The Resilience Fund is a multi-year fund aiming to support youth organisations to develop cultures and processes around organisational resilience. As a learning partner, we are providing a mix of advisory, training and capacity building for Berkeley Foundation staff and their partners to explore what organisational resilience means and how to build cultures of resilience. We are also creating learning exchanges with other funder peers who are exploring the theme of resilience.
Context
The Berkeley Foundation is the independent charitable foundation set up by the Berkeley Group. They have committed over £26 million to more than 100 charities and organisations that they partner with to help young people overcome barriers, improve their lives and build a fairer society. The Resilience Fund forms part of Berkeley Foundation’s 2030 Strategy and represents a £900,000 investment in strengthening the voluntary sector.
In 2021, the Berkeley Foundation appointed SIX as a learning partner for the Resilience Fund, a four year programme which works with with small to medium sized organisations that support young people and their communities, to invest in organisational development and build resilience for the future – whether through improved governance and people power, better financial planning or stronger systems and strategies.
Our approach
The support that SIX provides is a mix of advisory, training and capacity building for Berkeley Foundation staff and its partners to deliver future activities and act on learnings for the future. The programme focuses on highlighting best practice and supports peer learning, and has the potential to create a wide conversation about what organisational resilience means, and how to build cultures of resilience within organisations working with young people and beyond.
Value
Our value to this project was centred around three objectives:
- building the foundations;
- building capacity;
- and building out the learnings and legacy.
In the first year, this meant our focus was on ensuring that the first cohort are inspired and enthusiastic about their participation and about the programme; that we establish frameworks and definitions for the overall programme design to test and refine and that we make sure the learning programme is aligned with participants’ resilience needs.
In the second year, we focussed on the transitions, learnings and connections between the different cohorts and working with Berkeley Foundation team to build capabilities within the team to run the learning programme.
And in the final two years, we focus on compiling, making sense of and communicating the learnings and impact of the programme to date, both for and by grantees as well as for the board of the Berkeley Foundation and its peers.
