The Big Lottery Fund is opening a dialogue with the sector about its future funding strategy. Dawn Austwick starts the conversation here.

This month, we at the Big Lottery Fund will start what will be a series of conversations with charities, social enterprises, community groups, stakeholders, and members of the public on our future strategic direction.  

And it is deliberately a conversation; an exchange of thoughts, ideas, challenges and opportunities.  It is also a conversation worth having because it will inform how we use £4bn of National Lottery good cause funding between 2015 and 2021.  It will inform our next strategic framework and that’s why it is called Your Voice, Our Vision.

This will run to July 2014 and views will then form the basis of our new vision and framework, which will be published by spring 2015.

So, what am I thinking?

Well, the world may have changed since we last considered our strategic framework but our mission remains the same: to help communities and those most in need.

It is as much about how we fund rather than what we fund.

Our place is to help, to facilitate, sometimes to broker, and to recognise the key role a funder can play in enabling others to achieve great things. Our responsive demand-led funding is at the heart of this and of realising our mission. Through our funding we can enable and support people and communities to overcome challenges, to grow in confidence, to build for the future, and to live good lives. This social capital is the lifeblood of a society and the ultimate in preventative action.

Our own lifeblood is the knowledge, information, and understanding we collectively hold. Joining this up, pumping it around the system, making it available to others, and learning from it is one of our great challenges for the future. How does the real-time intelligence we gain from our responsive funding shape and inform our strategic thinking? We want to understand what works and therefore what difference our funding can make and to share that learning with others. We are just one piece in a much more complex puzzle.

We also need to understand what we are uniquely placed to do and where we are uniquely placed to help.  So for example, how do we maximise the benefit from the scale, scope and reach of our funding?  How do we maintain what I describe as a blended funded model, encompassing both responsive and strategic funding - and what is the interaction between the two?  And finally, we are an independent generalist funder - these features give us a special place among funders, the voluntary and community sector, and in civil society more generally.

There are also some fundamental questions we have about our role and personality as a funder.  For example, how do we:

• Balance open funding with targeted investments?
• Meet urgent needs now while thinking strategically about early intervention and prevention?
• Support innovation and risk taking by adapting great practice?
• Use the funding tools available to us: long-term funding, learning, support and development, capital, social investment?
• Think beyond funding – what could/should we do to influence policy and practice, other commissioners, and government?

So, what are you thinking?

We want people to add their voice to a developing conversation, submit a blog, post a film, send a tweet or contribute a comment:

•    Twitter: #yourvoice
•    Facebook: www.facebook.com/BigLotteryFund
•    Email: [email protected] / [email protected]
•    Web: www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/yourvoice

Our online conversation space will be live from 12 March.

Dawn Austwick is chief executive of the Big Lottery Fund