Rose Conway-Walsh urges mainstreaming and support for ex-prisoners

Thank you for the presentations. I am very familiar with the work of Community Foundation Ireland. Indeed, we have done some projects in Mayo with it and some cross-border ones as well. It has been a while now. One thing I suppose that struck me about it is because working in community development, sometimes when you are applying for funding, there is a whole lot of bureaucracy. I have always found the Community Foundation to be absolutely accountable and accountability worked into it, but not too bureaucratic, so I would encourage organisations here to avail of the really good opportunities under all of the different funding strands that you have. I would like to see more use, I suppose, being made of that. There were two challenges, I suppose, around the two things specifically I want to ask you. One is around the government mainstreaming of projects, because you get some really good innovative projects but then many of them, but then many of them just stop there. So what ideas you would have around mainstreaming them and what we could do as a committee indeed to encourage government to match fund and to mainstream those projects so that the benefits would not be just for the people who benefit from the initial project. My other one is in relation to later as part of the Good Friday agreement committee today, we have representations, we have witnesses talking to us about the challenges for former prisoners, for ex-prisoners, not only for them, but for their children, their grandchildren and their extended families. In the course of your work, have you done anything in relation to that or is there anything planned in the future that you could support that time? I think it is quite shocking. I think it is quite shocking in looking at their presentation going forward in terms of their travel restrictions, their employment restrictions, their insurance restrictions and all of those things. So there are real civil rights and human rights issues there that I think need to be dealt with and we need to deal collectively with that. I apologise in advance because I have actually a flight to catch, but if you could maybe address those two things and then maybe go on. I apologise to Mickie, if that is OK, Mickie, if we have enough time. Thanks very much and it is great to see you. I suppose a couple of things. You are absolutely right. So at Community Foundation, I suppose two things that we do when we are working with donors, we make sure that we mind the due diligence and that we take the best care that we can of the assets that they entrust us with. But on the other hand, we really understand that for communities, they are really up against us and so we want to honour that, but we also want to have as light a touch as we can. So we are always thinking about the application process, how we can improve it and also we are always at the end of the phone if people need support in applying to us. So I am glad that you have noticed that about us because it is our intention. We do a lot of work with prisoners. One of the groups is looking at prisoners' rights together and we also do a lot of work in the Republic with the Penal Reform Trust. So we will have a rolling fund and I suppose what we would hope to do is bring more investment. So if there are issues that people want us to consider and address, we would be delighted to. We have an open door. We hope to keep a small rolling fund for issues that emerge while we are doing the open grant rounds. So I hope that answers the questions. Yes, thank you. Do you want to bring in Mickie now? Yes, thank you very much. Thanks very much for the presentation and it is good to see Paddy Kelly again. I have not seen her for a while. So my question really is in relation to funding because there is a tranche of Peace 4 funding coming on board I think by the end of this month. But that may be at risk because it has to be signed off by the North-South Ministerial Conference. And of course the DUP have tried to pull out of those meetings. So I am just wondering, do you feel that funding like that may be put at risk because of this situation? Thank you. Do you want us to answer them each time, Chair? Yes. Whatever you are comfortable with, we have plenty of time. Yes. Great. Thank you very much. Actually, the question came up with the previous speaker as well in relation to match funding and what the committee can do. I think funding, as the two committee members have highlighted, is an issue. This is a very agile and flexible fund and really was to encourage partnership, new and existing partnerships, to think and to see how they might work across the island on particular issues. There is no doubt that we will need more funding going forward. And one of the asks of the committee would be to really encourage match funding. There is no doubt that we can leverage more funding into the fund if match funding were available. Groups have already said to us that they will have ongoing requirements to work together, that this is kind of phase one and they are very interested in seeing where that might be realised. So there are considerations that we are thinking about all the time. But certainly for us in terms of the new policy on philanthropy, it would be fantastic that match fund across government departments would be considered as part of that. And then obviously the focus for this fund would would be applicable. Paddy, I don't know if you want to if you want to add to that.