Community Resilience Fund

What the Community Resilience Fund is 

The Community Resilience Fund is a one-off capital grant fund to support community and voluntary organisations to:

  • recover from the pandemic
  • increase their sustainability
  • continue the vital work they do for the long term

It will support:

  • organisations based in and working with the most deprived areas of the city
  • city-wide equality groups

See the pdf full eligibility criteria for applying organisations (422 KB) .

This fund is about giving communities more power in decision-making.

See a  pdf list of all the organisations (166 KB) that applied for funding and the titles of their projects.

Since the participatory decision-making process, a video has been created explaining how the process worked and what was involved. It includes reflections from the residents and VCSE organisations who were part of the process. You can watch it below.

How we decided how the fund was spent

This fund is also about giving communities more power in decision-making. We used a new community-led decision making process to decide how the Community Resilience Fund was spent.

From April to October 2022, we co-designed an approach to deliberative and participatory decision making alongside 25 voluntary and community group partners and 32 Councillors.

This was done through a series of 6 workshops, facilitated by TPX Impact, and conversations with key stakeholders.

In stage 1 (July to October 2022), voluntary and community groups spoke to a lead organisation in their community, who gathered the project ideas and provided support where needed for submitting outline project proposals. We received 116 eligible proposals.

In stage 2 (January to May 2023),  pdf 100 residents and representatives (660 KB) of Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations were recruited to take part in decision-making. They worked alongside 22 councillors from across political parties.

Participants were given information about the different themes of the fund and expert input was available to help make decisions and make sure projects are suitable for funding.

This was a hugely collaborative piece of work. To co-design and execute the decision-making meetings required extensive time and commitment from our partners. We had a dedicated team of 29 facilitators from BCC and city-wide VCSE organisations who guided the decision-making meetings. All facilitators attended training around the approach to decision-making.

Without them, we wouldn't have had the capacity to do a project at this scale.

What organisations are being funded

The Community Resilience Fund funded:

  • 40 neighbourhood based projects (£3.2 million)
  • 13 city-wide, equalities based projects (£800,000)

See a pdf list of the projects that have received funding (283 KB) .

All successful applicants will be asked to develop a full project plan detailing how they will spend the money and carry out the project.

Depending on the size of the project, we anticipate the first grants will be awarded towards the end of 2023.

Evaluation: Learning from the Community Resilience Fund

The University of Bristol and Vivid Regeneration evaluated the Community Resilience Fund's decision-making process.

The evaluation looks closely at the action learning process, to understand the value, impact and potential of the collaborative way of making decisions. The evaluation is not focused on the outcome of the grant process or the impact investment made, which will be evaluated separately.

Read the Executive Summary

Read the full report

Resources for participatory and deliberative processes

We developed several resources as part of the Community Resilience Fund action learning process, including:

These resources provide further information and examples of how the decision-making process worked, as a case study.

These were designed to fit the unique needs of the project and should be seen as learning documents, rather than best practice. We hope these resources can be used as inspiration or a spring board for those interested in starting similar participatory projects.

Video resources

The first decision-making meeting gave decision-makers background information on the key themes and priorities of the fund; accessibility, environmental sustainability, financial resilience and digital infrastructure. 

We worked with partners in the city to create a set of videos to give decision-makers a baseline understanding of these themes to help them make better, informed decisions. You can view them here:

Thank you to those who contributed to and starred in the videos.

 

 

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