Scope of Work: Civic Power Fund, Infrastructure Project, Nominated Learning Partner

November 2025

Overview

About Us

About the Infrastructure Project

Nominated Learning Partner Scope of Work

Responsibilities

Expected Outputs

Timeframe

Budget

About you

Application process

How to apply

Overview

About Us

We are the UK’s first pooled fund dedicated to community organising. This means we raise resources from large foundations, trusts and philanthropic funders and redistribute them to community organising groups through relational and participatory grantmaking.  

Our mission is to build lasting civic power by bringing people who share a problem together to win change. By investing in organising, we can unleash the power of people to improve their lives and their communities and create common cause in pursuit of the social, environmental, and economic justice vital to a flourishing democracy.  

We also provide practical support to our grantee partners:

• We provide bespoke ‘beyond the grant’ resources such as access to training, governance advice and legal support, and aligned funding.
• We connect organisations within geographies and within communities of common struggle or cause to aid collaboration and maximise their power.
• We commission research to support our grantee partners and we convene funders and organisers to ensure continual learning.
• We deploy trust-based grantmaking principles to ensure maximum flexibility and sustainability in working with impactful yet often informal groups.

Everything we do is rooted in our values. Organising as a practice is rooted in building the power of marginalised voices and communities traditionally excluded from democracy, so we foster representation and liberation through all our work.

This is an exciting time to be working with the Fund.

We are a new and growing organisation, with a dedicated and energetic team. In our first three years of operation we have awarded almost £3 million to community organising groups and now have a thriving cohort of 45 incredible groups. We have built a series of exciting funder collaboratives across 30 individual donors and have released important research on the scarcity of funding for this vital work.

About the Infrastructure Project

A core part of Civic Power Fund’s strategy is to help build the infrastructure that organising needs to thrive, turning short-term activity into long-term change for excluded groups. Effective infrastructure can increase the knowledge, skills and resilience of civil society organisations.

We are developing this work into a learning project, which seeks to:

• Understand what already exists, what groups are accessing and what gaps remain.
• Platform and elevate community organising and demonstrate its efficacy as a practice that can grow the power and agency of communities.
• Consider questions of scale, replication or seeding in expanding existing infrastructure.
• Provide clear recommendations for donors on how they should be investing in support for grant holders.

The project also aims to create material benefits for grassroots community organisations by:

• Collating resources from infrastructure groups.
• Distributing resources widely through an open and accessible online platform.
• Strengthening the provision of support for unincorporated grassroots groups.

The project will be delivered through four separate modules:

1. Listening to grassroots groups: what do they need? A listening campaign to better understand the support needs of grassroots groups and to understand their relationship with existing infrastructure organisations.

2. Learning from infrastructure groups: what do they already provide and how can they strengthen this? Resourcing for 20 infrastructure groups to collate, develop and share existing resources.

3. Online resources library: consolidating resources and learning from the user experience. The development of an online information library to consolidate resources. This might offer self-serve tools for routine queries, encourage collaboration around key thematic and specialist content, enhance knowledge sharing and test distributed and participatory models of information sharing and curation.

4. Help desk: making quick help available and learning from the user experience. Extending and strengthening the support available to organisations involved in the project, providing real-time, personalised advice and signposting. This will also capture data on the volume and type of support requested, and enable analysis of needs and emerging patterns.

Civic Power Fund will grant to roughly 50 organisations via these Modules. These include three ‘project leads’ who have already been selected to lead Modules 1, 3 and 4. A fourth project lead (the ‘Nominated Learning Partner’) will act as a learning partner for Module 2 and the wider project.

Learning will be synthesised throughout and at the end of the project. The responsibility for this learning will fall on the Nominated Learning Partner.

Nominated Learning Partner Scope of Work

Responsibilities

The Nominated Learning Partner will lead the development of the final learning product, and deliver the interim learning products across all four modules.

They will also lead Module 2, supporting the 20 infrastructure groups to produce outputs, collate existing resources and modify or develop learning products to share through the online information library.

For Module 2, it will be role of the Nominated Learning Partner to:

• Support infrastructure groups to collate, share and develop resources.
• Act as a point of contact for the infrastructure groups, preventing overwhelm.
• Work with other Module Leads to develop an effective protocol for communication between and across the different groups involved in the project.
• Work with the Module Lead for Module 3, the online library, to ensure that infrastructure groups can help shape the library, and that resources are added to the library.
• Host curated learning events to draw out key themes. This could be two or three convenings of infrastructure partners.
• Produce a final summary report from the module, identifying common themes, lessons, trends, issues and ideas for further action or investment.

