Charities got a glimpse into how BIG England will be developing future funding programmes yesterday.
At the first of a series of ‘Big Insights’ events the funder brought together a group of 50 stakeholders to brainstorm the priorities and structure for BIG’s new older people grants programme.
This is how Dhamendra Kanani, BIG’s director for England since last October, plans to approach the development of four more new funding streams this year.
BIG expects to introduce a cause-specific funding stream in the arena of older people by the end of this financial year. It will start off with a value of £10m, and is earmarked notionally for up to £50m after 2013 – but BIG’s director thinks could be worth even more as time goes on.
Kanani (pictured) said that this process begins an era for BIG being “even more thoughtful about what we do as a funder” and offers an unprecedented level of engagement in English grantmaking.
“We want to co-produce an investment opportunity around older people,” said Kanani.
He told the group, who will meet again once the BIG team working on the project have pooled together their feedback, that the grantmaker is keen for them to “work with us to define priorities, outcomes and modality”.
Speaking to Civil Society, Kanani reiterated BIG’s intention to act on the input from the stakeholders - who were carefully selected to represent an array of charities, umbrella bodies and older people themselves – even if it runs contrary to BIG’s early thinking on the subject.
While BIG research has identified isolation and neglect as the two main issues affecting the quality of life among older people, Kanani said that if the group rejected these as priorities BIG would build that in to the programme.
“We don’t want to sit here in a funding ivory tower. We want to genuinely enter into a dialogue,” he said.
“We won’t now close the door, develop thinking and come to some sort of agreement internally.”
BIG will now hold similar Insights days on the subjects of young people, sustainable resilient communities and capacity-building.
aKanani said that the new approach marked a large and broad change for BIG England.
“It’s a significant change. It’s a cultural change as well as a process change,” he said.
“The brain is not in BIG.”
While insistent it was not a criticism of the previous behaviour of BIG, Kanani said: “It’s about better results, better buy-in, better intelligence.
“Funding bodies ought to work more like that."
The Insights day, held in London, was staffed by a number of BIG policy-makers who led and recorded discussions with the stakeholders about where to go from here.
Alex Dodds, policy officer leading the programme, told the audience: “The whole of BIG is behind this.”
Later, he reiterated the scale of opportunity: “We could be looking at a blank sheet of paper.”
