It’s my last week as Director of ABCT, and with that I have been doing a lot of reflection. A big part of that has been reflecting on the journey of Harm to Healing - how we got here, how it arose, what gaps it looked to fill, and our learning along the way.

The first thing to say is that we have learned a lot, but that is not to say it’s been easy, or that there is not much more work and learning to do. With that in mind, this aims to share my honest reflections of this experience and how it led to Harm to Healing (HtH).

I’ve had to track back a few years to remember where this work started. I think it’s fair to say we found the criminal legal system space the most challenging of ABCT’s priorities, in working out how and what to fund for a range of reasons, e.g. the impact of commissioning on the shape of the sector, and despite this being one of the oldest parts of the voluntary sector, the fact that the context doesn’t ever seem to change or get any better - especially for the most marginalised.

It was against this backdrop I remember watching the Justice Select Committee in March 2019 one year on from the Lammy report - it highlighted the failure to work with racialised communities in a meaningful way, and that led by and for community organisations were in an incredibly fragile state, more likely to be at risk of closure than others in the sector, while the needs they were addressing were becoming more urgent and acute. Core funding was so clearly needed by these groups and ABCT was comfortable giving unrestricted funding, so what could we do?

That was five years ago, and we’d already started conversations with Barrow Cadbury Trust about how could philanthropic funding be used as a catalyst for tangible progress? Luck came into the piece when Laurie Hunte joined Barrow Cadbury Trust after having worked with David Lammy on his review. Over a memorable coffee we decided that we could begin to mobilise funders around this issue, marking the beginning of a series of roundtables with interested funders on racial injustice* in the criminal justice system.** The roundtables drilled down into what could start looking like fundable areas, and came up with four:

1. Developing leadership and policy capacity in the sector
2. Fund/ build capacity of by and for*** smaller organisations
3. Policy/ research/ influencing
4. Strategic Litigation

It felt natural and right for ABCT to take the lead on core funding for historically underfunded racialised groups working in the space – a very real gap. What would doing something different look like? We knew we had so much to learn and would need to adapt out processes, but we also knew it would be critical to support creating time and space for people impacted by racism / the system to think through challenges from their perspective and what they’d like to see change. From the outset the ‘how’ was just as important was the ‘what’.

To get a sense of the arc from then to where we are now, I looked back at reports to our Board since 2019. They tell the story of a slow and incremental process, building relationships and learning as we go. The journey from those initial conversations in 2019, to our current support and investment for HtH was long, and has required us to be flexible and adaptable - to change the way we work, and to put concerted and intentional effort into building relationships and working differently.

We began by starting to fund groups working in this space directly. To do this, we had to change the way we did things at ABCT. Our norm had been to fund registered charities with a lower limit of £150k turnover, parameters that excluded many of these groups. We had to proactively and rapidly change the way that we funded to enable us to support some of these organisations.

Our game plan was quite vague at that point, to begin funding organisations ourselves – demonstrate how simple it could be - and then to bring other funders in, to be a bridge if you like, working toward some kind of pooled fund that would somehow emerge. This was in hindsight – naïve! In a key conversation in 2022 one of our colleagues pointed out that with the best will in the world, and however well we did it, no funder was going part with their money on the basis of a conversation and that we needed to get something solid documented, some research done around this space. We knew we wanted the research to be of value to the groups themselves, and to document the value of their work - not be a funder driven report that would end up gathering dust on the shelves, and not to reiterate the very real harms we already knew existed. We wanted this to spark action, and to spark change.

This marked another first for us at ABCT – we had never commissioned research before. Luckily, some magic happened with a joint bid from Temi Mwale and Patrick Williams. The report, rooted in the direct experiences of those proximate to the harms, developed the concept of HtH. HtH is a positive blueprint for change grounded in evidence, to take the work forward. It is also a call to action for philanthropy – we can, and should do better.

What’s happening now is that the HtH collective / the groups are working out what they want the governance to look like for HtH, and developing strategy for the early stages. ABCT has financially committed to kick off the seed phase and we are fiscally hosting the initiative (another first, and another steep learning curve), while supporting with fundraising.

I’d actually been planning to stand down as Director of ABCT a couple of years ago– and thank goodness I didn’t - because if I had, I wouldn’t have been a part of the beginning of HtH. But the work is not done, there is so much more to do…. No doubt

ABCT has been on a journey, amending the way in which we work both through our grant making parameters and processes, learning about commissioning, building structures to fiscally host the initiative, and working out our role and value add in this space. I’m so excited about the work the collective is doing and so pleased to have been a part of it, and I know that it will do great things into the future.

Huge thanks to everyone who has supported us along the way, within and outside ABCT, funders and partners and others. The report speaks to the concept of the ‘compulsion to serve’ – of organisations immersed in their communities and compelled to bring about change. My parting message is to funders: we should feel compelled to respond. Continue to reflect, to learn, to challenge yourself and others - and of course - support Harm to Healing!

Sara Harrity

* The language we used at the time was ‘disproportionality’, this has been consciously changed to directly reflect the nature of the harms.

** Harm to Healing intentionally use the language of the criminal legal system, reflecting a growing movement to reclaim the term justice.

*** Then we referred to BAME-led organisations, this has been changed in recognition of the reductive nature of the term BAME. It was the official term used by government and wider civil society at the time.