How we are fortifying the Black community through a Global Recession
In 2008 our world was rocked by a financial shift; some argue our global economy has never truly recovered. What remains true then and now is that the Black community is disproportionately affected when these seismic shifts in our economic landscape occur. Over the past three years, the Black community has endured extremely tough times, and it seems they will continue until 2025.
Scholars of the phenomenon say the Recession will last a year, and the GDP will fall by 2%. Worse still, they expect unemployment to increase to 4.9% by Q4 of 2023 and 6.4% by the end of 2025. Inflation and the cost of living crisis have already negatively impacted our community. The impact sector has seen a dramatic rise in the need for our services. Simultaneously we have found a significant reduction in the amount of funding available, even more so when seeking grant funding for racial justice organisations like ours, Black-led and Black-focused (compared to the highs of Summer 2020). Still, we must work to curb the effects of this shifting ground while continuing to support the people in our community who need it most.
Supporting our Service Users
Over the years, the initiatives we have built deliberately tackle people's essential social mobility needs when a financial crisis hits. The skills we develop are:
Financial Literacy
Impact based Entrepreneurship
Employability
In addition, we are a grant-funder supporting our community of Black-led and Black-focused charities and social enterprises across the UK to weather the financial storm and build in the markers of sustainability to ensure the long-term impact of their organisations.
In an ever-changing landscape, the needs will also change exponentially. In 2021 we began investing in our capacity to deliver high-quality research on the topics that concern our community, and that investment will be of utmost importance in this context. Through this crisis, we will ensure that we understand the specific needs of the Black community in its specificity. We are doubling down on our position as the Champion of the Black community by working closely with them to co-design each of our services to ensure we fit for purpose.
Ensuring our Sustainability
As a social enterprise dependent on a pressurised grant funding sector for our income, we spent much of 2022 contemplating the impact of a Recession on our ability to deliver our services continuously to 2026. In these stringent years, Do it Now Now will focus on the following:
Maintaining our position as a Champion of the Black community by focusing more of our capacity on systems influencing
Adjusting long-term budgets to be resilient, focusing on maintaining our existing slate of services at their current capacity
Increasing flexibility to manage rapid and slow changes by building multiple PESTLE-based scenarios that support our strategic planning
Fortifying our team so that we are more dynamic in our ability to adjust to changes and needs
Though capacity is lacking, we encourage other organisational leaders serving the Black community to do the same groundwork to best position themselves and their teams for overall resilience and to mitigate the negative impact of the coming Recession.
We will continue working through these challenges publicly by reporting our progress and activities on our blog.
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