Ms Elaine Crory:

The loss of all EU funding streams, or most of them, reached a cliff edge last year. The PEACE IV programme, which is ongoing, will be the last one. Those funding streams are for specific pieces of work, so some organisations came to the end of their funding last spring. The way in which many those community organisations operate is they get a certain amount of funding and they use that to bring in more funding because they secured staff under the original funding. When that happened many organisations struggled to get enough funds in to keep going with what they were doing. They were still facing the same level of need, if not more, because, as Senator Black mentioned, austerity has only got worse as time has gone on. They were still trying to make ends meet. With the addition of the cost of living and the increase in bills, even keeping on the lights and the heat in winter became really challenging for them. There are some organisations that will end up going to the wall when all of this shakes out and comes to a proper end.

One of the issues with funding is that it is sometimes very competitive. One of the reasons Reclaim the Agenda exists - Ms Crickard will say more on this - is to prevent such competition within the women's sector. We all operate well together within the women's sector. A large amount of funding coming into a larger organisation like mine will often be distributed or work-streamed to different women's centres. That works pretty well within the women's sector. However, when we come into competition with other sectors, it can seem safe for a funder to go for a larger organisation with healthy reserves, rather than one of the smaller ones. Unless we can bring in big chunks of funding and distribute, those small organisations are not really at the races at all. Funding is a huge frustration for me but sitting alongside that is the treatment by some Government departments which expect organisations to do work for them to produce evidence, research and so forth but do not produce funding for those same organisations.

These pieces of work also disappear when it is convenient. They may disappear for long periods only to be brought back later. It appears that the Government feels the community and voluntary sector is always there to work for free. Therefore, when money is asked for, when complaints are made about issues around funding or when the fact that we are reaching a cliff edge and what can be done about it is raised, it is almost met with hostility. There is an attitude of the sector coming back and asking for more money when it has already been given money and that kind of thing. It is funding combined with this attitude that we are constantly asking for money and feeding off goodwill when, if anything, the need has expanded and the funding has contracted.