Anti-Racism Community Engagement Fund

The Design Advisory Group has sought the expertise of Impact Funding Partners to manage the fund on behalf of Scottish Government.

The Anti-Racism Interim Governance Group (AIGG) research context: 

The AIGG undertook community research that led to recommendations about future AROS that included community perspective about how to create the new organisation and how people might like to see it work for them. The AIGG research in 2023:

• Used Participatory Action Research methods to engage with racially minoritised communities, to hear from people about how they thought an organisation could best work for them. In doing so, it supported the ambitions for the co-design of Scotland’s new community led accountability anti-racism policy focused organisation.
• The research began to build awareness of a new anti-racism organisation that was being developed to address systemic racism in Scotland.
• The AIGG research focused mainly on systemic/organisational racism and the resultant racialised inequity in outcomes, not on people’s lived experiences of individual personal racism.
• The outcomes from the research fed into the 2023 AIGG recommendations for the future AROS.

The full research report which can be found under the Application Documents section (at the end of this webpage), provides detailed documentation of the approach and reflects on the learning during this research period.

This fund aimed to build on the research findings by demonstrating that people in communities need to be resourced to be involved in how any new organisation is formed and how they would like to see it work for them. It was hoped that this approach will help to build trust with people who have been asked many times to participate in research about the harms and inequality in their lives, yet it is known that inequality is increasing.