About 50 civil society groups attended the Community First session at St Martins in the Bull Ring – the latest chance for groups to influence the TLI proposal in Birmingham and to find out more about Community First neighbourhood matched funding. Details are on the Chamberlain Forum website alongside information about the Community First funding.
The relevance of Community First to TLI is two-fold:
1) Community First funding depends on frontline civil society groups – like neighbourhood forums and residents’ associations forming their own infrastructure in the form of Community Panels;
2) the fund is a matched fund – which means Community Panels are going to be raising resources to match the funding from government. This means that timebanks, local lotteries, local private sector support and other initiatives are on the agenda for civil society groups.
The meeting re-iterated the need for Birmingham’s Transforming Local Infrastructure proposal to focus on the needs of civil society groups: ‘any money should be spent on enabling self-help between groups and providing high quality, timely and appropriate advice and information for frontline groups, not disappear into the back pockets of large ‘infrastructure bodies’ and professional charities.’
