Targeting is the aim

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After a nine-month wait, the Community Fund has a new chief executive: 44-year-old Richard Buxton. In his second week in the job, he talked to Jane Taylor about his aspirations

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LM: Let’s start at the beginning: who are you?

RB: I’ve spent the last three years at the Legal Services Commission, setting up the Community Legal Service across England and Wales, and in particular 200 Community Legal Service Partnerships, bringing together funders and providers of advice services.

The partnerships were very much about assessing local community need –and about targeting resources at those that need legal services most. Before that I alternated between local government and public-sector management consultancy. When I was director of housing for the City of Westminster, I was responsible for sorting out housing services in the aftermath of the major problems they had had. Social inclusion / exclusion was again very much part of my focus – I chaired the rough sleepers’ initiative for the area around the Strand and the West End. So there are strong links to some of the work I’ve been doing in the past.

LM: Why have you got the job here?

RB: The Community Fund is moving from being a pure grant-giver simply reacting to applications, to an organisa-tion that is increasingly happy to think about the targeting of resources. Its mission is about addressing disadvantage, and given a decline in the level of available resources , that means there has to be a greater degree of targeting and of working in partnership. I’ve been asked to look at how we are able to work with other organisations, how we target, how we measure the results of what we and the organisations we fund are doing.

I also have a lot of experience of devolved working and I see one of the great strengths of the CF as its country and regional structure. And although there are those who would argue we could run it cheaper if we bought a building in Milton Keynes and moved all our staff there, I think that would be to lose one of the enormous strengths that we have, which is the country and regional structure.

LM: You’ve taken up your post just as the CF is running a series of major staff conferences. What are the messages you are picking up? 

RB: I’ve been incredibly impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever come across an organisation where the staff believe so strongly in the value of what they do and the contribution they’re making. So many of the messages are incredibly positive. I’ve been involved in very interesting discussions about to what extent we can become a more learning organisation, about how we can make equalities an integral part of everything we do. To me the most important thing coming out is that we have a group of staff who really want to engage in the debates about how to take the strategic plan forward. 

LM: A widespread criticism of the Community Fund is that, having led the way among distributors for the first few years, it has become slow, bureaucratic, and risk-averse. And the financial climate is likely to make it even more so. What do you say to that? 

RB: I think the changing financial climate means we have to take more risks. The targeting of resources at sections of the community (geographic or other segments) that have not benefited fully from Lottery money in the past means potentially we’re going to fund organisations which are not at such an advanced stage of development, but which have incredibly strong roots. We might have to fund that organisation when on paper there are issues about their capacity to do some of the things that we would expect. 

LM: You’ve also arrived in the middle of the CF’s strategic review process. Is there anything about it that you want to change or add in? 

RB: Absolutely not. 

LM: Does it go far enough in injecting a new feeling of dynamism and radicalism?

RB: I think the answer is yes. But the strategic plan is inevitably written at a fairly broad level. The critical document which I will probably have to put more work into is our operational plan, which says what are we going to do to deliver the strategic plan. It has been worked on intensively and it’s full of dynamism and exciting things, building on the themes identified through the strategic plan. 

LM: One of the Community Fund’s great successes, working with disadvantaged groups and underdeveloped community infrastructure, was Brass for Barnsley. But two years on, we heard at a government conference this month that the coalfields’ share of CF funding has remained stubbornly at about 67% of average, which seems to suggest you haven’t been able to apply that success more widely.

RB: I don’t have enough information to comment on what’s happened in coal-field areas in the past couple of years. All I know is that for the areas to be included within the Fair Share scheme there will be clear targets about what we have to achieve. And that includes working very closely with NOF. Of course it’s easy to put resources in, what’s more important is what we’re achieving as a result, and therefore we have to be very careful that we’re not just rushing in to get rid of money. That would be entirely inappropriate. I was at a consultation event last week on Fair Share and one of the messages coming across very clearly — and there were a couple of representatives from the coal-fields communities there — was that at the end of the Fair Share scheme they wanted sustainable capacity within the community to ensure they would not be left behind in the future. That message was hammered home to me. It is a message that I will not forget. And it’s a message I expect to be held to account for. I expect to be here in three years’ time and I want to be able to go along to Fair Share areas and for people to say to me, yes, we really feel we have the capacity now to bid for resources and deliver projects for our communities. That is more important than simply pumping money in as an equalisation process. 

LM: I’m sure people will be tremendously enthused by that commitment –although it strikes me that three years is rather a short time in which to guarantee sustainability … 

RB: … And that’s why it’s very useful that we and NOF have got slightly different funding approaches. NOF is much more likely to use a draw-down endowment model, which will provide relatively small amounts of money, but over a much longer period of time. That means we’re in a position to go in early with some slightly larger sums of money for initial capacity building and then some early quick-win projects, knowing that there is a longer-term revenue stream available from the NOF capital draw-down. 

LM: How will you make sure this is genuinely a joint approach rather than the two of you vaguely competing in the same territory? 

RB: The impression I get is that NOF and CF are committed to making this work together. Which is why I say that I think it is exciting to have the two models of funding available within the same area at the same time. If you were to go down only the NOF model, the amount of money available in the short term in each area would be relatively modest. But it is secure for a sustained period of time. Whereas our funding commitment is shorter term but able to come in larger amounts.

Now, I will be honest, I do not know how we are going to make Fair Share work in each of those areas. We are not in that position yet. But the commitment from both myself and Stephen Dunmore is that we’ll make this work together. 

LM: The Community Fund has been anxious to impress on everyone that it is suffering a big decline in its income. But this is not mirrored by all the other distributors. Is there a danger of projecting your own funding crisis as a general crisis of decline for the Lottery?

RB: I don’t regard us as being in crisis. It’s not a crisis but it is a significant reduction. One of the key issues for me over the next few months is the communication of the message. First of all, we’ve got Fair Share coming out. There are then a number of policy changes arising out of our consultation on the strategic plan, and then there’s the strategic plan itself, which is about which groups we’ll be targeting.

We need to be very clear about communication, because we don’t want masses of unsuccessful applicants, for all sorts of reasons. It is important for organ-isations to realise that if they are not in a Fair Share area, and they are seeking funding for a target group that is not one of the target groups in the strategic plan, they will need an incredibly good case to attract funding from us. Although we will remain a generalist funder, we will be a targeted generalist funder.

LM: Does that mean you might also have ideas up your sleeve about other funding delivery mechanisms?

RB: There is at least one England regional manager who is very keen on the idea of delegation, who feels that there are other organisations with a track record of attracting applications from sections of the community, where we ought to consider delegation. I don’t know whether that’s the right answer. 

LM: As a newcomer, free of baggage, are there commonsense ways that you think the distributors ought to be working together more than they have done to make life easier for the people trying to access grants?

RB: Our joint portal needs, ideally, something that helps people find out what is the best source of the funding that they are looking for and presents the online form from that funder and lets them send it online. Rather than, as some have suggested, all having the same form, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense And there may be a series of themes where we can identify areas for increasing cooperation. 

LM: Another example from the coal-fields conference was how the East Midlands regional CF office was prepared to make development grants for promising projects irrespective of which distributor their application might end up with. That was held up as being very enlightened. Ultimately people just want you guys to sort out among yourselves who pays for what, without putting the onus on them when they are applying.

RB: Those are important and valid points. I don’t want to make commitments because there are people in the organisation working on those issues now. I suspect there will be developments over the next year or so with all of the distributors increasing the degree of cooperation, because I think we’re all committed to the idea of making it as simple as possible for the person who has to make the application.