The Head of Community Services has submitted a report to allocate grants to community and voluntary organisations through the Community Grants Programme.

Recommendations: That the City Executive Board resolves to:

1.    Approve the recommendations for the 2017/2018 commissioning programme as set out in Appendix 1

2.    Approve the recommendations for applications received to the grants annual open bidding programme as set out in Appendix 2

3.    Delegate authority to the Executive Director for Organisational Development and Corporate Services in consultation with the Board Members for Customer and Corporate Services and Culture and Communities to allocate the residual funding in the Advice and Money Management commissioning theme.

The Head of Community Services submitted a report which allocated grants to community and voluntary organisations through the Community Grants Programme.

Cllr Simm, Board member for Culture and Communities presented the report; she said that there was a growing level of need due to County Council and government cuts to grant funding. She praised officers for being proactive at understanding voluntary groups’ needs and coming up with solution to improve them. The City Council has not cut its grant budget.

Cllr Brown, Board member for Customer and Corporate Services explained that a lot of the grant funding goes to assist financial inclusion groups. Advice agencies work has become more urgent due to County Council cuts and it is fantastic we can continue to support this work.

The Grants and External Funding Officer explained that there was a change in the proposed grants list in Appendix 2. The Rose Hill Junior Youth Club grant for £9,900 was no longer needed as they had been successful at securing the money elsewhere, so there was extra money to allocate.  It is recommended to grant £2,500 to Oxfordshire Play Association for a play day at Blackbird Leys which leaves £7,400 unallocated. The Board might want to allocate this money tonight.

Cllr Simm recommended the money be added to the budget already allocated for Stay and Play sessions to be held in the children centres for a year. The Board agreed.

Cllr Sinclair welcomed the 3 year focus on commissioning she said that awarding only annual amount makes it difficult for 3^rd sector groups to operate.

Cllr Price thanked officers for the work done, he said awarding the grants and monitoring how the organisations spend the money was a huge job.

The City Executive Board resolves to:

1.    Approve the recommendations for the 2017/2018 commissioning programme as set out in Appendix 1

2.    Approve the recommendations for applications received to the grants annual open bidding programme as set out in Appendix 2

3.    Delegate authority to the Executive Director for Organisational Development and Corporate Services in consultation with the Board Members for Customer and Corporate Services and Culture and Communities to allocate the residual funding in the Advice and Money Management commissioning theme.

4.    Agree to grant £7,400 to the Stay and Play sessions and £2,500 to Oxfordshire Play Association

The Scrutiny Officer presented the report. He said the Committee had sought re-assurances that all the grant money would be spent in the year and had made some suggestions for making the grant allocations process more transparent, which had been agreed.

Cllr Brown, Board member for Customer and Corporate Services said the unallocated money was deliberately left to deal with any crises we might have during the year. She said she’d do her best to make sure the money was spent.

Members who declared a non-pecuniary interest in this item (refer to Declarations of Interest minute 79) took part in the discussion.

Cllr Simm, Board Members for Culture and Communities and Cllr Brown, Board member for Customer and Corporate Services introduced the report.  They said that that County Council funding reductions were having an impact and that the financial pressures facing many community and voluntary groups were likely to get worse.  The City Council was committed to protecting funding for this sector and the approach set out in the report was similar to that taken in recent years.

The Committee welcomed the report and commented that relatively small grant awards could be very valuable to community and voluntary organisations, and that multi-year awards enabled organisations to plan ahead.

The Committee received confirmation that £20k had not yet been allocated from the Advice and Money Management theme, which has a budget of £518k.  The Committee considered whether to recommend that this funding should be allocated but concluded that it would be useful to keep some headroom in case there were additional calls on this funding during the year, for example due to additional unexpected County Council budget cuts.  The Committee suggest that the unallocated funding should be kept under review during the year to ensure that all of the £20k is spent.

The Committee noted that relatively few funding applications had been received from BME groups and questioned whether more could be done to encourage and support under-represented groups.  The Grants and External Funding Officer advised that the small grants programme tended to be more appropriate for these groups and that two workshops had been offered; in Rose Hill Community Centre and the city centre.  Locality Officers were encouraged to work with under-represented groups across the city and a new Diversity Officer was also now in post.  The Board Member for Customer and Corporate Services added that it was important to try to step back and look at the overall picture rather than to automatically fund the same groups each year, and the new Commissioned Advice Strategy would better enable this type of approach.  The Committee suggest that offering additional workshops in different locations across the city would also help to enable an inclusive approach to the allocation of small grants. 

The Committee asked whether groups applying for grants through the Annual Open Bidding programme had access to examples of completed applications or to the council’s assessment criteria, and heard that this was not the case.  The Committee suggest that that providing details of the council’s assessment criteria on the application forms would help to support community and voluntary groups in applying for grant funding and improve transparency.

The Committee noted that the recommended amount of grant funding awarded to groups and projects through the Annual Open Bidding programme varied from nil to 100% of the amount requested.  The Committee commented that the rationales provided for the recommended awards (the ‘Why?’ column in Appendix 2) were inconsistent and some explanations were  ...  view the full minutes text for item 83