Alison Naftalin outlines Lively Mind’s grant application process, which has helped treble funding from trusts and foundations since the charity’s inception

Three years ago I was volunteering at a village school in Northern Ghana. I saw that children were not getting a quality education and as a result were trapped in a cycle of poverty – lacking the skills and capabilities they need to thrive and build themselves a better future. I wanted to give these children access to creative and independent learning from a young age and I wanted to do it in a sustainable way. So I struck on the idea of setting up an educational play centre, using local materials, to help children in my village learn through play.

I trained youths and women from the village to run the play centre as volunteers. In this way the centre was cheap and entirely self-sustaining. The impact was marked and immediate with children becoming engaged in the activities and developing key skills without even realising they were learning. So much so, that the neighbouring village also asked for a play centre and then so did another.

Funding for growth

After six months I had to move to Uganda and decided to try the scheme out there. By the end of the year, I had set up 12 play centres across Ghana and Uganda. I had trained over 350 volunteers who then taught around 1,000 children every week. As well as helping the children, it was clear that volunteering at the centres also empowered the volunteers, giving them teamwork and leadership skills so that they too were able to make changes to their lives.

Eventually I had to go back to the UK where my job was waiting for me, but the people that I had worked with begged me to train and support them so that they could continue to set up new centres. How hard could it be to raise a few thousand pounds a year? I was naïve: this is where the hard work began.

Back in London I took stock of the situation with the newly formed board of trustees. We registered Lively Minds as a charity and since it was still in its infancy, we agreed a small budget of just £12,000. This would allow us to set up eight new play centres and to pay our staff in Africa a part-time wage. Although £12,000 may seem to be a relatively small amount, we knew it would be an uphill struggle given that I also had a full-time job and neither I nor any of our trustees had any fundraising experience.

Events, challenge events and individual donations from friends and relatives formed much of our first year’s income, but we quickly realised that this was very labour intensive and unsustainable.

I searched for trusts and foundations supporting overseas education projects on the TrustFunding database, Grant Net and the Charity Commission’s website. My search returned a list of approximately 50 trusts, which I whittled down to those that would be prepared to support a new grassroots charity with small grants.

I started researching the priority areas of individual trusts as well as the types of grants that they had made in the past. The majority of the trusts had a specific application form, which was helpful for providing structured responses. In the first year I managed to get two grants, one of £1,500 and one of £3,000. It was a tremendous boost because not only did it give us much-needed funds with which to run our projects but we also gained credibility.

Measuring success

The following year, it was clear that the charity was growing and our budget also needed to increase. I put myself on some free fundraising training courses organised by the Foundation for Social Improvement. These taught me three very important lessons. Foremost, it helped me to frame our core case for support more effectively. I realised that I was too close to the charity to see it objectively and had focused too much on howour projects work, without giving enough information about what the actual impact of the projects was.

I started improving our monitoring and evaluation systems in Africa so that we could track, measure and demonstrate the impact of our work. This was not easy, because although our staff are experts at working with children and communities, they have not been formally trained in monitoring and evaluation. Nor are they computer literate. I spent a lot of time with my staff in Africa helping them understand the importance of measuring impact – both to make us more accountable to our existing donors and beneficiaries and to attract new donors.

Intelligent evaluation

Designing suitable evaluation tools was challenging as the children at the play centres are under six years old, and the volunteers are generally illiterate. We got around this problem by giving the children simple questionnaires, asking them to identify colours, shapes, sizes and numbers. Before we open a new play centre we ask the children to complete the questionnaire, and then do so again at regular intervals after it is open. This enables us to assess whether the children have picked up skills.

All our volunteers are given questionnaires assessing their self-belief and general state of well-being before and after volunteering. We also spend a lot of time seeking and capturing feedback from parents, volunteers, teachers and community leaders commenting on the impact of the play centre. Although these are not the most sophisticated systems, it has been hugely interesting and gratifying to see the positive results coming out of the evaluations. I use information from our evaluative work to insert an ‘our impact’ section into fundraising applications. I also provide a brief summary of our evaluation processes to inform donors that we monitor and evaluate our work and to demonstrate accountability.

As a result of collecting this anecdotal evidence, I saw how powerful case studies and human interest stories can be. One of the quotes that stays with me is one I took from a volunteer in Uganda. Robina is a 65 year-old women, bringing up 15 grandchildren alone, with no income, after all of her children died from HIV or AIDs related diseases. She told me how proud she is that although she has never been to school, she is now able to teach the children in the community. She spoke of the respect that this earned her and also of how volunteering enabled her to build up a support network. When I realised how moving stories like this are I began using case studies from parents, volunteers and head teachers in grant applications to bring them to life.

Knowing the funder

Since the FSI training and cumulative grant applications I have gained a deeper understanding of trusts and foundations. In particular that the trust is not a general source of philanthropy but has its own mission and objectives and is seeking to find fellow travellers who share these. I now spend a lot more time reading about the philosophy of the trust when making applications. I then explicitly try to demonstrate the alignment the trust’s values and priorities and the work of Lively Minds.

Last year we managed to secure four grants from trusts and foundations, trebling this income from the previous year. We have been quite fortunate that our grants have been unrestricted and have been made on the basis of a full costs recovery model. As the only paid members of staff are our local staff in Ghana and Uganda, the income we received has gone straight into our projects. But it is also nice to know that we have a buffer and can use this income for essential core costs if necessary.

Lively Minds now has 26 play centres that give over 3,500 children the chance to learn through play each week and are run with pride and enthusiasm by over 550 volunteers. We have also introduced reading schemes in many of our villages. We are now at a stage in our development where we are seeking to make a step-change and to scale-up our activities so that we can bring our programme to thousands more children who so desperately need this type of intervention. Our challenge in the next few years will be to find ways to diversify our income streams to fund and sustain this growth. We are hoping to build our relationship with our existing trusts and foundations and to find new donors to join us on our journey.

Alison Naftalin is director at Lively Minds

This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 2, February 2011