This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 2 (North-West of England, UK)
This CTP describes the point in late 2011 at which the organisation began to pitch for, and win, large grants with local higher education institutions; the additional support and expertise required to deliver them; and the shift in organisational identity.
In the early years of the hackspace (as described in other CTPs), the organisation drew in funding from a number of different sources across the region, including client work, small grants from local enterprise charities, and donations made by some of founders from their own income. Following a shift in leadership, the directors made an active decision to be organised and pro-active about the organisations funding. This first involved chasing up unpaid invoices and taking in smaller grants. From there, the directors began to actively chase larger funding opportunities from across the region. In order to be able to draw this money in, the directors were required to create a vision for what the organisation would be, and how it would serve the needs of local communities. Through this process, the directors articulated a new identity for the hackspace, based around education and skills development:
“I spoke to the [city] council and the local digital development agency, who assisted in getting funding in kind for first applications. The project we pitched to them was essentially, here’s funding for 6 months to set up a hackspace, and here’s how they work. So we went about finding out what makerspaces were before setting one up. We framed it around what already existed in the city, and talked about the potential for trading and new technologies, which we were well versed in, but other people weren’t looking at at the time. We talked about the need for coding and skills development in the city, which was digitally disadvantaged, and where there wasn’t much of a spotlight at the time”.
As a result of these pitches, the organisers won funding from the local authorities, which enabled them to take up premises in a large building in the centre of the city where they were able to build up and develop the organisation.
This event acted as a CTP because it brought in sufficient financial resources not only for the organisation to invest in the physical infrastructure necessary to operate the hackspace, but also to develop longer-term strategic plans around its identity and operations.
This CTP was shaped by the emergence of the ‘maker’ movement in the UK, and of other hackspaces in the local area. As detailed in other hackspace and FabLab case studies for the TRANSIT project, the interest and awareness in ‘making’ in the UK is broadly aligned with a number of associated events including the first MakerFaire in the region, hosted in Newcastle in March 2009, run by the media company O’Reilly; the founding of London Hackspace in January 2009; and the emergence of open hardware technologies such as the Arduino platform, which became available to buy directly in the UK in late 2008 through the design studio Tinker London. These events were in turn influenced by the development of similar hackspaces and hardware communities in the US, and in particular in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The directors identified how they were able to draw on this nascent enthusiasm when pitching to develop their own hackspace:
“We were in a position to identify a lot of the [technologies] that are around today, but in the context of things that were only just growing at the time, and in the specific context of [the city]. There was lots of enthusiasm and buy-in – lots of people wanted to volunteer and help create the space”.
One element of this emergence in hackspace and making was the presence of another nascent hack group in the North West who were about to lose their premises; and the directors were able to draw in this group to strengthen their own application:
“In the process of getting funding, we were approached by people who’d wanted to set up a hackspace, but had focused on the tools, not the community, thinking about it as a small group of people sharing tools with a membership model. We weren’t keen to have a membership model, but they came to us and said ‘Our space is closing down’. So we wrapped that into our application to say that we’re interested in the provision of where this could go”.
Rather than absorbing the hackspace wholly, the directors hosted them within their own space to allow for a diversity of groups.
The CTP was also shaped by the provision of funds for regional redevelopment in the city. In the 1970s, the city lost nearly 50,000 jobs and 17.5% of its population as a result of industrial decline. The city leaders deployed economic redevelopment strategies, including improved transport infrastructure, and investment in education institutes (including the local universities) to play a role in economic growth. The directors were able to tap into this ongoing focus on education and redevelopment in their funding applications.
This CTP was shaped by the emergence of the ‘maker’ movement in the UK and of other hackspaces in the local area; and of the funding provisions for organisations in this part of the UK.
The directors reported no contestation or frictions in their decision to pursue funding. The decision was however built on the need to address the fragile state of finances that the organisation had been in prior to the leadership handover, which the directors described as frustrating:
“I was aware that [the organisation] was quite rickety – it had loads of potential that wasn’t being fulfilled in any way, shape, or form. I came in for a really appalling year of just doing the basics. I got an accountant in, dealt with the fines, got a bookkeeper, procured more funding, looked at more schemes, taking it all apart and putting in basic systems. When that phase finished, we took in £10,000 to £20,000 through grants and contract work, building it up from there in that first year and a half”. As this quote illustrates, frustrations about the weak state of the organisation’s finances drove the need to develop a more solid funding stream and firmer institutional identity. By this stage, the leadership handover, and associated tensions, described in previous CTPs had already happened.
The directors described being mindful of the need to develop a sustainable funding stream that could be increased over time, and that these activities fed intentionally into that strategy:
“I knew that we needed to look for smaller funding later, and then we were then interested in building it up over time into larger pots. We stared with £10,000 and then £20,000 through the council and then the community association funding in 2013. The year before last [2014], we put in an application for bigger funding through the [local authority not-for-profit grant scheme] – we’d been unsuccessful in the three years previously, but successful this time round. We got £150,000 over 3 years from April 2015. We also got money, £50,000, from the culture team at the council, and £220,000 from Arts Council England”.
As this quote illustrates, the strategy to build from smaller grants to larger ones was as successful as the directors had hoped it would be. With each round of funding, the directors were able to prove to funding bodies that they were able to reliably deliver on proposals, and could also take on the responsibility of greater sums of money, with the educational focus providing a critical means of framing their activities.
It is difficult to evaluate what the longer term implications of this CTP would have been had it not occurred. The directors described how strategic and driven they had been in sourcing sustainable finance – had they not been able to access the first round of funding grants, they likely would have searched elsewhere. Had no grants been forthcoming, the directors would likely have been able to support the organisation through smaller amounts of money derived through personal work and consultancy; but would not have been able to set in place the larger plans based on physical premises and local community.
This CTP supported the organisation’s transformational aims, by creating a sustainable funding stream that allowed the directors to create long-term strategy to meet these aims. The CTP also shaped the organisation’s transformational aims, by creating a focus on educational provision which was in turn shaped by the social and economics needs of the local area for which their was funding.
Through this CTP, the directors became familiar and comfortable with the process of applying for funding in increasingly large sums. In the short term, the organisation moved onto more solid ground through grants and raising money through educational services, shifting to becoming financially independent:
“I put a rocket up the courses that we’d developed, and called in cash that hadn’t been received. By 2012, we were a lot more robust – we were making money on our own, which we’d never done before, £82,000 I think. We’d just been reliant on other funding sources until then.”
The long-term effect was that at the time of interview (early 2016), the organisation had taken in £650,000 in the previous year. The directors had also been able to develop ongoing working relationships with a number of collaborators and funding bodies through activities supported through these grants, including skills development, biohacking, and heritage activities.
Stay informed. Subscribe for project updates by e-mail.
