Regeneration without funding

Summary: Regeneration is an expensive undertaking. Yet there are periods when there is no funding available. Should these periods be gaps of activity? Use effort to build awareness, develop preconditions to regeneration and raise funds, but do not initiate action if there is no funding available to build and support participation capacity in the neighbourhood.

Lack or absence of money often has a paralysing effect on regeneration activities. While it is possible to do start doing something without having considerable funding in place, it is difficult to expect that deprived neighbourhood can be regenerated without extraordinary financial support. Initiating action that cannot yield results will inevitably create disappointment in regeneration among the stakeholders. A second start will be much more difficult as once failed the confidence is very difficult to bring back. You must be aware that: (i) starting with little or no funding, (ii) having significant part of your funding suddenly taken away under the programme implementation, and (iii) having to stop activities for any lengthier period - are three totally different situations with different implications.

• It is possible to involve volunteers: residents, local businesses and, often, outside stakeholders, provided they believe in the future of the neighbourhood and have capacity to participate. Hence planned activity has to match their initial capacity.
   
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• If existing financing can be used better - provided deprived neighbourhoods get their proportional share of funding and service, and cohesion of unmanaged activities can be attained, some progress can be achieved without massive extraordinary allocations from the public purse – provided stakeholders have capacity to participate in regeneration.
   

The best targets to spend the little money you have, are on individual and group capacity building, getting to know the neighbourhood, formation of attitudes, mutual confidence building, and shared visions.I if properly balanced with fund raising efforts these will create the main preconditions for sustainable development of the neighbourhood.

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This is the key dilemma of financing regeneration. While a lack of funds does not have to doom stakeholders to resignation and inactivity, awareness, synergies of activity and voluntary effort alone can hardly reverse the trend if stakeholders do not have capacity to generate necessary level of activity, and there is no confidence in the future of the neighbourhood. Neither capacity nor cohesion of activity can be achieved without considerable public support. Determining capacity of the stakeholders to decide what can be done with available funding is one of the most difficult tasks in initiating neighbourhood regeneration.

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