Paper description: This paper explores the work of the Rank Foundation—a UK-based grantmaking organization that conducts place-based philanthropy as a form of community development. It begins with an overview of place-based grantmaking in the UK, tracing it to different policy and sociopolitical phenomena in the last 30 years. It then discusses how the Rank Foundation emerged within this landscape as place-based funders. Finally, the paper will go over the programmatic elements of Rank’s work in the city of Plymouth (which includes a participatory grantmaking panel, repayable grants scheme, and a digital network platform) and discuss the promises, challenges, and lessons learned.
How the paper relates to Innovative Pathways to Thriving Communities: ‘Place-based philanthropy’ is increasing as a grantmaking methodology within the UK giving space. Instead of channeling philanthropic gifts towards a specific cause, place-based philanthropy funds a variety of charities, activities, and thematic programmes that are all bounded within a specific locality. This is because poverty is increasingly understood to be a spatial phenomenon (linked particularly to British post-industrial towns) whereby intersecting and bespoke issues of class and identity drive the socioeconomic struggles within a local place.
With this context in tow, our paper relates to the theme Innovative Pathways to Thriving Communities because it provides both a practical application of how to establish pioneering collaboration in a local place and because it simultaneously takes a critical perspective on community development and practice. Regarding the former, our case study pulls from personal experience tied to establishing and running a place-based program that will offer insight on the instrumental aspects of the process, including but not limited to: using lived experience of community members to drive strategy, engaging with the emergent issues within a place, and fostering reciprocal relationships across a place. Regarding the latter, the paper also explores the questions laden in place-based philanthropy, namely around issues of ‘who knows best’ in local development, the important but problematic role of private philanthropy in the face of persistent austerity, and difficult questions around bounding what defines a ‘community’ in the first place.
Finally, by showcasing an example of ‘engaged scholarship’, whereby academics and practitioners come together to advance the health and prosperity of local places, our paper fundamentally shows that developing innovative pathways requires both academia and practice to learn from one another when developing data-and-context-driven policies for specific communities in the UK and beyond.
