21/10/2026
Last week I was down in Edinburgh sharing the Unmapped Places project with funders the Williamson Trust and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and all the other fundees from the Healthy Planet, Healthy People programme.
As last year, it was a wonderfully uplifting, inspiring, convivial, informal and relaxed event, with the purpose of larger collaboration for community-led systems change.
YES.
This is how funders should fund. This is what's needed at this point in time. Funders take note!
- The initial funding application is not onerous. It's simple yet thoughtful.
- They embrace flexibility, things changing and evolving, things going 'wrong' (which is not for hiding, which we are all used to doing).
- In other words, there is plenty of space for emergent learning and feedback - we are not tied to arbitrary outputs and outcomes that we'd listed on an application before any work commenced (a totally backwards way of doing anything by the way).
- All the money is given upfront. They trust us.
- They bring us together at the RSE (who administrate the fund) as 'our' space, recognising that the space historically and currently may feel overwhelming and exclusionary for some. We are encouraged to make it our own, be however we need to be there... transforming spaces.
- All the fundees briefly present their projects (in whatever way they wish - last year we had a song!) instead of writing a final report.
- They include the project reviewers in the room; the process is transparent and we get to meet and discuss with people who looked over our applications.
- They actively encourage crossover and collaboration amongst the fundees, for bigger-picture change. We are not in competition.
- Should we choose to scale our project, scale is understood in a thousand ways, 'growth' is not the only way.
- For the follow-on funding application, they provide a small amount of money to cover time/costs developing the application. That could include paying folk for meetings or workshops, and for writing the actual application.
- With all the above, they're embodying the Healthy Planet, Healthy People principles - walking the walk with internal process too, which is so often absent.
Every single one of these points is quietly radical. I am so grateful for it.
And I was given the most beautiful gift of flax, grown on Lewis by Cuansiar. The harvest was good. They're now just building their first (open-source) processing machines as part of their project Annlan, to mix flax with heritage breed wool from Uist to make into clothing, amongst other things!
