10 Days and counting!

On 15 September, I’m heading off to Johannesburg to spend two weeks with The Other Foundation, an LGBTI participatory grant making organisation. Why? Excitingly, this is the first part of my Churchill Fellowship, a programme that allows people from the UK to travel elsewhere in the world for four to eight weeks to learn and inform best practice in the UK. I’ll be exploring participatory grant making in South Africa and the USA! To give you some context, I’ll explain how I got to this point.

Having been heavily involved in the Disabled People’s Movement in my formative years, the mantra of ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ has become one of my core values. It has shaped my career and the work that I have done. It’s also the reason I applied to work for the National Lottery Community Fund, whose driving principle is that when people are in the lead, communities thrive.

In my time at the Fund, I’ve had the privilege to deliver on the empowering communities’ aspect of our Strategy for Supporting Civil Society, which seeks to:

• Share power more equitably with communities to create opportunities for people to have a voice and make an impact.
• Involve people with first-hand experience in decision making.
• Value the diversity of people’s experiences and create opportunities for them to use their experience to create change for others.

This then led me to develop the Lived Experience Leaders pilot programme, lived experience leaders being those who are using their first-hand experience of a social issue to create change for others in a similar position. The programme looked to develop leadership so that civil society organisations better reflect the communities they work with, and so that people with first-hand experience are at the forefront of driving social change. In line with the strategy to involve people with first-hand experience in decision making, this programme was the obvious choice for trialling some participatory grant making techniques. The programme was designed and developed in collaboration with over 70 lived experience leaders, and we were joined for the decision-making days by three lived experience leaders. You can read more about the process we took here.

This programme (and all the learning I have done in the lead up and during its development) ultimately led me to participate in the Churchill Fellowship. So, as I said, on 15 September I’m off to spend time with The Other Foundation. I’ll be meeting their staff, their grant holders, and their peer advisors and decision makers, as well as joining them for a three-day conference which brings together LGBTI activists from across Southern Africa. I then return to the UK for two weeks before jetting off the USA, where I will spend time with over 20 foundations, grant holders and experts in Boston, New York, Washington and San Francisco. This learning, I hope, will not only inform the work that we do at the Fund, but will also influence the rest of the sector, giving us ideas, answering questions and helping us avoid pitfalls!

If you want to keep up with my travels (and me inevitably getting lost in various foreign cities) you can follow me on Twitter @patersonhannah or follow my medium account here.