HCT Stepping Stones
Partnership and programme mode
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Money, money, money
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Money is needed, but it’s not neutral - it can disrupt and divide. This is the hard truth we run into every time we move from thoughts into action. Making decisions about money has been complicated, confounding and sometimes confrontational. That’s why we’re spending some time digging down into what that has meant for us, in the hope that it resonates with others, and can open up a wider honest conversation around how we manage this together.
Our partnership was interested to think about systemic changes and the profoundly different relationships, behaviours and collaborations we believe lead towards fairer health. We resisted doing change in a way that felt received: project or programme structures, steering groups, ‘prove it’ projects or work. The terms of our funding also did not allow onward granting, which was a useful guardrail around the pit of traditional funder/funded relationships.
But we still fell in some (money) pits.
Every time the allocation of funds came up, amongst ourselves and in the system, we struggled. We wrestled with questions about legitimacy and transparency, from ourselves and from the VCSE sector - who were we to hold these funds when organisations were failing and in dire need of money? We struggled with being an un-constituted organisation and agreeing what our shared accountability and governance should look like. It was hard to sit in the unknowingness of not having the answers, and to focus on relationships, when the world expects familiar solutions, quick fixes and funding.
Relational work to build trust and shared meaning is often invisible and intangible - it can feel like people are ’just’ talking and nothing is happening. We were keenly aware of the pressure to be seen to be doing, so our early decisions around money were not always strategic.
At the same time our funder had a stake in the work. This was more flexible territory than their ‘norm’ but still we felt the pull of ‘knowing and showing’, and their need for certainty and clarity was hard to reconcile with our emergent sense that if we kept doing the same we would get the same, which wasn’t good enough - ‘business as usual’ led to health inequalities worsening not improving.
Once we realised that learning was the work, it gave us a new language and framework for understanding how money was - and wasn’t - working.
We spent more time focusing on the role money was playing - how it was creating disturbance and discomfort, how it was disrupting and making people compete. We realised the starting point for many of these conversations - between us, with voluntary and statutory sectors, with funders - was scarcity. With scarcity as the overarching story, having and spending money could be a way of enacting power, and reinforcing us/them barriers that worked against trust rather than helping to build it.
This is hardly surprising. When funded organisations are struggling to keep the lights on, and funders and commissioners are facing increasing need and demand, slowing down to work out what really needs funding in order to make long-term change feels like a luxury. But if we don’t think differently about money, the most likely scenario is that we will keep exploiting dwindling resources to prop up a broken system.
We wouldn’t have got where we are without a learning focus and pain points around money. Working through difficult situations and having learning conversations gave us the confidence to commit to focusing on building relationships instead of projects.
It was through this process that we realised we were learning about the shared governance of funds across a system that usually relies on top-down and tightly controlled commissioning and granting processes. This led us to think about what needed to happen differently, and for partners like Create Gloucestershire to explore Community Chest models. According to Elinor Ostrom’s work outlined in her book Governing The Commons, shared assets are most effectively managed by the people who benefit from them. Learning from this wisdom, groups like Culture Matson collaborate to share funds in a Community Chest using high trust principles, supported with capacity-building to create their own processes for distributing funding collaboratively not competitively.
So what does all this mean for what next? With all these systemic pressures around money, it can feel impossible to imagine a world of mutually beneficial resource management. Top-down commissioning structures often prioritise administrative efficiency and replicability. In comparison, alliance models like The Plymouth Alliance have moved from a single lead provider to a group sharing the risk and rewards of a commission, and are more aligned with responsive, community-centred approaches.
But there are pockets of possibility all around, particularly at a community level. There are mutual aid models in Gloucestershire like The Long Table, Makers and Menders and Fair Shares. The gift economy, where the currencies of exchange are gratitude and reciprocity, happens on a neighbourhood level all the time, and is intrinsic to Indigenous and ecological wisdom, as Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her book The Serviceberry.
Here in Gloucestershire, a next step is thinking about what infrastructure is needed for money to flow freely to those who need it, in a way that is high trust and also safe for funders. It needs to understand that money is needed but not neutral, and not to perpetuate ‘power over’ hierarchies. Again we are back to the ‘not that’ language. But some organisations are already testing out models for fiscal hosting and Community Chests, using the principle of the Commons, and as we start to build Stepping Stone 5, we are already thinking imaginatively about what that looks like where we live.
