The funding game : a case study of voluntary/statutory relationships

• Main Author: Mordaunt, Jill
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1992
• Subjects: 361
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.657986

This thesis is a study of the process of negotiating funding by a voluntary organisation from statutory sources. It is a case study which focusses on one organisation's attempts to obtain resources for a supported accommodation project for people with a mental handicap. This is approached from a focus on the inter-organisational network as a political economy. This view observes that in such networks, organisations are competing to gain two scarce resources, authority to operate in a domain and money to fund those operations. Thus the funding relationships have to be viewed in a broader policy context. The methodological approach is qualitative and relies mainly on unstructured interviews and documentary evidence in offering an account of the process of negotiation. In the case study, four stages in the process of securing funding are examined: firstly, the establishment of the organisation and the way it gained legitimacy: secondly, the development of the idea of the project through attempts to achieve the organisation's objective through other agencies: thirdly, the attempt to secure funding from central government through Urban Aid, where the fit between the objectives of the funding programme and those of the project was tenuous. Finally, the successful application for Support Finance from a health board is examined. This highlights the complexity of the environment with which a voluntary organisation has to negotiate. It seems that ultimately success was more dependent on the alliance between a number of agencies to obtain the commitment of both the health authority and central government to the principle of community care, than on the efforts of any one organisation alone.