West Midlands partnerships

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The Community Fund sees a future for itself as a distributor of funds from a variety of sources, not just the Lottery, according to its chief executive Richard Buxton, speaking in Birmingham last month.

Buxton was speaking at a regional event, ‘Lottery matters in Regeneration’, organised by John Taylor, the New Opportunities Fund’s West Midlands manager. Buxton was making the point that at present, ‘there are legal barriers to Lottery distributors giving out funds on behalf of others. If this goes, I could imagine access by community groups to small funding pots’ – a reference to the idea that the CF would make endowments or devolve some of its funds for very local distribution and control.

An extension of the CF’s legal powers has already been flagged up by the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, in her Southwark speech in March. ‘I’d like to consider,’ she said, ‘whether the Community Fund might be empowered to distribute funds on behalf of other, non-Lottery funders. And to work with those who are not constituted as charities.’ Buxton also aired the possibility that Awards for All might somehow be developed to link up with other non-Lottery agencies involved in handling small grants. The context to these remarks was a forum that brought together the Lottery distributors with Advantage West Midlands (the regional development agency), the government office and range of regeneration and community body representatives to try and consoli date partnership working across region.

The gathering revealed some large of ignorance among the various strategic funding agencies about each other’s and potential, but also a high level of will ingness to rectify this situation. The session produced several points for action to accelerate the effectiveness of partner ship working, including: 

• setting up a regional funders’ forum with all strategic agencies involved, including the Regional Assembly 

• production of a West Midlands funding guide covering Lottery, regional develop ment agency and government office funds, plus any other significant sources, too 

• setting up a brokering table where fun ders can agree a joint approach to handling of large multi-funder projects 

• look further at the possibility of regional ‘one-stop shop’ for smaller com munity funding. The West Midlands government office already has approval pilot such a scheme, but there was inter est in exploring where, for example, Awards for All could become part of a sin gle multi-agency pot.

Participants also agreed to hold follow-up events.

For more information, contact John Taylor on john.nof@advantagewm.co.uk