Tracey Walsh Interview #2: Adapting to change

The changes across the East End have been vast on every level. Visually, it’s unrecognisable. Changes have brought lots of prospects in terms of the range of jobs, as well as the cultural and social opportunities that exist. But some things haven’t changed, like the levels of deprivation. In part, that’s because we’ve had a very transient community. So, people come in, have the vision, up-skill, but often move on and out of the area. We are very aware of the issue of transience. That’s why it is so important to ensure the training and support that’s on offer to communities is consistent.  

Our core work remains unchanged: tackling deprivation  

That’s what we’ve tried to do in our grant-making: consistently fund local organisations that are effectively working to tackle deprivation. This is because people who are in most need of support, when they get that support, they often move out – it’s one of the consequences of social mobility.  But then new people move in, and they’re often at that original starting point of the people who have just moved out and require that same level of in-depth support again to improve their life chances. But this churn in population is definitely slowing down now. So whilst the cost of housing, for example, is still a major factor in local people moving, improved schooling and job opportunities are also retaining residents. 

EECF has obviously adapted a lot over time. Our core work, our role as a grassroots grant-maker and our need to have a finger on the pulse hasn’t changed.  The social needs that existed two decades ago still exist today, but how you address them has changed.  EECF and the charitable organisations delivering front-line services have to adapt to employment trends, changes in the benefits system etc.  As the economy changes, needs change: it’s a constant cycle.  So at our core, we’re still supporting those key social needs, but priorities change and we have to remain agile to respond accordingly.  

Community insight 

We’ve always been forward-thinking as a grant-maker. We’ve always included the community on our Board and in our grant making.   New buzzwords like ‘participatory grant-making’ is all the rage, but we’ve being doing this for 30 years! It just seemed obvious, because the only way you can really support communities is to give them a say and power.   We’ve adapted our grant-making programmes. We’ve engaged with the community at all levels. We now have Community Insight Panels bringing donors and grantees together. We’ve had young people help us devise summer programme grant guidelines. 

When Canary Wharf estate was first being built, the buzzword then was ‘CSR’ – Corporate Social Responsibility.  We were a relatively young charity at that time. We weren’t calling it CSR: this was about investing in communities. It was about listening to donors and being fortunate enough to be able to show them what the needs were. And they were open and listening too and they worked closely with us to target their resources to best effect. 

Emergency response to COVID 

We’ve been clear from day one that we are a needs-led grant maker. I think COVID strengthened the impact-driven side of what we do.   Long-standing social needs were exacerbated, particularly things affecting young people and older people.  The significant overnight change was instrumental in helping us really focus our funding on key issues.    

We’ve always naturally performed a convening/co-ordinator approach, as we know where it’s best to distribute the money, based on listening to donor and community needs. Having monitored and evaluated, it’s clear that to have a real impact, you need larger chunks of money over a sustained period. Over the years, we’ve moved our grant-making in that direction.  

We’ve had to be very adaptable in our grant-making – with COVID, and the constantly-changing needs over that period. For example, with our COVID Emergency Fund, we had money coming through, but we were never quite sure how much we were going to get, and – certainly at the beginning of the pandemic – we couldn’t guess how long it was going to last. So decisions around how best to spend this money to meet all the emerging needs meant we were re-evaluating every couple of weeks and months. What have we given out? What impact is it having? What funding requests are we now getting and what volume?  

Need for Life Chances emerges 

The Emergency Fund gave us that confidence to say, ‘look, if we are really going to make a difference, we need to focus our grant-making and apply as much of our resources as we can into supporting key sections of the community’.  Having looked at the changes that were happening and speaking to the community, we defined those needs – young people, older people and digital inequality – and that’s how the Life Chances Campaign was born. The Campaign is backed by research, which has been rewarding, in the sense that it hasn’t highlighted anything that we didn’t know, but has reassured us that we are doing the right thing.  

Constantly evolving 

But we can’t be complacent. Just like monitoring and evaluating, research is really important. It’s good to go through that process: learn what’s coming out of it and how we can adapt our grant-making. I think sometimes I’ve made that exhausting for the team because we’re constantly adapting. There are always improvements that can be made, even if they’re minor tweaks. Maybe it’s not the criteria, but it’s the language that you use or the way that you advertise it, to reflect the demographics of the community, maybe we communicate in a different way. We never sit back and just say, ‘great, we have out strategy and grant criterial, we’ll just review this every five years’. 

I think that if we’re truly going to keep up with the needs of the community and make a genuine difference through our grant-making then we have to constantly listen, evaluate and evolve.