Category: Blog

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Networking for democracy

“Our democracy faces serious challenges. Substantial new efforts are required to counter those challenges – and to build upon and improve our democracy. One of the most effective ways to support this work is to connect the efforts of those pursuing such goals.” 

Cover of Networking for DemocracyJoe Mitchell’s JRRT-funded report Networking for democracy synthesises evidence gathered following two months of interviews across the sector and a small literature review.

 

 

 

JRRT is interested in hearing the views of grantees, applicants and other campaigners on the report’s proposals.

 

Downloads and links: 

Executive Summary 

Full Report 

Google Document (for ongoing comments, corrections and clarifications)

 

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Is it time for Automatic Voter Registration in the UK?

A research report by Toby James and Paul Bernal of the University of East Anglia considering the case for Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) was published on Wednesday 29 April 2020. The research was commissioned by the UK Democracy Fund, a pooled fund set up by JRRT.

 

Download the full report here 

 

  • Millions are missing from the electoral registers – the Electoral Commission estimated in September 2019 that some 17% of eligible voters in Great Britain were not correctly registered.

 

  • The delay of the May 2020 elections due to COVID-19 is generating debate about effective digital means of registering citizens ahead of the bumper package of elections in May 2021, with local, Mayoral and elections in the devolved nations.

 

  • Government announcements in late March on Boundary Reviews, which are based on registration data, add further urgency to calls for reform.

 

  • Cross party support is building with backing from the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in its 2014 report on voter engagement and the APPG on Democratic Participation report in 2019.

 

Is AVR the solution?

 

The research report sets out the array of measures, such as automatic voter registration and assisted voter registration, that could be adopted. It considers the impacts on privacy, data protection, consent and security.

 

Download the full report here 

 

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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!

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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.