Community Resilience Fund

What the Community Resilience Fund is 

The Community Resilience Fund offered one-off capital grant funding to support community and voluntary organisations to:

  • make facilities more accessible
  • increase financial resilience
  • improve environmental sustainability
  • invest in digital infrastructure

It supported:

  • organisations based in and working with the most deprived areas of the city
  • city-wide equality groups

This fund aimed to give communities more power in decision making and opportunities to monitor outcomes.

Since the participatory decision-making process, a video has been created explaining how the process worked and what was involved. It includes reflections from the residents and VCSE organisations who were part of the process. You can watch it below.

How we decided how the fund was spent

This fund was designed to give communities more power in decision-making. We used a community-led decision making process to decide how the Community Resilience Fund was spent.

From April to October 2022, we co-designed an approach to deliberative and participatory decision making alongside 25 voluntary and community group partners and 32 Councillors.

This was done through a series of 6 workshops, facilitated by TPX Impact, and conversations with key stakeholders.

In stage 1 (July to October 2022), voluntary and community groups spoke to a lead organisation in their community, who gathered the project ideas and provided support where needed for submitting outline project proposals. See the pdf full eligibility criteria for applying organisations(422 KB) .

We received 116 eligible proposals. See a  pdf list of all the organisations(166 KB) that applied for funding and the titles of their projects.

In stage 2 (January to May 2023),  pdf 100 residents and representatives(660 KB) of Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations were recruited to take part in decision-making. They worked alongside 22 councillors from across political parties.

Participants were given information about the different themes of the fund and expert input was available to help make decisions and make sure projects are suitable for funding.

This was a hugely collaborative piece of work. To co-design and execute the decision-making meetings required extensive time and commitment from our partners. We had a dedicated team of 29 facilitators from BCC and city-wide VCSE organisations who guided the decision-making meetings. All facilitators attended training around the approach to decision-making.

Without them, we wouldn't have had the capacity to do a project at this scale.

What organisations are being funded

The Community Resilience Fund funded:

  • 43 neighbourhood based projects (£3.2 million)
  • 13 city-wide, equalities based projects (£800,000)

View a pdf list of projects that received Community Resilience Fund Capital funding offers(259 KB) . 

All successful applicants were asked to develop a full project plan detailing how they would spend the funding and deliver their project. During this process, grantees have been given opportunities to apply for revenue funding to support the delivery of their capital projects.

This funding can cover costs such as:

  • professional fees, for example architects, structural engineers, project managers
  • specialist services, for example surveys, site clearance and cleaning, energy consultancy, and other technical assessments
  • staffing

In addition to the core Community Resilience Fund grant programme, revenue funding was made available between 2024 and 2026 for community hubs and anchor organisations across Bristol.

This funding was intended to help organisations manage their buildings sustainably over the long term through improved maintenance, stronger financial management, and future-proofing measures.

Evaluation: Learning from the Community Resilience Fund

Evaluation of the Community Resilience Fund

People's Voice Media Go to https://peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk/ (opens new window) were commissioned to evaluate the Community Resilience Fund with a focus on collaboration, lived experience and grassroots insights.

Community Reporting and Ripple Effect Mapping were used to understand the impact of a sample of Community Resilience Fund grant recipients.

To find out more about how we decided who would receive the Community Resilience Fund grants, see the dedicated report in the next section of this page.

Evaluation of the Participatory Democracy Process

The University of Bristol and Vivid Regeneration evaluated the Community Resilience Fund's decision-making process.

The evaluation looks closely at the action learning process, to understand the value, impact and potential of the collaborative way of making decisions.

The evaluation is not focused on the outcome of the grant process or the impact investment made. This has been evaluated separately in the report in the first section of this page. 

Read the:

Resources for participatory and deliberative processes

We developed several resources as part of the Community Resilience Fund action learning process, including:

These resources provide further information and examples of how the decision-making process worked, as a case study.

These were designed to fit the unique needs of the project and should be seen as learning documents, rather than best practice. We hope these resources can be used as inspiration or a spring board for those interested in starting similar participatory projects.

Video resources

The first decision-making meeting gave decision-makers background information on the key themes and priorities of the fund; accessibility, environmental sustainability, financial resilience and digital infrastructure. 

We worked with partners in the city to create a set of videos to give decision-makers a baseline understanding of these themes to help them make better, informed decisions. You can view them here:

Thank you to those who contributed to and starred in the videos.

 

 

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