Across the project as a whole it will be the role of the Nominated Learning Partner to:

• Curate inputs from Module Leads.
• Facilitate events for learning, feedback and ideas. This could include meetings to draw out learnings across module leads and a project-wide meet-up towards the end of the project.
• Produce quarterly learning products for both CPF and the donors from across all four modules, capturing key insights from partners.
• Produce a final learning product, with recommendations and ideas for further investment. Please note, there is extra budget for this component.
• Act as a learning advisor for CPF and module leads, enabling them to share learning effectively both with the project’s donors and more widely.

Expected Outputs

• Three to four curated learning events to draw out key themes.
• Quarterly reports submitted to CPF and the donors.
• Final summary report

Timeframe

The project launches in January 2026 and will run until the summer 2027. Module 2, Resourcing Infrastructure Groups, is due to launch in April 2026.

We hope to award this contract in March 2026 to enable some time for project set up.

The infrastructure organisations are holding 10 working days for learning interactions as part of this work; this includes conversations with the Learning Partner and convenings. A small number of days will need to be held back for any possible engagement with donor staff/boards.

Budget

The budget envelope for delivering all work related to Module 2 and for the project is £150,000.

That includes the costs to the learning partner to cover their involvement, as well as project costs such as travel, convening costs and facilitation.

There is additional budget available to develop the final learning product. We have not allocated this yet, as we expect the learning partner to develop views (alongside the other module leads and infrastructure partners) on how to best use the resources we have secured.

We anticipate that a better understanding of needs and opportunities will emerge over the course of the project, and so we are not expecting applicants to make proposals now on how this budget might be further allocated.

About you

This project is fast-moving and has tight, fixed deadlines. We are expecting organisations, rather than individuals, to have sufficient capacity to deliver the contract effectively.

We are looking for people who can bring the following to the project, and will assess the final tenders against this award criteria:

1. Technical ability: capability to deliver the contract to a high standard:

1. Experience in convening and facilitation
2. Experience in synthesizing learning across multiple partners
3. An understanding of how to work with community organisations
4. Preferably, knowledge of evaluating large scale UK Trust and Foundations’ programmes, or sharing learning with institutional funders

2. Contextual knowledge: understanding of the fields of:

1. Community power building or community organising
2. Community-based infrastructure or grantee support

3. Values alignment: commitment to the aims of the project and Civic Power Fund values

4. Value for money: what can be delivered within the award sum.

You will be able to work effectively with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, with experience in supporting often overloaded community organisations to participate in learning processes.

You will know how to use a full range of approaches to draw out and synthesise learning, from interviews to reviewing analytics to convenings for collective sensemaking. You will have experience in enabling decision makers to engage with learning, and translating complex ideas into clear recommendations for action.

Application process

Stage 1

• Submit a request to participate over email to: contact@civicpower.org.uk
• Please mark the email ‘Infrastructure Learning Partner - Request to Participate’. See below for what this needs to contain
• Deadline: 7 December 2025, 23.59

Stage 2 

• We will review all Requests to Participate and issue an invitation to tender to a maximum of three suppliers.
• These successful participants will be sent tender documents by 9 December, and invited to submit a full tender.
• Participants will be offered an informal meeting with CPF on 11 December to discuss the opportunity and answer questions once the invitations are issued.
• Deadline: 22 January 2025, 10.00

Stage 3:

• Tenders will be assessed against the Award Criteria. The assessment panel may invite suppliers in to further discuss their proposals on 27 January.
• One supplier will be awarded the contract. We expect to notify awardees by 12 February.
• The contract is due to start in March 2026.

How to apply

Please submit via email a request to participate of between roughly 200 and 400 words to contact@civicpower.org.uk. Please mark the email ‘Infrastructure Learning Partner - Request to Participate’.

This should include:

1. One or two sentences about your organisation, and your work. Feel free to tell us who you expect might work on this project, if you know at this stage.
2. Why do you think you would be well placed to deliver this work? Please briefly share details of your track record as a learning partner.
3. A brief outline of how you demonstrate the technical ability and contextual knowledge that the project requires.
4. Your capacity and availability over the project period.

Finally, if you have questions about the project, you are welcome to note them here.

The decision to invite will be based on the panel’s assessment of:

• Who has sufficient capacity and technical ability to be able to deliver the contract? Have they done this work before?
• Do they have a basic understanding of community organising, and community infrastructure organisations, and experience of working with community organisations?

We will invite those who we feel meet this threshold to participate, up to a maximum of three.

If you have any questions about the process, or the project, please contact Jessica at jessica@civicpower.org.uk