Funding for both longstanding tradition and emerging innovation in community

Re-designing the Community Granting Program

The City of Brampton had just completed it’s very first Culture Master Plan in 2018. I was hired into Cultural Services, to focus on redesigning the Community Granting Program - the only funding source for artistic production in the City of Brampton.

• The Community Granting Program in 2018 had artists, community athletes, legacy community festivals, and sports tourism all applying and competing for funding within the same singular program framework.

• Through discovery and program review, we learned that 10 different departments were required to ensure that the $1.6M of funding each year would be effectively evaluated, risks mitigated and projects initiated.

• We learned that the application process for users was long, unclear, cumbersome, and also required significant knowledge about non-profit governance in order to meet compliance requirements for the city.

Community Granting Program: Discovery thru Implementation

Tools, Methods, Approaches

• Using a holistic impact framework, qualitative interviews were held with all stakeholders of the program including administrators, applicants, grantees, evaluators, members of the public, publicly elected officials and regional partners.

• Co-design workshops were held with stakeholders to learn more about how they as community members wanted to also work together with limited funding options at the City.

• After engagement and co-design with over 100 stakeholders who were directly impacted by the program, the redesign separated out the many different ‘publics’ that needed funding from a singular program into:

  • Separate programs with distinct frameworks to meet the needs of each community, in particular Sport Tourism and Legacy Festivals were moved out of the Community Granting program and provided their own programs, funding and staff compliments.

  • The Community Granting Program then became tiered, ensuring that applicants would be evaluated with projects of similar scope and scale.

  • Tiering provided accessibility to first time entrants, who were successful in their first applications to the program.

  • The Community Granting Program was rebranded as The Advance Brampton Fund to differentiate it from the other programs. It continued to have community artists and athletes apply to this fund until the separate Arts Organization would be established who would then take over all arts granting.

  • A free long-term non-profit skills support and training series developed with Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) to serve the Brampton non-profit sector, and support regional partners. It was introduced with learning opportunities specific to funding opportunities at the City of Brampton, and more advanced skills training to continue furthering leadership in the non-profit sector in the city.