We are delighted to share a guest blog from Living Wage Friendly Funder, Comic Relief, on the one year anniversary of launching the Living Wage Friendly Funder scheme.
Our vision here at Comic Relief is to live in a just world free from poverty. So when we were approached by the Living Wage Foundation about the potential for a Living Wage Friendly Funder scheme it made sense that we would be involved and importantly pioneer a new way of grant making.
As a Living Wage Accredited Employer, extending the application of the Living Wage to our grant making was the next logical step. Recognising and valuing the contribution that all of the staff from our wonderful grantees is an important part of tackling poverty here in the UK. We know how committed these individuals are, working above and beyond their duties to make social change happen. We do not want a sector where frontline workers who are seeking to tackle inequality and poverty may in fact be facing in-work poverty themselves.
The process of becoming an accredited Living Wage Friendly Funder has been surprisingly easy. The financial implications of uplifting grants has been relatively small. It is evident that the sector wants to pay the Living Wage, but like all charitable organisations, there is always an eye on keeping costs as low as possible and sometimes this means wages are kept as low as possible. Our major concerns have centred around groups who may struggle to pay the Living Wage to their staff, but feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and many groups have commented that they hope all funders will sign up to the scheme so that the Living Wage becomes the accepted standard for all funding applications.
All of our UK internal grantmaking is now at the Living Wage (which means that when we fund a post in an organisation, we ask that the post holder is paid at least the Living Wage) and we have just completed a very positive pilot on our devolved small grants funding. We are aiming for Comic Relief grants delivered by UK Community Foundations to be paid at the Living Wage from 2017.
Being part of the Living Wage Friendly Funders group has been a fantastic experience. There is great potential in the third sector becoming the first sector to fully adopt the Living Wage as standard. Funders will play a critical role in this by supporting paying the Living Wage through our funding. On this first year anniversary we are proud to be a founding member of the scheme and look forward to more funders joining us over the next year. The number of funders committed to this initiative has risen from the original 5 to 12 within this first year. We are excited to be part of this movement that recognises and values the contributions of those people who are working to make the UK a better place for all of us.