Ah, March – the busy month!

For anyone who has spent the month chasing ridiculously short funding deadlines, and uncertainty about whether they will have a job in the new financial year (the money has run out but the work hasn’t!), we understand your pain!

It’s also been a busy month for the funders to make sure they can account for their budgets and spend their money. Maybe financial years are a necessary evil but they feel like an inconvenience.

So what’s been happening in the development world?

Collusion With A Broken System

Quarterly, the infrastructure organisations from Cambridgeshire and Peterborough meet with the funders who operate locally, at our last meeting we had an insightful presentation from Home – Research Charity – IVAR UK  a research and consultancy organisation that has done much work on the ‘system of funding’ the voluntary sector.

Their research on power imbalance, small charities and unrestricted funding, made the argument that for the resilient but responsive local voluntary sector, funders need to ‘trust, shift their power and fund the organisational structure. You can find more information here: Our research – IVAR

None of this will be of any surprise, but the good thing is the research creates the evidence for the sea change needed and many funders are visibly making changes to work with the sector in a more supportive way.

Funding Month 2024

This series of events by local and national events was a great opportunity to catch up with the latest grant programs and hear from the grantmakers themselves. It was good to hear from the National Lottery Fund trying to give out the message that small organisations are valued and important, and how their process for applying for funding tries to cut down on the amount of time taken to fill in application forms.

A Bumper Month for Funding Alert

Every 4 weeks we send out a funding alert of the latest funding opportunities, many of these will be from funders who have simply updated their programmes to sign up for Funding Alert subscribe here Subscribe to mailing list – Support Cambridgeshire

If you missed this month’s  alert you can find the bumper month of opportunities highlighted here: Funding blog – Support Cambridgeshire

The Peer Support Group

If you are responsible for fundraising as part of your role and look to expand your funding base, the February Fundraisers Network proved to be fruitful and useful Fundraiser Network: The Superpower of Networks – Support Cambridgeshire . You can sign up for the next event in April, where a guest speaker will be present, there is an opportunity to raise issues and a chance to take a deeper dive into specific funding issues/opportunities for attendees. We have now integrated Fuddies into this network.

We know and we hear

We know there is more to do to shift the systems, keep talking, keep highlighting the issues and let’s keep making progress towards a more balanced and realistic system across ALL of our funders. If you would like to discuss this further contact kathy@huntsforum.org.uk