TIME FOR GROWTH

Building endowment from many donors to benefit the community is an ambitious task. Thanks to a £1 million grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, CFN established its Time for Growth programme.

The programme challenged ten community foundations to grow their endowments by an average of £2 million each, within three years. The programme offered a grant of up to £100,000 to allow the ten community foundations sufficient staff time and skills for them to concentrate on faster endowment building. An independent panel monitors and advises the programme.

Time for Growth participants are:
County Durham Foundation
Cumbria Community Foundation
Derbyshire Community Foundation
Essex Community Foundation
The Fermanagh Trust
Heart of England Community Foundation
Hertfordshire Community Foundation
The Scottish Community Foundation
South Yorkshire Community Foundation
Wiltshire & Swindon Community Foundation

They started on their new fund development activity between October 2001 and January 2002 and by the end of March 2004 between them they had raised gifts and firm pledges of nearly £14 million.

All the foundations have seen the enhanced involvement of trustees in fund development and know how crucial these volunteer advocates are in effective endowment building. CFN is using the interest earned on the grant to offer on-going peer learning, training and support to the ten foundations.

To share the lessons learned among the whole network, the Gulbenkian Foundation has provided a grant towards a careful evaluation of the Time for Growth programme.

For more information, contact Clare Brooks, Director, Network Development, [email protected]

YOUTHBANK

YouthBanks are groups of young people who get together for a variety of daunting tasks – starting with getting some money from which to make grants in their local area. Once they have got the money they set about identifying needs, planning grant-making systems, publicising grants rounds and in due course awarding grants to other young people who have had a great idea for improving life in their community. Since starting in 1999 YouthBanks around the country have given in excess of £250,000 to other young people’s projects.

CFN, along with British Youth Council, Changemakers and National Youth Agency, secured nearly £1 million from the Community Fund to set up the national office of YouthBank UK. Of the seven pilot YouthBanks originally launched, four were associated with community foundations.

For more information on YouthBank, please see www.youthbank.org.uk