GRANTMAKING DURING A CRISIS

Firstly, we recognised that this is a humanitarian crisis on a scale that none of us had ever lived through in this country and in our recent lifetimes. Any response we need to make, needs to be felt at community level and make a difference to people’s lives.

We immediately made two large grants of a hundred thousand pounds each to community foundations that we as a trust have a long-standing relationship with.

We also recognise that for many of our grantees – the organisations to whom we give funding – that this was going to be a particularly difficult time and that there would be a lot of costs associated with adapting to remote working.

We set up an organisational support fund immediately to provide small grants to a number of our grant holders for things like purchasing laptops, digital equipment, moving training resources and materials online, staff support and welfare that sort of thing.

We created a fund that people could access additional funding over a two-week period just to help smooth that process of moving to a different way of working.

So as we’ve moved our systems online we’ve obviously had to change our ways of working financially.

We’ve found that despite the need to adjust our processes internally that the quality of the online banking provision that we get from CAF Bank has made it extremely easy for us to continue to make the payments that we need to make to our grantees. There’s been business as usual on that front which has been fantastic to be able to rely on the service.

Where we’ve come up against more complex problems so where we’ve needed to make overseas payments which would normally require us to use a fax and be in the office CAF Bank have been fantastic at coming up with innovative solutions that have helped us again just ensure that we can get our money out the door in an efficient way to people who are going to spend it really well.