Quartet Community Foundation
United Kingdom

ABOUT the CF: Quartet aims to inspire philanthropy that changes people’s lives for the better in the West of England, UK. We work with local donors, research social needs, collaborate with others, and support a strong community sector. We are one of 47 accredited UK community foundations, giving out around 1,000 grants a year to local community groups. We’ve been operating for over 30 years and have built our endowment to £61m.

PROJECT TITLE: Bristol City Labs for tackling systemic inequalities

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Quartet is one of three main partners in the Bristol City Funds collaboration, along with Bristol City Council and Bristol & Bath Regional Capital (BBRC). We create change through social investment, managed by BBRC, through grant funding, managed by Quartet, and through brokering non-financial support for our local VCSE partners. We bring together 80+ people from 40+ organisations across sectors in Bristol to work on the key challenges faced by the city. Our work has been broadly aligned to the SDGs but we wanted to make them more central to the project and wider discussions in the city. We also wanted to change the way we work so that we are bringing a wider range of people together to co-create local solutions to addressing inequalities.

This Global Challenges Local Solutions funding is helping us to update Bristol City Funds’ bespoke impact tool so that the SDGs can be integrated into our decision-making and impact monitoring. It is also supporting citizens with lived experience of mental health issues in South Bristol to participate in a new initiative called a City Lab. The City Lab will see organisations and local people coming together to research and co-design work to tackle mental health inequalities. Learning from previously funded projects will be fed into the process by student researchers. The project will provide a test bed for supporting community organisations to engage with the SDGs and for incorporating the SDGs into our wider work at Quartet.  We hope that this successful pilot project will enable more City Labs to be run in future, focusing on other SDG-related targets.

SDG TARGETS: 17.17 Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships; 3.8 Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.