Next steps with our new strategy – we want to hear from our members

This strategy process has been like no other we’ve done at London Funders.  We’re setting our new direction on the foundations of the biggest funder collaboration we’ve ever coordinated (the £57.7m London Community Response), with a bigger membership than ever before (a 50% growth in five years), and more people attending our events and following our comms channels than ever before (up 161% and 331% respectively over the last five years).  But we’re also trying to do this at a time of great uncertainty – with the impact of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, and long-standing structural challenges impacting the health of our communities and our civil society. Your voices are key to help us to get this right.

Over 300 of you have already contributed to different stages of developing this strategy – from taking part in member surveys, answering polls on key questions at our events, through focused discussions on strategy, learning sessions, contributing to the scenarios for the future of London work or the After the Storm report, or just talking to the team and our Trustees about what’s important to you as well as the people and communities you work with.  Your input has been invaluable, and we hope you’ll see your asks and aspirations reflected in the draft strategy that has emerged from our thinking together.

You consistently told us you valued the connection and collaboration opportunities that London Funders creates, that the communications we curate help to bring new issues to the fore and inform your thinking, and that the spaces we create for people to learn together really help you to take progressive steps forward. 

You told us loudly and clearly that you wanted to see us place Londoners at the heart of our decision-making (71% in our member survey said the needs of Londoners should be our driver, not the needs of our members), and that you wanted us to be bolder in our leadership (nearly 90% of you said this).  You also wanted us to bring learning and connections from beyond London to our work, to be more active on equity and justice issues, and to take a positive approach to share learning across the network.

We took all of your feedback and ideas and put them through a “double diamond” process of thinking. First, with a strategy advisory group made up of civil society groups, funders from across sectors, equity infrastructure organisations, think tanks, and other stakeholders to critically assess what the opportunities were for London Funders to strengthen our work for the future. This group met five times to review and assess different issues and helped us to come up with some solutions.  The outputs of these strategy advisory group discussions then went to our Trustee Board, elected from the membership, to consider further and to explore what this would mean when turned into strategy and plans. This has led us to a point where we now have a draft strategy in headline form, and we want to check back with you to make sure we’ve heard what you said correctly, that our thinking process with partners from across sectors has strengthened and refined this in the way you agree will be helpful for your work for the future, and that you’re ready to work with us to make this a reality in the years ahead.

We’ve drafted our new purpose statement as:

We’ve tried to build in here the importance of action, of doing things together, and of putting the needs of Londoners in the driving seat when it comes to making the decisions about where we focus our energies – all based on the themes of feedback you brought to us.

We’ve crafted an initial set of ambitions as:

We’ve tried to reflect here your feedback that you wanted us to look at where we could take action together, specifically: 

1. That you had a sense we were a “movement” rather than a “membership” (many of you spoke about how you felt this was a group of funders working towards common goals)
2. That we should focus in on where we can bring about the greatest change and only get involved where no single funder or sector can tackle an issue alone,
3. That we should strengthen our focus on learning as the purpose of coming together so that we’re constantly building on good things. 

By focusing on these three areas we’re trying to show how we can make the biggest difference with the resources available to us, and where we can add the greatest value to your work.

Finally, we’ve drafted three more operational statements – the methods by which we’ll achieve all of this:

For those of you familiar with our work, you’ll know we love alliteration, but we are open to changing these if you don’t think we’ve got them right!  You told us about the importance of bringing you together, of showcasing great things, and creating spaces where learning can be understood and applied.  You told us that you wanted us to bring more data and insights to the fore to help you shape your work and that we should use the evidence we gather to help strengthen approaches within and beyond the funding sectors.  You also told us that the work we’ve done in recent years, from the Way Ahead project that incubated new organisations like London Plus, through to our innovative collaborative vehicles strengthened your work through covid and beyond.  Beneath each of these method statements we will develop our work programmes with you, so do let us know if there’s anything else you think should be a priority for us.

If you do have views on the draft headlines for our new strategy we’d love to hear from you – this survey will take you about ten minutes to complete, and is available until Monday 13 June.  We’ll collate all the responses and present them to our Trustee Board later in the month to help finalise the strategy based on your input, and will then work with you all on our more detailed plans to turn this into action in the months ahead.

Thank you for your generosity with your insights and ideas to get us to this stage, and thank you in advance for helping us to get this right in the final drafting.