback

What’s work­ing well in the blue­print so far?

The blue­print reflects the major­ity view of what the fund should look like. I am very con­fid­ent that the final piece would deliv­er bene­fits for the Park and its people, once we dot and cross the final Is and Ts.

The level of detail required for each grant size. I think the sim­pli­city of the pro­cess will be a relief to fund­ing vet­er­ans and build con­fid­ence in people new to funding.

I per­son­ally feel the EDI ele­ment will work well (keep­ing 10% in reserve) and I don’t feel any need to keep revis­it­ing it or make the min­im­um 10% high­er. It’s a min­im­um threshold and I’m con­fid­ent there will be many more applic­a­tions hit­ting the EDI defin­i­tion than just 10%.

I am con­fid­ent we have got a lot of things right at this point. I think the amounts offered in grants sit well with me, how­ever I would add that I think small should be up to 200,000, medi­um 350,000, large 450,000… my think­ing behind this is that there is a good spread of grants.

I feel the applic­a­tion pro­cess and ques­tions that people have to fill out are simple and is includ­ing of the people who are try­ing to get to use this funding.

Very little con­fid­ence in any­thing cur­rently, the blue­print still seems to be a col­lec­tion of a vari­ety of ideas with no sense of a con­sensus to any one dir­ec­tion on the major­ity of issues raised. I have tried to be more spe­cif­ic in com­ments dir­ectly on the document.

The pro­posed ​‘Struc­ture’ of the Fund is basic­ally sound and the mod­el employed by Involve, I believe, has been suc­cess­ful to date. I am also con­fid­ent that the ​‘Oper­a­tion­al Sup­port’ from the PA will guar­an­tee the Panel’s suc­cess & assist effect­ively to improve our Com­munit­ies’ Wellbeing.

Rep­res­ent­at­ive paid pan­el is what I think is most import­ant. The expli­cit sup­port that will be giv­en to applic­ants is great. Scor­ing of the pro­jects is great.

What would you change, and why?

For example, is there any­thing in the blue­print that doesn’t sit right with you, feels unclear, or that you think could work bet­ter? Be as spe­cif­ic as you can — the more detail you give us, the more use­ful it is.

I’m still not very clear about the scoring/​weighting sys­tem for award­ing the grants. And, I really think one pan­el tasked with review­ing applic­a­tions from all three grant pools makes sense.

I think the com­munity pan­el decision mak­ing for medi­um and large grants is great in prin­ciple but we still need to really flesh it out — the logist­ics of it are still quite vague and I’m not sure the Park have enough to go on.

I think the pan­el that is going to decide grants needs not to be people that are always on pan­els. I really think the mix of people on this pan­el is refresh­ing and I per­son­ally think we should all be on the next pan­el. I feel we are a fair bunch of folks. That would make the next stage easy… how­ever I know not every­one agrees with this, or even might not want to be on the next pan­el. Also EDI needs more discussion.

I feel the size of pots needs to be gone over and thought about slightly more and think about the pros, cons and res­ult from dif­fer­ent sizes of money available.

I have tried to be spe­cif­ic in com­ments on the document.

I feel that the ​‘Com­munity Decision Mak­ing’ aspects have been ques­tioned in depth to date & we are still to reach con­sensus. The point has been made that geo­graph­ic­al con­sid­er­a­tion gives way if ​‘Pro­ject Qual­ity & Com­munity Bene­fit’ is com­prom­ised as a res­ult. There­fore, let us not get bogged down too much & remove any geo­graph­ic­al ref­er­ence where needed.

The EDI 10% ring­fenced is ok, but I would want it to be 15 or 20%.

Our guid­ing ques­tion is: how should this fund work, and how do we make sure com­munit­ies are genu­inely in con­trol? What’s the one thing we still need to get right to answer it?

This could be some­thing that’s unre­solved, some­thing that needs more thought, or some­thing you feel strongly about that isn’t yet reflec­ted in the design.

Unless there’s lever­age from the NLHF, I wouldn’t want the over­head cost of admin­is­ter­ing the fund to get close to 30 – 40% of total grant fund avail­able for award. If we man­age to suc­ceed with that, I think it can become a won­der­ful case study for sus­tain­able par­ti­cip­at­ory poli­cy­mak­ing in prac­tice; and this would even­tu­ally cause more donors to want to rep­lic­ate, or award more grants to the Park. I’ll love that we look bey­ond this £1m, and the next 2 years of imple­ment­a­tion, and pon­der on what leg­acy we want to leave behind through this process.

How should this fund work: With as much sim­pli­city as pos­sible and giv­ing the widest range of people a shot at receiv­ing fund­ing. ~ I think we’re hit­ting that.

How do we make sure com­munit­ies are genu­inely in con­trol: From the design pro­cess through to the decision mak­ing pro­cess, voices from around the Park should be rep­res­en­ted ~ The Park have done a good job of bring­ing us all togeth­er from a really wide array of back­grounds. If this can be done when bring­ing a decision mak­ing pan­el togeth­er then we’re well on our way to answer­ing this question.

I think we need to have spe­cif­ic amounts in the funds. An inter­act­ive map sounds like a great way for folks to check where fund­ing is going, trans­par­ency is also very import­ant in fund­ing so every­one knows it isn’t going to for example to CNPA Friends… I think there is still a lot to clear up and ulti­mately agree on… will leave that till the zoom.

We need to go through every point point by point and vote on decisions then stick to them!

Com­munity Engage­ment’, I believe is the key. How we, as a Pan­el can either assist or facil­it­ate this through the PA to make it eco­nom­ic­ally attract­ive & enga­ging requires our aware­ness & pro­posed out­reach activ­it­ies to be agreed still.

I would want more involve­ment of the whole com­munity. Not sure how, maybe as a ​“con­sultat­ive” opin­ion, for the pan­el to take into account? so not as vote, but ask­ing the whole com­munity ​“what do you think of each of these pro­jects?”. At any rate the decision should be totally trans­par­ent, and repor­ted back to the community.