Developing a Regenerative Futures Fund # 6— The Ingredients

A few conversations recently — including the creation of a number of outcome maps at our Regenerative Futures Fund Outcome Mapping day, and a second outcome mapping day last week — have got me thinking about what we were calling ‘principles’ for the Regenerative Futures Fund.

My thinking was also aided an excellent chat with my friend Matt Baker from The Stove in Dumfries on Friday which helped to move my thinking onwards in relation to wider ecosystems.

I really enjoyed the report by Carnegie Trust and Centre for Thriving Places about the ‘Shared Ingredients of Wellbeing Economy’ — this is a clear summary of a range of ‘measures’ and principles of a Wellbeing Economy and how they crossover and essentially cover the same themes but structured and emphasised differently.

This got me thinking about the ‘principles’ we’ve been developing and using to frame conversations about developing a Regenerative Futures Fund for Edinburgh and something that is missing around being part of a wider eco-system. And also that maybe framing these as ‘Ingredients’ might be more useful.

This is how we framed conversations with organisations in Oct/Nov/Dec 2022:

The point of the Regenerative Futures Fund development year is to co-design a new 10-year fund for community-based organisations or groups. Between Aug 2022 — Aug 2023 want to work out if it’s possible to create a new fund for Edinburgh with the following principles:

1. Collective long-term transformational change — contributing to ending poverty and reaching net zero by 2030.

2. Shifting power in how decisions are made — in a genuinely participatory way by people with lived experience of the issues the organisations and groups aim to improve.

3. Unrestricted funding for 10-years — on the basis that community-led organisations are best placed to know what needs done in their communities.

4. New money — aiming to try to bring money in that can’t currently be accessed directly by organisations, on the basis that Edinburgh is a wealthy city.

5. Administratively light — get as much money out into communities as possible by having as small an overhead cost as possible.

6. Continuous learning, together — design an evaluation and reporting system that is light touch and useful for organisations.

And here is a visual showing a slight evolution of these, to include being part of a wider eco-system:

Anyone developing or involved with funds that are similar — I’d love to chat — hear what your ‘ingredients’ are…

I know these will need more work and more brains. Also aware that language matters and need to keep checking that these are not becoming too ‘jargonistic’.

That’s it!

(leah.black@evoc.org.uk for anyone who’d like to chat more…)

Short and sweet for a change :)