OUR APPROACH
Consortium has been supporting LGBT+ groups and organisations for over 25 years, with a membership that has continued to grow, and currently stands at over 725 members. From this work our role as a specialist funder emerged in 2019 to find ways to address the need and demands for increased funds. Throughout this journey we have always believed in the importance of involving people and communities in the decision-making with a participatory approach driving our processes for giving.
What is a Participatory Approach?
A participatory approach means that people who are impacted by a decision get to take part in making it. It focuses on working together, so that people can help shape how and who we want to fund. The goal is to give communities a stronger voice and make projects more successful by involving the people they will affect.
How does that work for us?
Our participative approach is one that continues to evolve over time. We have an ambition for all stages of our giving work to have lived experience at their heart, from co-design of a funding programme, to the decision-making process, every stage is critical to success and achieving real change for our communities.
We do this by bringing partner organisations together, on a paid for basis, to identify the gaps and explore potential ways to address inequalities and disadvantage. We also continue to grow our pool of Community Panellists, covering a diverse range of intersectionality and expertise, that we can draw on for both consultative moments, and for creating decision making panels.
We also look to continue growing our reach into diverse and intersectional communities and working with organisations to ensure we’re reaching as many organisations as possible with available opportunities.
Being a relational funder
In a sector that is heavily reliant on volunteer led organisations, we recognise the importance of additional support mechanisms beyond simply money and funding. We look to be a supportive funder from the moment of first enquiry, through to transitioning beyond our funding. Where we identify barriers to engaging with our funding, we support organisations to access programmes in ways that work for them, we explore with our fundees how else we might support them to deliver their life-saving work, and focus our monitoring and data capture on stories and real-life experiences more than simply reporting on numbers.
