Sensemaking — what we are seeing and hearing in week 3 and 4

As with previous weeks our team of 30 sensemakers, made up from staff across the Fund and joined by young people from our Young People in the Lead advisory board came together to talk about what they are seeing and hearing from their conversations with grant holders and contacts across communities. We are using the three horizons framework to understand current concerns, innovations and emerging ideal systems. You can find out more about the three horizons framework here.

This week we spent some time reflecting on the information we are gathering and whose voices and insights we are hearing. Our discussion explored the contradictions we are hearing, where two or more insights could at the same time be opposing as well as true — for example for some children being in lockdown has been incredibly unsafe if they are in an abusive home situation, where as other young people maybe in a much safer position at home if they are removed from harm they are experiencing outside the home. These contradictions arose in much of what we discussed, and it was important for us to acknowledge, understand and explore this so as we develop our approaches, we aren’t inadvertently causing harm. Holding multiple truths is a challenging but important role for us to play.

As in previous weeks the number of arising concerns were many and echoed much of previous weeks including mental health, financial concerns and unemployment. This week however we heard more about confusion and mixed messages — people unsure where to go for support and lack of accessible information, particularly for different communities. We also noticed an increase in concerns about transition and ‘post’ COVID with issues such as the looming recession, returning to schools, homelessness spiking and the return to the streets as hotel support is removed, as well arising racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and anti-Semitism. We heard about concerns relating to the pace at which we are moving making good future-planning impossible, good practices around co-design and co-production with communities being put to one side, and generally having no time to pause and think. This week we also spoke a lot about the challenges and concerns with regards to funding including confusion over what funding is available, what the funding landscape will look like over the next 12 months, the exacerbation of already existing blockers to funding, the competitive funding environment and a fixation on emergency response funding rather than exploration of what next.

The second horizon, (where we notice innovations emerging in response to the crisis) we are hearing a huge variety of innovation across a large range of areas from specific thematic issues such as homeless accommodation and the attempts to break addiction, to working approaches such as job-sharing and more flexibility. We again spoke about the innovations in funding practices such as how we could better support smaller groups to apply for larger funds, taking more relational approaches to funding and funding the space and time to think and strategize.

In the third horizon where we begin to see innovation that might become the new normal we spoke about funding as a system rather than just individual organisations– being more connected to communities, funding for longer term and using an equity lens to approach our funding. Outside of funding we talked about how ‘work’ can be redesigned and that we can start to develop and embed new patterns of working together centring access and care so that everyone feels human and is treated with dignity.

This week there were a number of pivotal questions that arose. Depending on how society responds to them might determine whether we return to the old ways or working or towards a ‘new’ normal. These included:

• How do we manage transitions?
• Who gets to decide what happens next?
• Whose responsibility is it to care?
• What are the right questions — who is asking them? Who is answering them?
• Who has the time and the power to think about and convene a different future?
• When will ‘recovery’ begin?
• Who should be the recipient of help?

These are pretty big questions and ones we don’t have all the answers for but it’s important for us to be thinking and exploring these both as a Fund and as wider civil society to understand our place, offer and approaches in the months to come.