By Brooke Littlejohn, Assistant Project Manager for A Better Start Southend

Community Resilience is about connecting, educating and empowering the community to work together to solve problems. At A Better Start Southend, our community and the many assets within it, are central to everything that we do.

In 2019, we launched the Resilience, Ideas and Innovation Fund (RIIF), with the aim of enabling positive working partnerships between A Better Start Southend and grassroots groups that have an established place within the community network. At A Better Start Southend we believe in the difference community-led change can make to families and children and the Resilience, Ideas and Innovation Fund only reinforced that belief for us.

Through the RIIF, we were looking to fund projects between £500-£10,000. We were accepting proposals from organisations, community groups and parents, which showed innovative and creative new ways of thinking, as well as helping to build partnership working and could be sustainable projects and services in the long term. Ultimately, we wanted to receive a wide range of proposals from a variety of different groups and stimulate that important partnership working aspect that underpins everything we do at A Better Start Southend.

The first round of funding produced two successful projects: Story Sacks – a partnership between Southend Libraries, Southend Association of Voluntary Services (SAVS) and Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) which will create sacks with story books and props inside, aiming to bring the exciting story telling experience home –  and Umbilical Chords – hosted by Southend YMCA and a group of parents, which focusses on making music with children and their families in order to  improve social and emotional and communication and language development in  children. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, these projects have been unable to begin this year, but will be going live in January 2021. It is anticipated that, once up and running, these projects combined will reach 78 families in their first year of delivery, with an increase in numbers as the projects grow.

Feedback following the first round of funding was extremely useful; we learned that applicants felt that reporting requirements – although necessary and imperative to the delivery and evaluation process – would be best if kept to a minimum. This would allow time and effort to be directed towards supporting children and families. Applicants also reported that the way the application process was conducted felt like a partnership, and that the opportunity for three years of funding by A Better Start Southend would provide longevity, meaningful sustainability and self-defined change for families in Southend.

The RIIF was the first of its kind launched in Southend and it was a unique experience to launch this fund to organisations in the community. There were a small number of challenges for applicants when submitting a proposal due to the time and resource required. It was clear that there was a need for a more supportive approach that was proportional to the amount of funding being offered, and this, alongside further co-production opportunities, was taken into consideration for the re-design process of the fund.

One of the most important pieces of learning we took on board from this fund was the need for it to be as accessible as possible to the community it serves. In future, the funding application process will be a more collaborative one, where our partnership between A Better Start Southend and the community will be further strengthened in order to enable community network to form and develop.

What next for the fund?

In 2020, we re-launched the fund in partnership with SAVS after an extensive re-design. Our Community Ideas and Development (CID) Fund was shaped by the extensive and informative feedback from the previous applicants, which allowed us to create an open and less resource-heavy application process. Organisations are now able to submit a proposal throughout the year, rather than in a specific time frame and nurture a more collaborative approach to funding in Southend. The CID Fund is accepting applications and we hope to have some more exciting news to share about new projects in the near future.

To learn more about the Community Ideas and Development Fund, or to make a proposal, click here or contact SAVS on abss@savs-southend.co.uk.