Revolutionising community funding processes through co-design and participation – Bristol City Council

Bristol is the largest city in the South West of England, with a population of 471,200. With at least 91 languages spoken and being home to the UK’s largest local currency, the city is known for its diversity, creativity and independence. Many neighbourhoods are well known strong sense of identity and community, reflecting their specific histories and populations. Amongst the vibrancy of the city, there are also some stark inequalities between neighbourhoods and within neighbourhoods. Despite receiving various accolades for being one of the best places to live in the UK, Bristol also has 41 areas in the most deprived 10 per cent in England, including three in the most deprived 1 per cent

Bristol City Council’s Community Resilience Fund (CRF) is a £4 million fund to support community and voluntary organisations with one-off capital grants to recover from the pandemic, increase their environmental sustainability and/or build their capacity to work over the long term. The funding is targeted at organisations based in and working with the most deprived areas of the city, and city-wide equality groups.

At the time this funding was agreed, momentum had been steadily building in the city in favour of the Council adopting more participatory methods of community engagement:

• Designing a New Social Reality, a 2020 report by Black South West Network, VOSCUR and Locality called for equitable, long term funding for local groups and more diverse voices in council decision making.
• A Council motion, passed in January 2020, called on Bristol to “reboot democracy” by trialling participatory democracy schemes. Later that year, the council held its first Citizens Assembly.
• The Council’s Community Development team were looking for opportunities to experiment with more participatory methods, having brought these principles into their work on a local scale.

The council faced an immediate challenge to design the process for allocating CRF funding and decide who would be involved in those decisions. However, this challenge also presented an opportunity to respond to the city’s appetite for more deliberative democracy and a more inclusive decision making culture. If a grant process could combine a traditional focus on measures of deprivation and poverty with concern for equity and participation, perhaps it could generate more positive outcomes.

Bristol City Council decided to make the Community Resilience Fund a completely co-designed, participatory and deliberative allocation of council funds, with the twin aims of addressing inequity and giving local people greater power. By committing to an entirely co-designed process, the Council invited local people and organisations to shape almost every aspect of the CRF. This ranged from the thematic priorities applicants were asked to respond to, the application process, promotional materials, the shape of the decision making process and decisions on individual grant allocations.

The Council started by forming a Design Group made up of local VCSE leaders. This group worked with officers to build a framework and identify the key thematic priorities for the fund. They also maintained oversight of the entire co-design process, meeting regularly with Council’s Community Development Team and TPXimpact, an independent organisation commissioned by the Council to facilitate the co-design.

Over several months, local residents, VCSE leaders and elected councillors took part in a series of facilitated workshops to co-produce the decision making process. There were a small number of unavoidable constraints on what could be devised and implemented. For example, the fund was restricted to capital projects and had to be delivered within a specified timeframe. However, the co-design approach allowed a wide range of people and communities to think creatively about how to allocate funding.

They decided to give local VCSE organisations a key role in facilitating local participation. They also decided that instead of following the usual grading and assessment process led by Council officers or elected members, they would open up decision making on each grant to local people. Following a locally held deliberative meeting a group containing local councillors, representatives from VCSE organisations and local residents would make final decisions. The local people participating in these meetings were recruited through an open process and the Council used some sortition methods to ensure appropriate diversity in each meeting.
 

The Community Resilience Fund attracted huge numbers of local people to participate in design of process and decision making on the grants. The levels of involvement far exceeded those of other council funds that followed traditional application and assessment methods.

It has strengthened the council’s relationships with the voluntary sector whose leaders worked alongside the council over an extended period to develop the fund and were respected as equal partners in the process.

The project has also developed the skills of council staff, who received training in participatory and deliberative methods, as well as the chance to practically apply that training in an authentic way.

The council is exploring how this approach to grantmaking can be applied to other funds and activities, including consultations on new housing development and the Community Infrastructure Levy.

• Setting up participatory and deliberative processes takes more time than simply implementing existing procedures. In the case of the Community Resilience Fund, officers had made a detailed timeline at the beginning of the project but found that every aspect took more time than anticipated. Extra workshops were required to get agreement from so many groups and individuals on the decision making process. More time was needed between phases to allow space for VCSE organisations to reflect on proposals or consult with local people.
• The project exposed how using more innovative and ambitious community engagement methods requires different skills and mindsets than many Council officers are traditionally expected to have. Staff involved in the Community Resilience Fund reported they needed to be more flexible, responsive, curious, thick-skinned, as well as having a greater willingness to work outside siloes, build relationships, take risks and try things that might fail.
• Although there was broad support for introducing more participatory decision making in Bristol (including a Council motion), reconciling that support with the existing culture and systems of representative democracy took work. The Community Resilience Fund team worked closely with the Bristol’s Democratic Services team to think carefully about the role of councillors and ensure they could be involved in ways that respected their role as elected representatives but did not undermine the participation of local people. 
• Support from VCSE organisations could not be assumed and had to be earned. When initially invited to take part in this participatory process, there was some pushback and scepticism from some organisations. Some worried a lengthy process of engagement and deliberation was too slow and would fail to help local groups who were desperate for funding now. There were also concerns that involving the wider public in decision making might lead to poor quality decision making. One could speculate that organisations who already had strong relationships with the Council and a track record of successful grant applications might fear losing their competitive advantage to other organisations, if a new, more accessible process was introduced.
• It took time for many communities to accept that the Council were genuinely asking for their help and participation. Previous experiences of traditional consultation and a perceived lack of follow-up on other matters unrelated to the Community Resilience Fund meant there was an initial scepticism that was only overcome as the Council persisted in inviting people to independently facilitated meetings, where officers did not arrive with all the answers. 
• Residents who participated in meetings and workshops and VCSE organisations whose representatives supported the co-design were paid for their time. This was vital to ensuring turnout and demonstrating the Council was genuine in its approach to participation.
• There were some internal challenges related to introducing a new process that other sections of the Council were not familiar with and operating outside traditional decision pathways for officers. For example, legal officers raised concerns that applying quotas around participation in the decision making meetings and using sortition methods to recruit might expose the Council to legal risk. These were resolved by applying targets instead of quotas and adding behavioural insights questions to the demographic screening.