Black Food Fund. Journey to here…

Hi, it’s Tayo and Bella.

Welcome to the final blog in this short series, where we share our journey in setting up and facilitating the Black Food Fund. As a bonus, we’re also including a link to some bonus content on contracting. Then later this year, the committee will be launching a new content series to update you on all things Black Food Fund.

BLOG FIVE: The Twists and Turns

It’s been a while since our last blog, and so much has happened! Here’s a recap of our experiences, achievements, and what we’re currently working on.

Experiences: Fiscal Dramas

If you’ve been following this blog, you might know that the Black Food Fund was initially hosted by Shift, a charity that unfortunately closed in May 2024.

Losing Shift was a significant setback for the Black Food Fund, which had spent around 10 months establishing a strong foundation with Shift as its fiscal host.

This work involved extensive contract negotiation with the funder to ensure they were sharing a proportional level of risk with Shift. It also involved a lot of collaboration between Shift, Shift’s board, lawyers, and our team to create a collective contract that distributed risk equitably. This effort was essential to ensure the Black Food Fund committee had real power and decision-making freedom in this work.

For a deeper dive into contracting on this project, see this bonus blog.

When Shift announced its closure, the Black Food Fund had to find a new fiscal host — a daunting prospect after all the time, effort, and money invested in our partnership. The committee reviewed a range of options and, in the end, decided that their best interim solution was to use Hello Brave as a temporary fiscal host (for a small proportion of their funding) while working on a more permanent structure.

Note: The choice of Hello Brave was due to simplicity, low cost and feasibility. Few funders would agree to contract with a sole trader as Impact on Urban Health did in this case — flexibility enabled by years of trust and collaboration.

As a result by June, a month after Shift’s closure, Hello Brave was able to sign a contract for interim hosting and by July, all parties had signed the collective contract (you can learn more about these in our bonus blog). Allowing the committee to continue moving forward with the first round of grant funding.

Achievements: First Round of Funding

Despite the setbacks, the Black Food Fund committee managed to design, launch, and issue their first round of pilot grants by October 2024.

Image from the Black Food Fund’s first funding round.

We won’t go into the full details here as the committee will share more soon, but it’s been incredible to see what this small but powerful group has achieved. The process included reviewing 64 expressions of interest (EOIs), shortlisting 5 EOIs, receiving 4 proposals, having 4 proposal conversations, and ultimately funding 3 projects.

Feedback from that round has also been super useful and largely positive (with useful constructive criticism) and we’re looking forward to seeing how the committee evolves this for the next round.

In this phase, the Black Food Fund and Hello Brave collaborated with Sistren Legal Collective to support the committee in developing a fair, plain English contract for all grantees. You can see a copy of this here. You can read more about the process for developing this in our bonus blog.

This easy and clear contract led to an efficient, smooth contracting process. With the first three grants offered, contracts signed, due diligence completed, and initial payments issued — all within 14 days. Whoop!

Working On: A New Structure

Now that the dust has settled, the committee is focused on establishing a longer-term structure for hosting the Black Food Fund. Sistren has provided invaluable support, including an excellent toolkit we used in workshops. Here are some printouts we adapted to review Sistren’s content during in-person sessions. We really recommend Sistren for anyone exploring the right structure for impact-focused work.

Images of content from Sistren’s Community Legal Toolkit & the adapted workshop assets

Based on that, the committee recently decided on a new structure and will be working out the logistics over the next two months. Within this, they’ve shared that they are not interested in a traditional organisational setup, which can often add complexity and pressure, especially in the context of an experimental fund. Instead, they’re exploring a flexible model to host their remaining funding, with a skeleton organisation that has strong yet lightweight foundations supported by an admin and facilitator.

This approach allows the committee — who are experts in their fields and have other commitments — to operate effectively within their 30ish-day-per-year roles.

And throughout it all, we’ve been excited to see that the committee has always kept its focus on the main thing. Which is getting funding into the hands of local people who are transforming the food system in Lambeth and Southwark to improve Black food equity and health.

And that’s it! We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog series. If you’d like to learn more about anything we’ve shared, please reach out. The committee plans to return early next year to share updates on their progress and future plans. Thanks so much for reading!

This work has been funded by Impact on Urban Health and in the interim it’s being hosted by Hello Brave.