Give it a Go Fund: behind the decision-making process - Barking and Dagenham Giving (2025)

Yesterday we announced the ten new recipients of our Give it a Go Fund.

A big thank you to the wonderful group of eight residents who helped us choose these recipients and co-design this round.

We have received positive and constructive feedback from the residents about the decision-making process.

One resident shared: “There was beauty in listening to other resident’s perspectives, even when they were different from mine. The best thing for me though, was having a say in where funding goes.”

We chose a slightly different way of making grantmaking decisions this time round, so we wanted to share a bit about this with you.

A group of residents helped us tweak the process that we used in the first round, deciding that there should be a theme for this round. They chose: Togetherness.

This meant the funding would go to ideas that bring people together, particularly people from different cultures and age groups, help reduce isolation and support people struggling with loneliness.

We loved hearing all the ideas for bringing people together. In this funding round, we received 28 applications, compared with 51 in the first round.

One of the reasons we introduced a theme for this round was to reduce the number of applications, following feedback from the previous group of decision-makers about the time it took to review applications.

After initially sifting through the applications using the basic criteria which we continued from the last round, we shared 21 applications with the residents, which they scored using an agreed scoring system.

After receiving the scores, we removed applications with scores below a certain threshold and decided that the highest-scoring application should receive a grant.

We then met up with the residents to decide which nine of the remaining 14 applications we would award grants to and asked them to re-score the applications.

Once we received the final scores, we took the nine highest scoring applications, adding these to the highest scoring application to make up the final ten recipients.