We had some training arranged for us recently. It was with a local CIC (Community Interest Company). I had an extremely bad feeling about it.
It seems that there a good many CICs which were set up because a gang of people want to do something, but nobody in their right minds would employ them to do it. They know they wouldn’t survive as a “proper” business, so instead of risking their own investment, they set up as a CIC and spend grants or risk-free loans fannying about.
Here’s an example. There’s been a campaign lately called Women Get Active, which does exactly what it says on the tin, as it were. It encourages inactive women (like I was) to get active (as I have), through providing unthreatening exercise, breakfast, and educational/therapeutic/engagement sessions. On week, after our zumba and our fruit salad, a lady came in from a CIC. Now, we were a group of inactive, overweight, self-conscious women. Bear that in mind.
She handed round sheets of paper, with PIG printed on them in big pink letters. We sat for twenty minutes with our piggy labels, and eventually after the introductions, we were told to draw a pig. Cue a room full of women saying “but I’m crap at drawing! I’m stupid!” etc, and then having to have their stick-pigs assessed by the rest of the group. Because, you see, how you draw a pig apparently tells you a lot about the kind of person you are. So the pigs with bog ears belonged to good listeners, and the pigs with four legs were the pigs of women with their feet on the ground.
This is what I expected from the CIC we went to for training. Seeing as where we are now is the result of successful fundraising by very talented people at Liverpool Biennial, I felt that nobody was going to be able to teach me anything that I couldn’t learn by shadowing the Biennial folks . Which I’m already doing. So I went into the training feeling a bit like the granny who gets taught to suck eggs. (ahem hem, not because I know it all, but because I have access to experts).
But darn me if the people who trained us, Empower Funding, aren’t brilliant. As a fellow trainee said, it was refreshing to meet someone who doesn’t just talk the talk, but who walks the walk. They live and breathe fundraising, if only because as a CIC, they needed to do it to set up, and they need to do it on an ongoing basis to function as a CIC.
They have that no-nonsense, suited-and-booted business approach, and you can tell that if they went on Dragon’s Den, they’d get the funding they were looking for. If they had a piece of paper with PIG written on it, it would be an acronym for something thoroughly businesslike, and there’d be a graph, with measurable outcomes.
It was great to see a proper third sector success, having seen a fair few third sector pig’s-ears.