The Resourcing Portfolio Team is a largely internally-focused team that looks at the ways Lankelly Chase uses its resources to further its mission, and works to establish and oversee consistent processes which allow the staff team to be creative, flexible and responsive.
What is the purpose of this work?
We want the way Lankelly Chase manages its resources to fully reflect the behaviours we want to see in the world. We also want to create simple, consistent processes that encourage us to continue to be creative and to innovate to meet our mission.
What’s currently happening?
Members of the Resourcing Portfolio Team are currently involved in the following:
- Working with our lawyers to develop a new set of grant making Terms & Conditions, that better reflect the relational approach we have with partners, whilst ensuring that all legal aspects are covered.
- Developing and testing processes relating to Devolved Decision-Making.
- Codifying the many different ways grant funding leaves Lankelly Chase, looking in particular at the reasons why particular methods are chosen, and who is privileged by those methods.
- Considering all of the processes that underpin the ways Lankelly Chase gets money out the door,
- Providing input into developing learning frameworks for the How Portfolio Team
- Creating work plan templates for Portfolio Teams to use in planning for 2021-2023 activity.
- Creating ways to monitor and assure ourselves that grant funding is being used to further our mission, particularly as we devolve decision making outside of Lankelly Chase.
- Developing a procurement policy, for products and services, which complements our wider mission.
- Developing a CRM which will be intuitive, easy to use and reflective of the way we organise and execute our work.
- Providing copy for the “Funding” section of the new Lankelly Chase website.
What are we learning?
- That neither totally closed nor totally open funding approaches have been successful in generating the new ideas we have been hoping to find, and that the question around who is winning and who is losing by the methods used is probably a better guide to which methods to use.
- That the team have been unsure about the levels of freedom and authority they have to seek new relationships, and that this has led to some partners or potential partners, being confused around how to approach us.
- That there is a collective desire to further devolve decision making and control over Lankelly Chase’s money, but also a growing realisation that there are gaps in knowledge around the methods and processes we need to develop to do so, along with a sense of constantly coming up against systems which are limiting our ability to act.
What next?
- Creating a clear guide to how we (can) do funding and contracting, including all the methods available to us to get funds out the door, the step-by-step processes that need to be followed and the documentation and record-keeping required to provide assurance.
- Building the question of “who is privileged by this funding approach?” into the work planning process for each Portfolio Team.
- Continue to be a forum for discussing and improving all the processes that underpin the work of Lankelly Chase.