A follow up to Fourteen, giving three Northern Ireland communities the means to fund activities for their wider community inspired by the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games
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14-NOW was a programme delivered by Springboard Opportunities in Northern Ireland. It was designed to bring communities together, boost wellbeing and give people the opportunity to make a positive contribution to their own community. Funded by Spirit of 2012 with £450,000 over three years, 14-NOW was built on the success of an earlier project, Fourteen, which focused on creating lasting social connectedness in local communities, building on the legacy of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
“Fundamentally, at its very heart, it’s a project designed by the community, so I think it’s a very unique project. And it’s breaking new ground.”
– Springboard Lead Partner
In the original project Springboard Opportunities worked with local partners Monkstown Boxing Club in Monkstown/New Mossley and the Old Library Trust in Creggan. For 14-Now they continued to work with those two organisations and added the Roe Valley Residents Association in Limavady to the extended project. This extension meant that they were able to work in a mixed community in addition to one predominantly Protestant community (Monkstown/New Mossley) and one predominantly Catholic community (Creggan).
Like in the original Fourteen, funded activities were shaped by the needs of each community in consultation with the local partner. These activities included a mix of short-term events, for example Halloween and Christmas events, focused on community cohesion, and longer-term projects with specific groups in the community focused on addressing longer terms social outcomes such as reducing social isolation, increasing wellbeing, improving collaboration, and changing perceptions of disability. Some projects, like Play to Grey, did both.
As part of an inter-community partnership, the Play to Grey project worked with a diverse range of beneficiary groups, from young children to older residents, in a largely rural community. As part of their longer-term projects, the Play to Grey group worked with a group of disabled young people and adults to provide them and their families with activities that they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunities to take part in, for example, hosting a summer residential to take the participants on public transport to visit key landmarks in Northern Ireland. It also provided a period of respite for families/carers. The project also supported participants to increase their ‘voice’ in their community through lobbying activities, specifically in regard to accessibility of local attractions.
“I actually bumped into one of the relatives just outside of work and she approached me in the street, and she said it’s unreal the work that the Reach project’s doing for her sister. She said that she would have been attending a day group and that would’ve been the only support mechanism she would have had and now she’s getting the support of meeting other young people and other people her age in the Limavady area.”
– Project lead, RVRA
To extend the impact of the project further in Monkstown/New Mossley and Creggan they also used some of the grant to appoint new Community Connectors to work across community organisations to develop projects to bring different organisations together in partnership as well as funding projects for individuals.
“The community forum is still going. There were no connections between community organisations before the forum and so now our focus is on trying to work together rather than competing.”
– Community Builder, Creggan
Delivery of 14-NOW was significantly impacted by two key events: the COVID pandemic and increasing levels of isolation from lockdowns and lack of access to community infrastructure in 2020 and 2021, particularly for the rural communities, and rioting and unrest Creggan in 2021. Both these events impacted participants’ wellbeing. In 2020 the local partners were able to switch activities to online, supported by distributing devices to increase access where needed, and also providing providers also ran essential services, such as providing care packages, activity packs, and hot meals, directly to their communities Others created paper based materials or provided other physical materials such as seeds, cooking ingredients and plants to use at home.
In addition to working with trusted community organisations, they found the introduction of Community Builders in Creggan and Monkstown essential in widening the reach of the projects to new beneficiaries and having a consistent contact person made the difference during COVID periods where they saw a surge in people wanting to volunteer and ensured a central person in each area was on top of recruitment to meet the demand.
They also reported that the increasing numbers of self-referrals into the projects in years 2 and 3 gave them a good indication of success and visibility in the community.
Whilst longer term projects could focus on significant social outcomes, for example reducing loneliness, short term and one-off events were seen an important gateway activity and across the three years participants highlighted them as often their first opportunity to mix with people from different areas/estates and allowing participants to develop a sense of safety and trust with the project.
For Spirit of 2012 working through Springboard as an intermediary with organisations ‘on the ground’ that understand the needs of communities was a key strength of 14-NOW and meant that partners and providers were able to clearly articulate the (often particularly localised) needs of their communities and how the activities were addressing these needs. This became particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, where projects across 14-NOW included activities that were quickly and very specifically tailored to the requirements of their participants.
This was approach was supported by Spirit’s flexible funding model that allowed projects to take a dynamic approach to what’s working and the specific needs of the community rather than having to come back to us to agree modifications. However, this put the onus onto Springboard to ensure that changes stuck to the spirit of the original application particularly in relation to the outcomes that the project was seeking to impact.
Springboard implemented rigorous processes that ensure that there was accountability for the funding, including quarterly reporting and partners and providers implementing surveys to feed into the evaluation, linked to further grant payments.
For the evaluation, the linking of the completion of reporting forms and survey data to funding did lead to larger sample sizes and richer data than in other projects we have funded with and could be considered for other funding programmes in future. Springboard noted within this structure the importance of ensuring that community organisations were at the right stage in their development to follow monitoring processes and that they understood where capacity building might be required.
Giving local people the means to fund activities that make a difference to wellbeing and social connection in fourteen communities across the UK.
Using the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement to bring young people together across the sectarian divide.