Finance
Rather than simply closing children’s centres and other community facilities for short-term savings, why not create hubs for people of all ages and reap long-term rewards? Stephen Burke explains
London mayor Boris Johnson lays a time capsule at the site of Acacia Intergenerational Centre in Mitcham, south London. The UK’s first purpose-built centre of its kind, it was officially opened by Merton Council last year.
Dawn Austwick joined the Big Lottery Fund as its chief executive in October last year. She talks to New Start about the future of the voluntary sector, big data and inverting the funding model.
You’re keen on a more open source funding model. Can you explain? At Esmee Fairbairn [where she was chief executive until moving to the Big Lottery Fund] we developed a blended model of funding which was very responsive and demand led. One of the things that interests me at the Big Lottery Fund is how we make the most of the intelligence and the data we receive and use that to decide the things we say yes to and also the things we say no to and how we can feed all that into our strategic thinking. If you’re small like Esmee you do that by osmosis but if you are a big organisation you need processes and systems to do it. With technology we have a real opportunity to do more. So we want to be much more open source. We want to make our data much more open and available so it’s not just us interrogating our data and trends but about sharing that with other people and enabling them to interrogate our material too.
We’ve made available all of our data since 2004 but at quite a crude level. To push it forward you’d want to work out which of the core elements of that architecture you need to make it consistent so the next stage is to start thinking about that. Once you put things out there the genie is out of the bottle and we can do lots of our own analysis work and others can have fun too.
