Introducing the Emerging Futures Fund Community Toolkit

Our Emerging Futures Fund was launched during the first wave of the pandemic, which you can read more about here.

It was set-up to resource communities to process what they were going through, to listen across their shared and different experiences, to narrate and tell their stories and to imagine, together, what might now be possible.

We had an overwhelming 1156 applications, an analysis of which we will share in our next blog but were only able to fund 52 of these. We wanted to do more, and seeing the demand from communities wanting to be heard, wanting to share, and also to imagine, we have created the Community Toolkit.

The Community Toolkit is an open resource for any community to use, designed by Resolve and built on by Civic Square.

We saw from the applications that all across the UK people have been experiencing both crisis and hope. Communities have come together in response, showing extraordinary resilience and creativity. We wanted to ask - how might it be sustained and built upon? Listening to communities and supporting them to imagine where they want to go from here felt like an important first step.

Together, we’ve created this toolkit so that communities can:

• Listen to, and bear witness too, each others’ experiences
• Turn their individual stories into shared narratives about the community
• Imagine together about the kinds of futures they want for their community
• Discover ways they can take their ideas forward

The Community Toolkit has 3 different tools.

The Processing Tool

This tool is designed to help communities process and capture their ongoing experiences of the pandemic to surface what they treasure, what they've learnt and what they would like to leave behind.

The Storytelling Tool

This tool is designed to help communities identify and connect themes and patterns between their shared experiences of the pandemic, to tell the story of their community together.

The Reimagining Tool

This tool is designed to take all the things the community have processed, collected and dreamt about together and use it to reimagine the futures they would like to share as a community.

You can find the toolkit here. We are also looking for feedback. If you try it, then please do let us know what can be improved. There is a form for that here.

We’d also like to share this Community Canvas and this toolkit created by the Transition Network, resourced by The National Lottery Community Fund, that communities may find useful.