Since 2017, Bristol City Council has consolidated eight separate grant streams into the Bristol Impact Fund (BIF), a programme designed to tackle inequality across the city through investment in the voluntary and community sector. What distinguishes BIF from conventional local authority grant programmes is its sustained commitment to co-design: the criteria for funding, the allocations process, and the shape of each successive round have been developed alongside the organisations they are intended to serve.
The first round was developed through a facilitated process involving a diverse group of voluntary and community sector stakeholders. An independent facilitator helped build consensus on priorities, clarify roles, and ensure inclusive representation. Independent funders were brought into the process to increase resilience. The design explicitly prioritised access for smaller and newer organisations, with infrastructure bodies funded to provide application support.
In the first two years of the programme alone, funded organisations raised an additional £3.9 million against a City Council investment of £6 million. A subsequent Community Resilience Fund of £4 million, using participatory and deliberative methods developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, extended the co-design approach into capital grantmaking.
Officers received training in participatory and deliberative methods and applied that training in practice, building lasting skills and relationships across the council’s relationship with the VCSE sector. BIF3, running to 2030 with a budget of £8.8 million, explicitly prioritises neighbourhood organisations and citywide equalities communities, building on the foundations of earlier rounds.
What practitioners can take from this
Bristol demonstrates how sustained co-design between local government and civil society, backed by senior political will and investment in staff capacity, can transform the relationship between funder and sector from transactional to genuinely collaborative, and improve outcomes for communities in the process.