Supporting small charities and social enterprises: a perspective from Clarion Futures
Julian Lomas
In the third blog in our series we hear from Emma Hale, Grants Manager at Clarion Futures, the charitable foundation of Clarion Housing Group. Emma reflects on their partnership with Almond Tree Strategic Consulting and the impacts of the Recovery and Resilience Programme on both the foundation, and on their partners.
For Clarion Futures, broadening our offer to include business development support and capacity building was a natural next step in our commitment to investing in grassroots organisations working in Clarion communities. We have a long history of commissioning and grant funding and had always had ambitions to test, deliver and grow a ‘more than money approach’ to our relationship with our delivery partners.
Realising this ambition was expedited by the disruption to our business-as -usual funding model during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our financial response was two-fold; to respond flexibly and at pace with streamlined access to immediate need, crisis response funding, and also to introduce access to core cost grant support. At the height of the pandemic, we saw partners dealing with significant financial challenges, largely centred around the necessary depletion of reserves, a dramatic change to the fundraising landscape and, as we identified after the fact, a notable skills gap in cashflow management and/or lack of access to robust financial systems.
The pandemic demonstrated that our partners are incredibly agile, they adapted delivery and in nearly a third of cases pivoted their business models completely. We also saw that partners diversified the essential services and activities they deliver, at pace and with demonstrable impact. Whilst this shift in scope was readily reflected in our grants offer, we understood our role as a responsible funder was also to explore opportunities to invest in organisations’ immediate viability and longer term sustainability – it was this that led us to partner with Almond Tree.
It was vital to us that we engaged with a partner who really understood the challenges, drivers and impact of small and medium sized community based organisations. Almond Tree’s network of associates offered the perfect balance of expertise and empathy. We were not looking for an off the shelf capacity building package, we needed the right team who could understand both the passion and complexity of small, overstretched management teams and trustee boards.
We also needed a partner to offer flexibility in working together in the design and shaping of our pilot offer. We knew our overall objective was to help our partners embed sustainable business models to stabilise their organisations and ensure their viability for the longer term. We had an idea of how we thought we might achieve that and were really fortunate to have the insight and expertise of Julian Lomas, Neal Trup, Phil Tulba and Robin Brady in mapping this out in a clear programme structure. Almond Tree not only acted as our delivery partner but became our critical friend and learning partner ensuring we reaped as much added value and learning from the mechanics and management of running a business development programme as we did from the individual interventions with our partners.
For our partners we have seen a real range of outputs and outcomes across the various consultancy support interventions. We have seen resounding consensus from partners who are hoping this is just the start of building on their relationship with Clarion Futures and a real keenness to continue to access this type of support as part of their on-going journey working with Clarion communities.
Alongside this wealth of positive outcomes we have seen a number of key impacts from the pilot which we will take with us in thinking about our next steps:
Delivering bespoke support – we recognise there is whole host of general training and leadership support available to third sector organisations already out there. However, we wanted to be able to tailor our support to the specific needs of our partners and the unique contexts in which they work. Building a comprehensive needs assessment tool with Almond Tree plus having the consultant’s approachable, diplomatic kick-off calls allowed us to really uncover where our support would be most impactful for the organisations going forward. This two-tier triage gave us the chance to prioritise need and design impactful, bespoke support interventions.
Providing a sounding board – a large number of our partners are founder or volunteer led, or have a very small, and very dedicated management team. Being able to provide space, time and access to community leaders to talk through their plans, ambitions and challenges with an Almond Tree consultant had a significant impact on the outcomes of the consultancy interventions. We have learned the importance of having that independent voice in supporting our partners and the need for leaders to have access to a sounding board, coach, mentor type role to build confidence, help troubleshoot and to reassure them when they are on the right track.
Improved relationships – one of the biggest impacts for us as a charitable foundation has been in empowering our own staff to have different types of conversations with their partners. Relationships were often forged around funding and KPIs and having Clarion Futures staff lead the needs assessment process opened up a new dynamic in their relationships - building a clearer and stronger understanding of the position of the organisations they work with. The pilot has facilitated a shift in the power dynamics of the relationships between funder and recipient and we are seeing stronger, more transparent and more equitable relationships being built with our partners.
Benefits to investing in mission over projects – traditionally we have funded on a project-by-project basis across multiple schemes and teams within Clarion Futures. This pilot has given us the opportunity to reflect on how we work with partners and explore new ways to invest in organisations as a whole, based on their overall mission and impact.
“The pilot non-financial support programme we have delivered in partnership with Almond Tree Strategic Consulting has exceeded all our expectations in how we, as a funder, can support our community partners beyond our grant making and commissioning efforts. Post-pandemic its particularly important for us to support and strengthen local voluntary sector organisations who deliver essential services for Clarion residents and our wider communities. The expertise from the Almond Tree team was integral to the shaping and success of the pilot programme and we look forward to working with them to embed this crucial business development support offer more widely going forward.”
The success of Clarion Futures is partly rooted in the success and sustainability of the charitable organisations working in our communities. Having the learning from this pilot to help us evaluate and consider how we continue to deliver and facilitate impact has been invaluable. This piece of work would not have had the impact we have seen without the guidance, expertise and patience of Almond Tree, and their network of associates.
We are excited to take the lessons learned and build on the legacy of this work to be able to embed business development support as part of our core offer going forward.