Crumbs from the table.
Begging bowl: how Croydon Voluntary Action and Westfield chose to illustrate their very small grants programme
After more than 12 years of development blight in Croydon town centre, at unmeasurable cost to residents, local business owners and even the local authority, Westfield have coughed up a grand total of £100,000 for a “Community Grants Fund”.
It’s called “a small grants programme with a difference”. The emphasis probably needs to be placed on the word “small”.
The £100,000 total in the pot doled out to Croydon community groups by Paris-based multi-national Unibail Rodamco Westfield represents less than one-hundredth of 1% of the £1.4billion that the company pledged to “invest” in their proposed land grab and regeneration of Croydon town centre in 2012.
As if to rub the people of Croydon’s noses in it, the publicity issued yesterday to the borough’s hard-pressed voluntary sector even included a photo of a food bank: literally, a begging bowl for illustrating the grants for communities, many of which have been left on the breadline.
Croydon’s third sector will, no doubt, express some gratitude for the hand-outs – limited at first to no more than £1,000 at a time.
In the release issued by Croydon Voluntary Action, the arm’s length, council-approved umbrella organisation, they say that the “partnership” with URW “is bringing over £100,000 in small grants into Croydon’s local voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector over the next year.”
Any group wishing to apply for a grant has to be quick: the application period opened yesterday, and closes on October 7.
It all seems like very little, very late, and also demanding of volunteer groups who choose to dance to URW’s tune, a very tight turnround – grant-funded projects have to be completed by the end of this year.
“Keeping Croydon’s community spirit alive”, says the poster, designed by an organisation that knows only too well how many community groups in the borough, after austerity and council cuts, are already on life support.
“The Croydon Community Grants Fund is a small grants programme with a difference – we want to fund you twice!” the CVA notice states, in their ever-grateful, gleeful way.
“Our aim this year is to support a range of social inclusion and health activities.
“To start off, we’ll be inviting bids for up to £1,000 – enough to make a real difference to groups starting up a new activity or scaling up existing work,” a view which might attract some contradiction. CVA says that they expect to be awarding approximately 15 groups.
“After that, our successful groups will be given a chance to bid again, but this time for as much as £5,000 – enough to put their activities on a more solid footing.” It sounds as complex and lengthy a process as that required of pensioners applying for the winter fuel payment.
CVA says that they particularly want to fund:
- Initiatives and activities which tackle youth disenfranchisement by providing opportunities and activities for young people
- Initiatives which support people experiencing homelessness, people living in temporary accommodation or refugees and asylum seekers
- Initiatives and activities meeting local priorities as defined by Community Plans of Local Community Partnerships
- Your project might be creating pathways to social inclusion or removing the roadblocks – and by social inclusion we mean any kind of health, wealth or creative activity that supports people in poverty, ill-health or social isolation. We’ll take small steps at first to help you – with equipment, marketing, events, space-hire or transport costs – and then if you can demonstrate how your grant has made a positive impact on the local community, we’ll be inviting you to bid for the larger amount.
“We particularly want to support grassroots groups with an annual income of £75,000 or less that are working with people in some of our hardest-hit communities. You need to be a constituted group with a constitution, a safeguarding policy and Public Liability insurance.
“We expect to distribute approximately 15 grants of up to £1,000 each in the first part of the programme.”
A “judging panel” – it sounds evermore like something from Dickensian England – will make a decision on who gets the grants on October 11, with successful applicants notified on October 14. CVA doesn’t state who is on the “judging panel”, nor how they were selected…
“All projects to be delivered and reported on by Tuesday December 31, 2024.”
Applications are being made online (click here for the form), or for more information, email shalina.alabaksh@cvalive.org.uk.
And if your organisation is really lucky, you might even get what CVA describes as a “Bonus”, the “opportunity to have a mentoring, capacity building and upskilling session with a Unibail Rodamco Westfield employee, who will provide support and guidance on any specific needs – ie marketing, finance, legal, health and safety etc.”
Perhaps they can offer insight into how to rip the heart out of a town centre, slowly, over the course of a decade or more?
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So Westfield are based in Paris now. That would explain their ‘largesse’ with those grants.
Shame they overlooked the ‘large’ bit of the word though.