Getting Real About Resources

(hosted by James Wallbank, Access Space)

JW - Alternative education models do need resourcing - it doesn't all happen in the cloud, mysteriously, for free. People have rent to pay.

A concrete example - Access Space provides 230 days/year a free walk-in digital learning centre for self-directed & peer learning. 2000 people came to visit last year, 6000 visits, 2hrs average visit. Until recently, had core funding from the Arts Council, but they have declined to cover base costs from next April. Increasingly successful project, but how are we going to pay the rent? We need about £30k/yr to run the space. This is a non-trivial amount of money, but a manageable amount. 

If we're getting real about alternative learning spaces, they have costs - where do they come from?

This year, we've made £1.1m of funding bids. My usual hit rate is 30% - this year, it's been 0%. We've got a ten year track record of increasingly successful delivery, but funders are massively over-subscribed.

I suspect an answer might be to move from having 6 funders a year who but in £10k or £20k, to having a much larger number of sources. But is crowdfunding going to be able to support a whole network?

Level of crisis - Sheffield Council "expanded" their adult learning team from 15 to 2! One of them resigned the first lunchtime, saying the job was "not doable".

Discussion

- The burden to prove [to funders] that learning has occurred sucks the life out of lots of projects

- Forest Cafe in Edinburgh had to leave their building - now trying to crowdsource funding from the army of people who've been involved over the years to secure their future. The power of crowdfunding goes beyond the money - massive popular support, people who care about what you do.

- Difference between the way people value arts/culture spaces and the way we value 

- History of "penny libraries" - crowd-funding of grassroots learning spaces is not new.

- If Access Space gets £30k funding from the Arts Council, similar projects in neighbouring towns are likely to have been bidding for the same funding and lost out - it creates a condition of scarcity. If Access Space manages to find 1000 people out of the population of Sheffield who will buy it a pint once a month, that covers £30k a year - and it can share what it learned with neighbouring organisations and help them find their 1000 people. Although it's born out of crisis, this distributed funding approach could be much more scalable than the old way of doing things.

- We all know how empowering it is to give even a small amount of money to something we believe in. I like to fund things that are local.

- You strengthen your network and get funding at the same time.

- [Vlad] We've been experimenting with different mechanisms - we don't just think about it as money, but as resources - also including time, equipment and other kinds of donations. For example, a bank in Romania set up a contest to win five Kindles - our network helped us win the competition. Our core funding needs are about the same - $30k - we get 1/3 private, 1/3 small grants, some from people chipping in. We ask people to chip in 10% - but we're flexible, they can pay it themselves, or they can find ten people they know to chip in a smaller amount, or they can donate time in place of this. Thinking like this over the past few years has brought us more and more cash - throughout the recession, we've been growing in terms of people and our cashflow. You have to learn to do all these things, not all at once, but grab opportunities. "Rent a team" - our students take on outsourced projects from companies and donate 10% to us, keep the rest of it - a project-based job for our students. One group ran an event for 500 people, another group are getting paid to make a video. cros.ro - "alternative education"

- Transition Companion - the Transition movement has published a collection of examples of practice of communities that have managed to fund projects.

- Access Space has existed for 11 years with an IT budget of zero - people give us computers, we have an excess of them!

- It takes time to build up the awareness of what you do to make a distributed model viable - you can't do it overnight - and you can't always do it quickly enough in a crisis.

- Crowdfunding is good but doesn't challenge the perceptions & decisions of the big power & resourceholders

- Let's not get hung up on purity

- If it's that hard to get funding for an organisation with a track record like Access Space, even harder when you're starting something new

- Over ten years, Access Space have helped a small number of similar spaces start in UK - meanwhile, researchers from Brasil came to visit Access Space, went back and managed to start 97 Metarecyclagem centres, then got involved with government Pontos de Cultura network with 600 centres and ambition to have 3000 of them. Invited James to Brasil to give a presentation - he ended his presentation saying, "What do you know that we in the UK don't get?" Independent researcher Felipe Fonseca said, "In Brasil, we can make so much more progress than you can, because we're disorganised!"