Category: Blog

Posted on

The Irish abortion referendum one year on

SMK Event sponsored by JRRT: The Irish Abortion Referendum – One Year On.

Inspiring, engaging, high energy – and extremely useful: just some of the responses to the SMK Change Network event, sponsored by JRRT, on 23 May 2019.

The event, at The Foundry, London, focused on the fight for abortion rights in Ireland and welcomed Irish campaigners who secured an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote in last year’s referendum on abortion. In May 2018, the Irish electorate voted by over 66% to remove the 8th Amendment from the Constitution which banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Keynote speakers were Deidre Duffy (campaign manager for Together for Yes, pictured above), Dr Claire Brophy (co-convenor of the Abortion Rights Campaign, photo left) and Rachel Lavin (data journalist and Who Targets Me?). Nike Jonah (creative producer for Counterpoint Arts) also joined the panel for a series of provocations to the audience of around 40 UK campaigners.

This event was one of a series for SMK’s Change Network, which brings campaigners together to explore and learn from key instances of social change.

SMK described the occasion as “our best Change Network to date – constructive, emotional and inspiring”.

The speakers were all excellent, engaging and shared their huge knowledge and expertise very generously. It was a very positive event, combining big picture strategy with nitty-gritty, ‘on the doorstep’ game-changing detail. Many of the attendees said that they felt the learnings could be applied in many ways to improve campaigning and make it more effective.

The group discussion also resulted in stimulating and high quality input.

Chloe Hardy, Director of Policy & Communications at the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, blogged about the event and a podcast will be available soon – which no doubt will be well worth a listen!

Posted on

Grants: our commitment to transparency

At JRRT, we make grants to a wide range of organisations striving to achieve aims that reflect the liberal and Quaker heritage of our founder, Joseph Rowntree. Our current grant-making priorities are political and democratic reform. We support campaigns that seek to bring about significant changes in the political system, making it more accountable, democratic and transparent and to rebalance power for the well-being of society.

In line with these aims, we make our own commitment to transparency in publishing details of the campaigns and organisations that we support through our grant making.  Details of all of the grants that JRRT has awarded since 2015 are available on the grants awarded section of our website. You can read case studies about some of our grantees or sign up to receive our e-newsletter to be kept informed of our grant making and the impacts being achieved by our grantees.

Furthermore, we have joined more than 100 funders in publishing our grants’ data in a standardised open-source format as part of the 360Giving initiative. 360Giving is a not-for-profit organisation that supports UK grant makers to publish information on who, where and what they fund.

Details of more than 300,000 grants totalling more than £8 billion are shared via 360Giving’s website and can be interrogated using their free analytic tools, including the flagship GrantNav database platform and the 360Insights visualisation  tool. Using standard identifiers for funders and for grantees, and providing consistent information in fields such as grant amount, duration, and grant description, results in a vast and easily comparable dataset. 360Giving describes its vision as supporting “UK grant making to be more informed, effective and strategic”. It wants to facilitate a shift “from sharing data to using it” that boosts the impact of grant giving and enables funders to find coherencies between themselves and others.

GrantNav enables grant makers to search easily for other funders that are supporting similar organisations, projects and causes, increasing opportunities for collaboration and added value in grant making. 360Insights produces visual illustrations of datasets, enabling often complex data to be compared, described and shared.

Our intentions in making our JRRT data publically accessible to the 360Giving standard are therefore:

·       to aid collaboration between grant makers, enabling decision making and learning across the sector to be more informed;

·       to demonstrate clearly to researchers and commentators where our grant funding is being allocated, to whom and for what purposes; and

·       to enable potential grantees to see who and what we have funded in the past, and where our current strategy is focusing our funding, in order to help them make an informed decision about whether to apply to JRRT

Our grants data are updated quarterly after each of our larger funding rounds. The most recent spreadsheet of data is downloadable here or visit 360Giving’s GrantNav database to interrogate our data alongside that of other funders.

By Nicky Milsted, the Administrator at JRRT.