On the 6th of December, 2022, we held our inaugural event, Risky Business. The event was a manifestation of all that we had witnessed in the 2 years of setting up The Social Change Nest. (It was also meant to be the launch of our Impact Report, but the first attempt at the event was scuppered by the Queen’s Funeral.) So, firstly if you haven’t read our Social Change Nest CIC impact report, you really should – it’s here and we are very proud of it.

Since we started during the pandemic, the word ‘risk’ has come up, again, and again, and again. It started with trying to get funding for mutual aid groups. We supported many of them over lockdown and beyond. We found that for tiny tiny amounts of grant money, small collectives of volunteers were being asked to fill out massive grant applications (6 pages or more, detailing out a level of spend and risk management that just wasn’t needed). It then appeared in movements who had been trying to get funding but couldn’t because they were deemed too risky by Grant Committees. We had a lot of networks and movements show up in a state of high anxiety because the push to register as an acceptable incorporated charity body had disintegrated into long discussions about who was going to be chair (a highly contested role in a flat network). Most recently, risk has manifested in high levels of concern about giving out money directly to individuals who are facing terminal illness in case they spend it on something other than a patient pathway.

Sometimes the subject area is deemed too risky: campaigners rocking the boat on climate change; sex workers demanding their rights; young people

In discussions with Foundations and Funders, we sometimes explore who is holding the risk. Often it is a perception of risk management by an overly worried grant officer who is concerned that the grant committee will interrogate their proposal and reject it. Sometimes the subject area is deemed too risky: campaigners rocking the boat on climate change; sex workers demanding their rights; young people (who are too young to get their own bank account and far too young to know what is good for them).

So with all this risk being thrown around, we found ourselves asking, “whose risk is it anyway?” And what does risk feel like as an embodied notion that causes behaviour? How is risk ritualised in the systems and processes that are used in this space? How is it abused and used in highly contested spaces where power imbalances lie and most importantly, should we be doing anything more than we are already doing about it?

Risky Business was our way of starting to delve deep into the questions. Chaired by the fantastic Jo Wells (formerly of Blagrave) and joined by an amazing panel; Natasha Friend and Caroline Mawer (Camden Giving), Derek Badowell (10 years time) and Nonhlanhla Makuyana (Decolonising Economics) and with contributions from an attentive brilliant audience, all it did was make us realise that this is a very big topic and there is a very long journey in front of us. We hope that you will join us travelling through it.

Esther Foreman, 

CEO of The Social Change Agency and The Social Change Nest

For a long time, as a grant giver and funder of feminist movements, I was really interested in having conversations about risk. I wanted to challenge the idea that people living in poverty were inherently less able to manage money, or somehow inherently less trustworthy. I wanted to talk about whose risk it was that we were talking about when we thought about what grants or investments to make, in our Boardrooms and on our committees. I wanted to talk about what the risk was and to whom, if we didn’t ‘invest’. And many of these conversations have been happening. Covid, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and a darkening of circumstances for all but the very few, has opened a crack in popular discourse about structural inequality, about movements, about the possibility of wholesale transformational change.

when those grants had started just 3 years before, they were considered extremely high risk

I had a moment of joy not long ago when the organisation I was working for at the time extended some grants using a ‘light touch’ process, and a colleague of mine said it was all good, but it was easy as it was all very low risk work. My joy stemmed from the fact that when those grants had started just 3 years before, they were considered extremely high risk and I’d had to argue their value against this. Our collective conception of what was a risky investment had moved so fundamentally in a relatively short time.
But I don’t want to talk about risk anymore.

At Risky Business, a brilliant discussion put on by my colleagues at The Social Change Nest and filled with an inspiring and thoughtful panel who are challenging these notions in their every day work, we talked about what it might look like to have a hundred-year strategy. How concepts of risk change quite fundamentally when you’re thinking about how to be a good ancestor. We talked about how we should invest in dreams. Or, as I read recently, how we should fund movements as though ‘we want them to win?’.

Without this language of risk, would people most affected by climate change, or poverty, or sexual violence, or racial injustice – or all of these things – stop having to demonstrate to the moneyed why their ideas were valid?

I sat listening to the panel brilliantly exploring issues about the ideas of risk versus social impact, and wondered what would happen if people weren’t allowed to use that word anymore. How, if we took away this term that is rooted in ideas of financial gain or scientific inquiry, we would think about our relationship with change? How would a Board or committee make decisions if they couldn’t hide behind ideas of risk? What other words would emerge, and with them what understandings of what we value and how we see our place in it. What understandings would surface about how people assess the worth of work. The worth of other people and their understandings. Without this language of risk, would people most affected by climate change, or poverty, or sexual violence, or racial injustice – or all of these things – stop having to demonstrate to the moneyed why their ideas were valid? Would people most affected find it easier to have not only an authentic, but also an authoritative, voice in those spaces where decisions are made?

I don’t know. I don’t know how easy it will be to talk about deeply human feelings of uncertainty and discomfort, without a neat and purportedly unemotional language of risk and mitigation. But I’d be interested in finding out.

Anya Stern,
Director of Practice at The Social Change Agency