THE LEGACY ASSET NETWORK FUND.

July 2024.

"I’ll be honest, I can’t believe it’s actually happened. This is what we needed”.

Context

Barking & Dagenham has been in an interesting and challenging place over the last 14 or so years. As one of the boroughs with high demand for a resilient and adaptable social infrastructure, the budgets cuts orchestrated buy our recently departed Conservative party led to massive disparities for multiple vulnerable groups within the local community.

As part of my previous role as Head of Legacy Strategy at Participatory City’s Every One Every Day project; I had the unique opportunity to engage in an exploration of community groups which were known to us to be proponents of accessible participation at the time. Through these conversation I found myself repeatedly confronted by the exit needs - “I don’t have the budget to fix things, so I can’t keep going” or “the council-run spaces are too expensive and I don’t want to push the cost onto the attendees” and last but not least “I have people interested in supporting the work, but I don’t have budget to train them up”.

Following these exchanges, and some conversations with members of the local council, it became more and more evident that the type of support needed by the types of groups eager to get out and get active, simply wasn’t in the plan and wouldn’t be for a while.

So, should we just fold our arms and wait?

…Maybe there is another way.

Project

Following many conversations, consultations and many many strategy development days - It became evident that there was an urgent need to response to the outstanding limitations to participations (and the associated benefits) in the local community.

With the support of our CEO at the time Nat Defriend, I managed to convince our board of trustees that a fund to support the continued offering of participation would make the largest difference on the ground for residents and the relevant organisations hosting and facilitating these opportunities.

Challenges

An interesting challenge during this project was the consideration that not all organisations were incorporated legal entities. Some were volunteer groups, some were social groups with wellness benefits, some were registered CIC’s and some were groups accosted with the local council. As you can imagine, this presented a variety of individual considerations specific to certain groups.

Fortunately, my research brought me to a platform called Open Collective which exists specifically to allow the circumvention of many of the hurdles presented by trying to manage and administer a fund on behalf of such a varied group.

The Legacy Asset Network Fund launched as of August 9th 2024 and remains an accessible community resource supporting the continuation of participation opportunities here in Barking & Dagenham.