Beyond Recovery makes application to the Obama Foundation

Even though we have proved the impact of our work and that every £1 invested in Beyond Recovery returns £14.22 in terms of social investment savings, getting all the funding we need to continue and expand our work is an ongoing challenge in these times of austerity.

We have recently submitted a funding application to the Obama Foundation whose mission is to “inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world” which is exactly what Beyond Recovery is all about.

Writing funding applications is not my favourite part of our work, but practice, if not always making perfect, has certainly helped me improve my pitch and I can now get them done without spending half a day moving the same sequence of words around on the screen in front of me.

One of the slightly unusual and rather nice things about the application to the Obamas was the way they ask not only for details of the problem that you are trying to fix but also what personal connection drew you to the work.

Here’s what I wrote:

After volunteering with people in recovery from addictions for 18 months I came to the realisation that the paradigm for treating addiction is flawed. People are not broken, everyone has infinite levels of health and resources within them to not only fix their problems but to have meaningful lives. I noticed that the stigma associated with prisoners and people with addictions was both internal and external and I became passionate about doing something about eliminating that stigma from the inside and out! I had a huge insight when I fell in love with these forgotten people who I knew could make meaningful contributions to society. Instead of fixing the symptoms I started working with their minds, uncovering their wellbeing & health. 5 years on, I see that the people I work with discover their own potential & resilience, the ripple effect impacts their families and communities and they have the ability to create incredible solutions that can resolve some of our intractable issues.

Another feature which marked this funding application apart from others is that I had to prepare a 60 second video on our values. You can see what I said below.

Fingers crossed for some good news!