Supporting communities to tell their stories

In 1995, the Scottish charity, Stepping Stones for Families, received one of the first National Lottery grants. Its plan? To test an innovative new approach to supporting families. As well as offering childcare and advice, it went further. It appointed new health and wellbeing workers to boost parents’ confidence. It recruited experts to provide vital money and welfare benefits advice. This was unorthodox for family centres at the time. Yet CEO Isobel Lawson knew it would work. She believed in it. “But…”, she added, “you know, you have to prove it.”

Sounds simple, right? Only it isn’t. As the largest funder of community activity in the UK, we’re privileged to have thousands of people talk to us about what’s important to them and their communities. The issues they face. The solutions they have. The difference they make. And we know that, especially for smaller organisations, reporting impact – the difference made – can be challenging.

The more we listened, the more we identified a need. An opportunity. We are, after all, much more than a just funder. We support communities as they tackle their problems, realise their ambitions, and fulfil their potential.

In this spirit, we’re making a promise. Starting today. That is, to support those we work with - charities, community organisations, grassroots groups – to better demonstrate the difference they make to their communities. We want to make it easier for them to access and share the ideas, solutions, best practice, and learning they need to showcase their impact.

For us, this is about working together to gather clear and robust evidence on how to take collective action to transform society. Our new plans – published today – set out how we want to work with the sector. To use evidence and learning more effectively. To tackle poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination. To inspire meaningful social change.

Communities are our North star. They’re the reason we do what we do. And while we’re the largest funder in the room, we’re rarely the expert. Especially when it comes to lived experience. That’s why we’re making a promise to ourselves, too. To put in place better systems and processes needed to listen to what our communities tell us. To grow from it, as a whole organisation. And then, to share this with others. After all, learning from each other works in many directions.

Our proposals set out five priorities for the next five years. These are:

• Learn with communities: to collectively gather and share evidence and create more opportunities for communities to learn, connect and develop.

• Lead with evidence by harnessing data and learning to make the biggest difference to society’s serious challenges

• Enable our equity-based approach so that we use learning about poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination to target our funding and communications

• Demonstrate our impact - using evidence and data to show the reach of our funding, and the impact this has on communities, and to make better funding decisions in future

• Take an evidence-based approach to funding – by using evidence and learning from outside and inside The Fund to make decisions.

During that time, we’re going to:

• Set up an online learning bank for best practice. Here, communities will find new ideas, evidence, and real-life solutions. We’ll translate evidence and findings from different sources into something that will be easy to access, follow and make use of. Communities can also learn more about the experiences of their peers - what their journeys look like in practice. There’ll be more opportunities to collaborate. And we’ll strive to fill any gaps in what communities want to learn about but sometimes struggle to access.

• Make it easier for our grant holders to access the networks; toolkits; and mentoring, coaching, and learning opportunities offered by us and our partners, across the UK. We'll ensure community groups have more ways to connect with peers, find advice, and learn from others.

• Make better use of evidence to promote positive change and demonstrate the difference that communities make with the help of National Lottery funding. This will help us to better communicate the case for change in each of our four mission areas and support other organisations who share our goals.

• Establish a diverse panel of community advisers from across the UK. We don’t have all the answers. We’re certainly not always the experts. So, this panel will give us ideas and advice about how we – and those we work with – can learn, build trust, and tailor what we provide to what communities really need. And they’ll help us to co-design new ways in which communities can openly learn, connect, and develop, too.

That’s the plan. You can read all about it here. We developed it through consultation with communities and sector partners; their advice, experience and expertise shaped it. We’re incredibly grateful for their input and we want to do justice to the passion they’ve shown for helping us with this. That’s why we’ll be holding ourselves accountable to the commitments we make here. And we’ll be sharing what we learn along the way, including reporting back to communities and our partners about the difference our funding makes through an annual impact report.

Over the next few months, we’ll be developing our plans for the community learning panel. Charities, grassroots groups and organisations serving communities with protected characteristics that might want to get involved can get in touch. Drop us a line via community.learning@tnlcommunityfund.org.uk. We’d love to hear from you.

And as for Stepping Stones and Isobel Lawson? Back then, we did something different too. Our grant included £40,000 of funding specifically for finding out what really made a difference to helping families more effectively. The results were clear: parents got the most from dedicated help for family wellbeing and money advice. They welcomed the friendly, holistic support. The tailored responses to each family’s needs. There were enormous benefits. Stepping Stones discovered that, over 10 years, adding financial inclusion to its support “realised circa £10 million back into the rural community”. 

Showcasing the project’s impact was a game changer for them. “It raised our profile… our innovative ideas were given more legitimacy,” Isobel said. Local authorities, enamoured with the evidence-based approach, asked Stepping Stones to place staff in council nurseries in the city. The charity has tweaked the model over three decades, but the core elements remain today. Impactful as ever.

Isobel believed it.

And then, with a bit of help from us and our funding, she went ahead and proved it.