Rebecca White

Every week a well-meaning person forwards me an email about a restricted funding opportunity. Usually they are for around £20,000 over a year and broadly in our arena of work.

Five years ago I can remember winning our first £20,000 bid and it felt incredible. There’s no doubt that all the incremental steps along the way have lead us to today.

But below are my six reasons why it’s thanks, but no thanks.

1) I set up a social enterprise and not a charity (they are not mutually exclusive). I naively wanted to be majority trading within two years. This wasn’t and isn’t the case, but in my stubborn way, absolutely remains the ambition.

2) Restricted income simply doesn’t excite me. I have to accept that to put in the hours I do and take the personal risks I do, that there has to be something in this for me. Restricted funding is was it says on the tin and is the opposite (mostly) of innovative and exciting.

3) It’s usually very short-term. We are working in one of the most complex sectors there is. The idea that you can deliver quality and complex change to lives in the space of a year is a deceit we are all complicit in.

4) It’s often set by someone who doesn’t know the local scene, the local needs or even care that much beyond reporting back to trustees or investors. External cash will often not meet the needs of people locally. If it did we wouldn’t be having the same conversations about social mobility for decades.

5) It’s not outcome focussed. Too much funding is generic, output focussed and many funders just aren’t great at demanding great outcomes – because it’s hard.

6) It feels counter to our value of Equality. We believed in ‘hands up’ and not ‘hand outs’ and much funding feels like a sop to the poor and needy and just a bit Victorian.

The people we are and work with deserve better than spare change in a bucket and cake sales.

As a business, if the customer buys from us (including the public sector) through partnership, dialogue and track record, the customer gets what’s the customer wants.

And this means we have the impact we want to have.

Nothing is binary and funding has and will probably always have its place as long as we make a strategic decision on fit.

Many organisations do amazing things with it. Just not us.

Following a question at an alumni event at my old school last week about my typical day, I got to reflect on just how untypical my job is and how much its variety suits me. So I thought I’d give you a snapshot of a day last week.

5am alarm. I’m an early bird and sit with a a cup of tea, catch up on emails, schedule daily social media/marketing and arrange my Trello to-do list for the day.

I look at where I will be as well as where the team will be to see if there are any pressure points throughout the day. We’re all looking out for each other and I need to be contactable.

6.15am I head out the door for a run or the gym. Always with music or a podcast, this might be my only me-time today and is essential to my health, both physical and emotional, managing my workload as well as feeling energised for the day.

I love breakfast and eat a lot while I can. Learning a language is also something I love! I normally spend a few minutes on my language app over breakfast. Using a totally different bit of my brain feels fantastic and I’m currently learning Portuguese.

7.45am. If I’m working in Norwich, I’m in the office for around this time. Managing an operational team that may need to speak to me on and off all day, rushing around a number of counties to meetings, keeping on top of admin and even doing some direct delivery means that this first 75 minutes of the day is precious.

It usually enables me to reconcile the bank account, undertake some marketing and strategy work as well as report writing, update systems, do some reading/research, prepare and plan for a meeting and quite often grab a coffee at NR2 in the process. There’s often cleaning, DIY or other office-running things too as I want to ensure our heavily utilised space is a nice place to come to work for the team and the people they support.

On this particular day I dash across town to meet Cara, our Chair of Directors at her local gym at 7.45am. We have a productive hour finalising the agenda for our next Board meeting (with new members) and their Induction.

9.30am Back in the office I have a good meeting with Jessica, our Employment Project Coordinator. Her service is being launch at the start of 2020 as a traded offer. We reflect on what we’ve achieved so far in terms of her Theory of Change and the modules of delivery that she is going to design. We then finalise her key marketing messages and timeline for the launch process.

10.30am. Meeting with accountant. I’m having some difficulties getting everything signed off for the last financial year and just need to get the accounts out the door. Sigh!

12pm. Catch up with Simone and our newest colleague, Tom. Methodically, using Trello (of course!) we go through all our mentees – from referral through to closure to assess progress and agree any actions for the team. This includes me as I’m excited to be conducting a mentor match on Friday!

1pm. Meet Tom to talk through some mentee processes and make calls to referrers so he can shadow me.

2pm. Some admin time. Catch up on emails, annual leave requests, file some invoices, check payroll has worked correctly, update pension with new employee and schedule our monthly newsletters. Probably some silly tweeting and team WhatsApp messaging too!

2.30pm. Get a call from a customer wanting to commission a one-day TILS+ course – yay. Drop everything to work up a quote, draft an SLA and schedule actions in team Trello. Manage to get one of five reports due this week off my desk too. Phew!

3.45pm. Call another customer wanting an update on a commission. No reply. Grrrr. Been chasing for weeks now…

4pm. Off to the Norfolk Show with Simone and Jessica. Heavy traffic, but lovely to show our faces and meet some very friendly ones. And so much more fun to do this with the team too.

8pm. Back home and must make something for the YOP team lunch tomorrow and prepare for my alumni talk at my old school!!

9pm. Zzzzzzz

This, our sixth year running as a social enterprise, is a year in which I wanted to pause. If you asked the team whether it feels like that, I’d be slightly fearful of the answer!

It doesn’t mean taking our feet off the gas or endless naval gazing. It means consolidating our thinking, reflecting on learning and just being a tiny bit more considerate of our next steps.

Just this week I was asked as Expert Witness to talk to an enthusiastic bunch of people setting up their social enterprises. They were me six years ago and in many ways I feel no less green today. Having to consolidate six years of thinking about social impact measurement into a thirty minute talk made me realise it’s more coherent than I thought. Of course the horizons are endlessly receding in our world, but the doesn’t mean we haven’t travelled far too.

So whether it’s impact measurement, understanding the finances, putting in place systems and processes or focusing on creating a great team, not only have we achieved a lot, but hitting the pause button to recognise that is vital – for my sanity if nothing else.

Honestly I’m really enjoying focusing on the Vision, Mission and Values as well as the infrastructure right now. It’s what I say to any start-up – get things in place so that you don’t have to retrofit them later on when you’re really busy.

I could have followed my own advice more, but thanks to a great team and reaching the point of a really clear Vision and Mission, we are better able today to focus than we would have been at the start.