Talking about innovation | The National Lottery Community Fund
Since Hannah Paterson started her new role leading our work at the Fund around Innovation, Policy and Practice she’s been busy. Back in February she reached out across Twitter looking to connect with those delivering interesting ways of doing things. Hannah was overwhelmed with responses as many people wanted to share their practice and also to find out more about what is happening here at the Fund. Here she reflects on some of her learning so far.
When I tweeted looking for interesting practice and thoughts on innovation, I didn’t imagine it would result in an avalanche of responses. However, after 70 conversations, I’ve seen some some interesting themes emerge. Here, I’ve pulled out the ones I think have the most relevance for funders and civil society to contemplate.
Innovation
Curiously, not many people questioned what innovation was. People assumed the work they were doing was innovative. Some of the conversations I had were with incredible people doing great things but wouldn’t be work I would necessarily define as innovative. It is difficult to unpick whether this is because they had the opportunity to chat to a funder and therefore just wanted to share their work rather than thinking of their work as innovative or whether their understanding of innovation was fundamentally different to my own.
This has been a key learning point and a good reminder about shared understanding and definitions. Who gets to define what is and isn’t innovative? How do we know if something is or isn’t innovative? How do we ensure the context in which people are working is considered? For example, what might be innovative to one person, place or issue might not be innovative to another.
Moving forward I’ll be looking at how we define, describe and frame innovation within the work that we do at the Fund both in what we fund but also in the way that we fund.
The Arts
I have spoken to a lot of people within the creative and arts fields (whether that’s storytelling, theatre, journalism, poetry, crafts, art, film) about how innovation lives and flourishes in this space. Creativity is intrinsically linked with innovation but it’s also a space where access to resources and funding has been particularly difficult, especially over the pandemic.
In contrast, over the last year the arts are where so many of us have found community, safety, connection and sanity. The Fund is not an arts funder but creative practices are used by many of the community groups we support up and down the country. For civil society and for funders we might want to be asking questions about how can we bring creativity and imagination into our work and use this to connect, heal and innovate?
Journalism, Mapping, Networks and Infrastructures
I had a lot of conversations with local journalists and journalist/media projects. Very few of these were connected and many thought they were the only people working in this space. This is a trend that happens across the UK and in all spheres.
Being able to map a sector takes time, capacity and money, it’s ever-changing and when we are working with our heads down it’s often difficult to look up and see who else is in the system. Peer-to-peer learning, collaboration, engagement and challenge is how we can push ourselves to think differently, bigger and notice the missing piece. It allows us to work with more humility and creativity, it provides inspiration and alternative perspectives to the work.
As a funder we should be considering how can we support, develop and fund the connections, networks, systems and infrastructures needed to connect and elevate the work? How does civil society re-imagine infrastructure and governance that enables approaches that don’t fit the mould? Can Funders be rethinking eligibility and develop ways of funding those working at the edges.
We’ve started to trial these ways of working through our Growing Great Ideas programme which supports eco-system funding and the Emerging Futures Fund which provided an opportunity for organisations to re-imagine what the future could be