"On a daily basis, we see and hear grantholders' efforts to provide immediate and dignified support to people living in communities across Scotland"
During my years working in grant making, I have continually been impressed by our grantholders’ ability to respond to the broad ranging and often unexpected challenges of working in the third sector. However, I think we can all agree that we are now in unchartered territory.
Our recent event, A Life and Debt Situation: Designing Financial Security, certainly brought this home, with stories from the day echoing the conversations and feedback we’ve been hearing from grantholders over recent months. We know that, coming out of the pandemic, many organisations are struggling to get back on track. We know that organisations face complex challenges in adapting to new ways of working, replenishing pools of volunteers and re-training new members of staff, not to mention the pressure of spiralling energy costs. And we also know that these challenges are being faced at a time while supporting people with complex needs, often at the point of crisis.
In a recent blog post from our Head of Programmes and Practice, Russell Gunson, a number of measures were outlined within our theme of Financial Security. This included a new Programme award call seeking proposals for projects that can deliver change that lasts on tackling poverty and trauma.
While this reflects our commitment to exploring longer-term, strategic measures, as outlined in our 2020-30 strategy, we also remain committed to underpinning our approach with agility. We are very aware that, as Scotland’s largest independent funder we have the responsibility and opportunity to respond to trends we are seeing and feedback we receive.
Last week, we were pleased to be able to inform our current revenue grantholders (organisations supported under our current strategy) that we will shortly be making an additional payment, effectively an uplift to their current grant, to help cope with immediate pressures. These payments range from 10% to 25% of this year’s instalment of their current grants, and have been purposefully weighted towards smaller, low-capacity groups which are more likely to be severely impacted by increased energy costs. We have tried to make this process as light as possible, with payments unrestricted and no associated reporting requirements. We hope to have made all payments by the end of November.
Core to our values as a Trust is a commitment to learning and improvement. In addition to having ongoing conversations with our grantholders, we will carry out a further survey in the new year. As part of this we will be interested in hearing how organisations feel about our response to this crisis and, as always, how we can help to strengthen organisations’ ability to support those people who are most adversely affected by the current cost of living crisis. We are also very aware that financial support, whilst clearly important, is only part of the solution, and are therefore committed to more effectively using our voice to effect real change and ensure longer-term sustainability.
We know that we are not alone in taking this approach and hope that these additional payments, combined with those from other funders, can provide a financial cushion over the coming months. I would just like to reiterate how much respect and admiration we here at the Trust have for the incredible work being done by our grantholders. On a daily basis, we see and hear about their efforts to provide immediate and dignified support to people living in communities across Scotland which we know has never been more critical than over the coming months and beyond.
