Our National Charitable Partners Programme

In 2021, the National Emergencies Trust launched the National Partners Pilot Programme to help us make new friends with national charitable organisations who may support those impacted during an emergency. The programme aim was to establish pre-approved partnerships with a diverse network of distribution partners, across every community, cause and region, helping us to quickly understand the need and refine our flexible distribution model. The Pilot was built from learnings during our Coronavirus Appeal, where we had to quickly establish new partnerships amid a pandemic. We were able to work with various charities covering a range of communities and needs. These charities, alongside our existing partner, UK Community Foundations (opens in a new tab), delivered nationwide service provision and grants to support specific communities with unmet needs affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2022, I joined the Trust as Grants Manager. With previous experience in charitable grantmaking and research in Clinical and Health Psychology, I have learnt a lot about emergency response work and the significance of this work in the charity sector. In addition to managing existing grants from the Coronavirus Appeal, part of my role is to review and relaunch our National Charitable Partners Programme.

It was important for us to take our time to listen and learn from our partners and the wider sector to ensure complete inclusivity with our new programme. We gathered our learnings which we then applied and incorporated into our new National Charitable Partners Programme. The revision of the programme involved conversations with our partners where we asked for criticism, feedback, and areas for improvement. We engaged in fundraising and grantmaking events in the wider sector to listen to the issues individuals face working in these fields and resolutions from them to alleviate this. This includes; power dynamics between funders and fundraisers, overly detailed application forms that are disproportionate to organisational capacity and lack of transparency, communication and support during an application process.

The purpose of the National Charitable Partners Programme is to help the Trust extend our equitable distribution network, so we can quickly respond to the different needs that surface during an emergency.

Over the next two years, the Trust is prioritising growth by establishing new relationships to ensure that we don’t leave anyone behind. By doing a gap analysis with our Equity Scrutiny Group, we were able to identify five priority themes:

1. The Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community.
2. Communities experiencing racial inequality.
3. Disaster and rapid response.
4. Trauma and mental health needs for children and youth people.
5. The faith community.

However, the programme is not exclusive to charities working in these areas, it is open for all and is an opportunity for us to learn about the amazing work going on in the charity sector.

The main developments from the pilot programme include:

• An open programme where we will review applications on a rolling basis with several review periods each year.
• A relational based two-stage application process (for between appeals and during appeals) which focuses on building our partnership now to enable rapid response during an emergency.
• An application form that is tiered to support smaller organisations in applying.
• Access to networking opportunities to connect and share expertise from existing partners to promote growth and development of the partners, the programme and the Trust.

I’m currently reviewing new applications to the programme and liaising between the applicants and our independent assessors. I’m looking forward to sharing these applications with our Trustees and Committee members, hearing their perspectives, and taking part in some interesting discussion. We’re excited for the new partnerships that will arise from the programme, which will help us achieve our aim of equitable distribution across every cause, community, and region.

Despite these new changes to the programme, we acknowledge that we are still on a journey of learning. After each application is received, there is an opportunity to complete an anonymous feedback survey on your application experience to help us improve our processes, which will, in turn, ensure our funds are shared out equitably.

If you are interested in becoming a National Charitable Partner, you can find out more on our Charity partners page.