Community development funding operates, across much of the English-speaking world, according to a remarkably consistent and remarkably ineffective pattern. A community or neighbourhood is identified as requiring intervention. Funding is allocated, usually on a three-year cycle. An organisation moves in, designs a programme, delivers it and then winds down as the funding expires. The external professionals move on to the next designated area of deprivation, and the community is left, three years later, largely as it was before.

This pattern is so familiar that it has acquired a name: the funding spin cycle. And the research on its effects is unambiguous. The three-year institutional funding cycle is structurally incapable of producing the durable community health that its proponents promise, for reasons that have nothing to do with the intentions of the professionals involved and everything to do with the nature of community itself.

Why the cycle fails at year one

The first year of the funding cycle is typically consumed by the bureaucratic requirements of setting up the project: hiring staff, securing premises, developing monitoring frameworks, establishing governance structures and conducting the needs assessments that justify the initial investment. This is the year in which the most energy is expended and the least is delivered to the actual community the initiative was designed to serve.

By the time the programme is ready to operate, the three-year clock has already advanced by twelve months. The relationships that might have been built during this period, if the resources had been invested in people rather than infrastructure, remain unformed. The community, observing the activity from a distance, has had little opportunity to become a participant in what is being built, and still less opportunity to develop the sense of ownership that would sustain it beyond the funding period.

The delivery year and its limitations

The second year is the delivery year, in which the professionalised services designed in year one are implemented. This is the year that produces the outcomes that appear in monitoring reports and grant renewals: the number of participants, the workshops delivered, the clients served, the satisfaction ratings achieved. These figures are real, but they measure the outputs of a service rather than the health of a community.

The critical limitation of the delivery year is that the activities it generates are entirely dependent on the continued presence of the professionals who designed and deliver them. The participants are positioned as clients of a service rather than co-producers of a community. Their engagement, however genuine, does not build the relational infrastructure or the collective efficacy that would allow them to continue without the professional input. They are, in the language of the leaky bucket, consuming rather than producing.

The wind-down and what it leaves behind

The third year brings the wind-down. Staff are redeployed, premises are vacated and the community that was, briefly, the subject of intensive professional attention is left to continue without the infrastructure that was built specifically for the funding period. The participants who were clients of the service have no platform from which to sustain their engagement. The connectors who were employed rather than discovered remain unknown to one another. The relational work that might have been done in year one has never been started.

The research is clear about what this cycle produces: not sustainable community health but a periodic injection of activity followed by a return to the baseline. And because the cycle is applied repeatedly to the same communities, the communities themselves can develop a learned helplessness, a pattern of waiting for the next initiative to arrive rather than building from their own resources.

Building on permanent local relationships

The alternative that the research points toward is not the absence of external support but a fundamentally different model of it: one in which external resources are used to build permanent local relationships rather than to deliver time-limited services. This means investing in connectors, funding the time that relational listening requires, supporting the informal associations that already exist and creating the conditions in which local people can take on the functions that only they can perform.

This kind of investment is harder to measure, slower to produce visible outputs and more resistant to the accountability frameworks that funding bodies typically require. But it is the investment that produces the community health that the spin cycle consistently fails to deliver.

Questions for reflection

What short-term, grant-funded initiatives have come and gone in your organisation or neighbourhood, leaving little to no lasting cultural change in their wake?

How can you invest your time this week in building a relationship that does not depend on an external budget to survive or to continue?

Think of a community initiative you are currently involved with. How much of its energy is going into institutional infrastructure and reporting, and how much into permanent local relationships?

What would it mean for your organisation or community group to design its next initiative explicitly around the question: what will remain when the funding ends?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.