Prosper Together

About the work

Prosper Together is an exciting participatory grant giving programme. It worked through community hubs to provide them with pots of money. The hubs could then use the money to support their communities however they chose. This included providing funding for gas and electric, but also included providing air fryers for people using the food bank. They could also help people with furniture and flooring for people moving into new accommodation.

What we did

We involved the Community Hubs in an evaluation framework session that helped capture from them what they hoped providing funding in a different way would give them. We then attended the weekly surgeries where people were asking questions about what they could and couldn’t spend their resource on. We also held a series of interviews with each of the community hubs and asked them to collect feedback from the people directly benefiting from the funding.

The difference we made

Our report helped capture how participatory grant making can work in practice. The community hubs were trusted to make best use of the resource and to help it reach families in need. The report helped show how the Community Hubs could send information through their networks and this helped reach people in need. The lack of paperwork and hoops for people to jump through made the fund more accessible.