We make unrestricted, core and project grants for charitable work in the UK.
Learn more about our approach to funding, and what to expect from us as a funder.
Open and trusting grant-making
We are part of a community of funders and charities committed to open and trusting grant-making, a campaign coordinated by the Institute for Voluntary Action (IVAR).
Our approach to funding
- Long-term, core funding
- 66% of our active grants are for core costs, or are unrestricted.
- Most of our grants are for three years (54%) or longer than three years (32%).
- Backing the work we care about
- We use all our tools, including Funding Plus, communications, and convening and connecting, to enable the work we fund to have a greater impact.
- We are keen to connect the organisations we support – you can investigate our data in our portfolio.
- Flexible and open to learning
- Our approach to learning is based on setting mutually agreed outcomes for the work we fund. We expect these outcomes to change over time.
- We encourage organisations to tell us when things are not going well, and to change and adapt their work over the course of our grant.
- We will only ask for information we need and use, and commit to sharing what we learn.
- Increasing our capacity
- At the moment, we have a London-based funding team of 16 managing an active portfolio of 900 grants.
- Under our new strategy we will be making longer, larger grants and the size of our portfolio will decrease. We will have more time to meet, visit and talk to the organisations we fund as time goes on.
- Please invite us to events and meetings - we will make every effort to attend if we can, and if not we will try to highlight and support the valuable work in other ways.
