The INVENTORY OF EXISTING FUNDING & RESOURCING STRUCTURES aims to gain an understanding of the existing services and decision-making processes in relation to project finance and funding and to analyse the potential connectivity between them.
Before you start 'reinventing the wheel', you indeed need to ensure that you have a full understanding of how your own organisation works in terms of funding and resourcing.
This task involves making an inventory of the funding and resourcing structures and relevant processes that exist within your own municipality, i.e. your assets. Additional capacities could also be delivered by your stakeholders and partner organisations, which are your wider assets. It is therefore prudent to explore and map their capacities as well as those of your own organisation.
For this step, 3 tools are proposed to you:
- An Inventory Checklist of what you need to know about the finance and funding assets and processes at your organisation/municipality.
- A SWOT-diagram permitting the analysis of the available funding assets.
- An Inventory Matrix to identify potential finance and funding capacities across different departments and/or partner organisations.
Who is the tool for? | When should the tool be used? |
The Coordinator of the Action Plan & relevant team members the key/senior people of the municipality involved in project finance and funding Stakeholders | The tools and activities should be used at the beginning of the funding and resourcing process. This activity substantially informs the set-up of the Coordination of funding and resourcing activities. (Step 2/1) |
Click on the stations to navigate through the Inventory line!
Key challenges of the step
- Depending on the size of organisation, an inventory of existing services and processes can be complex. For the purposes of coordinating the funding of the Plan, the inventory needs to be comprehensive
- Specific attention is needed for covering all the fields and topics that are relevant for the Plan.
- Seeking funding takes usually place within a highly competitive environment; different interests are pulling on limited resources within and outwit an organisation. Therefore, collaborative reflection is needed for obtaining a comprehensive and objective understanding of the capacities and interests involved in funding activities as well as about the characteristics of the related processes.
Main risks
- An incomplete inventory could have a negative impact on the overall funding and resourcing activities. For instance, certain activities might be outsourced unnecessarily that could have been delivered by an existing service in the municipality.
- A too superficial evaluation of the assets could miss relevant power relations and interests concerning funding decisions and priorities. This could hinder the funding strategy and render it less effective in getting funding approval.
Helpful tips
- Local authority departments often work in silos limiting the awareness of existing skills, capacities and systems across the whole organisation. It is therefore important to gain clarity and to enquire what services and processes already exists and which are missing (for example nobody is keeping a database or Map of funding programmes, or nobody checks it regularly, or all of this activity is not communicated well).
- An annual review of the inventory task is advisable to capture any changes that might impact on the funding approach of your plan and to stay in touch with developments.
- Advise your stakeholders to undertake the inventory tasks for their own finance and funding systems as well, and capture their findings so that you have a better overview of their capabilities and how they could support the search for funding of the plan.
Further Resources
This is a systemic tool. It could be useful in case you are seeking to explore the funding and resourcing systems of your organisation or your overall funding environment a little bit deeper. It could help you in identifying which areas are more or less clear to you, and where you might need to put in more effort to learn more.
