Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Making the most of community participation: The 1% Solution
Box 8 Geometric funding streams: an example
New Deal for Communities partnerships were typically allocated £50 million to
be spent over ten years. But many have found the generous funding crippling
because of the weight of expectations, the time it has taken to build the capacity
to spend the money effectively and the need to meet government-imposed
standards of financial propriety.
On this proposal, the funding would have been distributed in a completely
different way, lowering the stakes earlier on in the process, creating enough
lead-in to plan bigger projects properly and allowing the time to generate the
culture of participation around each NDC project for spending to be decided
effectively and legitimately.
Table 3 Geometric funding streams: an example
Annual allocation Cumulative total As % of Cumulative
Year (£) (£) total %
1 50,000 50,000 0.1 0.1
2 100,000 150,000 0.2 0.3
3 200,000 350,000 0.4 0.7
4 400,000 750,000 0.8 1.5
5 800,000 1,550,000 1.6 3.0
6 1,600,000 3,150,000 3.2 6.2
7 3,200,000 6,350,000 6.3 12.4
8 6,400,000 12,750,000 12.5 24.9
9 12,800,000 25,550,000 25.0 50.0
10 25,600,000 51,150,000 50.0 100
Empower the everyday intermediaries
Embedding pluralism at the local level, by finding new and creative ways to bind the
1 per cent into effective forms of accountability through their interactions with the
local community, must be a priority if this approach is to sustain its legitimacy in the
long term. Power must be distributed so that citizens are not lumbered with a 1 per
cent they do not trust and cannot hold to account. This implies a key role for local
community and voluntary groups – tenants’ organisations, local parent–teacher
associations, sports clubs, faith organisations, mother and toddler groups,
community projects and so on. These bodies are much better than formal
governance will ever be at mobilising the involvement of citizens and users, because
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