It is always heart warming to come across kindred spirits and find you are not alone in your thoughts. That is exactly what I felt immediately on reading Jake Hayman's article at the weekend which I found posted on Linkedin.
What made it even more timely, is the work we have been doing as a team at Oxfordshire Community Foundation, which means we are about to embark on a "techie" project, code named State of the Sector.
Our vision for this is to enable everyone working in sector, although predominantly donors and funders like ourselves to become more proactive and loads more effective in our interactive and collaborative use of "intelligence". We hope to deliver just what he believes is so needed in a sector that seems hell-bent on "reducing the highly complex world into amateur box-ticking".
So watch this space for progress with that, but in the meantime, a BIG thank you to everyone who has supported us in our efforts thus far. It is such an incredible privilege to find so many committed, socially minded and enterprising individuals - too many to mention but you know who you are.
Imagine a world where service users, charities, foundations, researchers, academics, frontline workers, public sector experts, commissioners and regulators were aligned and working together effectively as partners. After 10 years I’ve realised how far we are from actually achieving this. We need a new model for funding charities that is better than Victorian style philanthropy excused by reductionist, unbenchmarked and often corrupted ‘impact assessments’. I know it’s possible because there are some brilliant grant-makers out there – people who have transformed society with funding because they were brave, educated, understood the communities they wished to serve and were prepared to take responsibility and risks. Because they cared enough not to let great potential fail.
unknownx500
