Northern Ireland’s new £100,000 fund will help women from the community and voluntary sector influence public decision making. At last, the meeting notebook has been promoted from silent witness to potential constitutional instrument, provided it can complete the monitoring form.
The Northern Ireland Office’s Engagement for Change Fund will run for three years and support leadership and advocacy development. It is intended to help people represent their communities to policy makers, which means a carefully underlined agenda item may finally travel further than the hall where it was written.
The fund will focus particularly on women’s participation in public debate, while helping community leaders of all genders develop skills in communication, advocacy, networking and the use of evidence. This is welcome news for every campaigner who has arrived with lived experience, three folders and the sinking feeling that somebody else brought a consultant.
A single community organisation will be selected to deliver the programme. It will provide training on Northern Ireland’s policy landscape, traditional and social media, network building and the practical art of persuading decision makers that people affected by decisions may possess relevant information.
There will also be a dedicated programme of work addressing the barriers women face in accessing and thriving within public forums. These barriers include underrepresentation and the ancient democratic custom of announcing that the agenda is already full immediately before inviting views.
The scheme follows earlier Northern Ireland Office support for community organisations. It therefore arrives with a serious purpose and the unmistakable air of an institution discovering that communities have been doing public service for years without a sufficiently impressive folder, evaluation framework or person named to receive the evaluation framework.
The central idea remains sound. Decisions improve when people with direct knowledge can influence them, and participation should not depend on knowing which door to knock on, which acronym to use or whether the person behind the door has read the briefing.
Now community leaders must turn experience into evidence, evidence into advocacy and advocacy into a document that can survive three years of programme management. The notebook has won its seat at the table. Its first task is to prove that it has learned the correct way to ask for permission to open.
Source: Northern Ireland Office.
