Funding Justice 3: An analysis of social justice grantmaking in the UK in 2022/23
Our third report on social justice grantmaking in the UK, produced with The Hour Is Late.
At the Civic Power Fund, we are continually inspired by the work of our grantee partners. Through turbulent times, they, like many organisations across the country, have continued to foster solidarity and leadership in their communities, resisting the politics of division, and building people power to fight for a more just and equitable society.
All The Small Things, based in Stoke-on-Trent, has been tackling loneliness in the community using deep conversations and community events. It is also providing community organising training to its growing network, helping members to engage and influence the local council to push for the change they want to see.
A network of volunteers and professionals supporting migrant communities in Tyne and Wear — Triangular CIO — has continued to strengthen its alliances with other refugee community organisations. They host monthly meetings between this growing network and local authorities to make sure the voices of asylum seekers, migrants and refugees across the region are heard.
Parents for Future Scotland’s outreach efforts last year culminated in an assembly at Glasgow City Chambers in April (pictured above). Their strength in numbers has won them a seat at the table with local decision makers. They have since met with the Council to discuss how their demands for stronger action to tackle the climate crisis will be addressed.
After 20 years of campaigning, strategic litigation and community organising, the group Wards Corner CBS won its campaign to implement an alternative community plan for the Wards’ building and market in Tottenham, London.
In Stretford, Manchester, Collaborative Women ran their “Collaborative Voices Women’s Campaign,” bringing 40 women together to address shared challenges. Their efforts resulted in a meeting with the Mayor and invitations to join the local Women in Housing Group and Strategic Health Partnership.
Coffee Afrik, an East London collective supporting women, youth, and marginalized groups, are another great example of how grassroots organising efforts can drive real change. Through their organising and campaigning workshops, they’ve empowered their community to take a stand — leading to nine protests, and securing progress on two significant local public health issues. They are also taking action on housing, demanding equal housing treatment for Somali families from the council (pictured above).
The Centre for Progressive Change’s Safe Sick Pay campaign has made big strides recently, with the Labour government committing to backing all three of the reforms it demands to improve the rights and protections of workers.
These are just some of many inspiring examples, reminding us time and again that community organising is key to successful social movements that drive systemic change — whether that’s the historic movements that brought us the basic rights we enjoy now, or ongoing campaigns that are shaping today’s policies and discourse at both local and national level.
Whilst we have seen new funder initiatives emerging to invest in this work, our new report Funding Justice 3 has shown that funding for community organising, and social justice work more generally, is worryingly scarce.
Based on a rigorous analysis of over 20,000 grants worth £935.7 million, from 84 funders in 2022/23, this report looks at how social justice funders are responding to the complex and interconnected challenges of our time. It found that:
- There is a persistent scarcity of funding for social justice. Grants directed to social justice work accounted for c. 4.5% of funding from the UK’s largest grantmakers in 2022/23.
- Community organising and power building work is particularly under-resourced. Just 0.2% of giving from the UK’s largest grantmakers, or 2.3% of the value of the grants analysed in Funding Justice 3, went to work with organising at its core.
- Social justice funding continues to be weighted towards ‘service delivery’ and ‘inside game’ initiatives. 46.9% of social justice funding went to ‘service delivery work, and 26.3% was directed to ‘inside game’ work in elite settings, aimed at influencing decision makers. Less than 9% of social justice funding went to ‘outside game work’ — mass protest, activism, organising — that excluded communities rely on to be heard.
- Social justice funding is still not reaching many local communities. Just over half of social justice funding went to work carried out at the national level. At a sub-national level, London continued to receive the most funding on a per capita basis — £411 of grants per 100 people.
Four of the five regions receiving the lowest amounts of per capita funding in Funding Justice 2 remained at the bottom of the list for 2022/23 grants — East Midlands, East of England, South West and South East. - As in the previous edition, social justice funding was spread thinly across a broad and changing group of organisations. The 3,871 social justice grants in our 2022/23 data went to 2,238 different grantee organisations — an average of 1.7 grants per organisation. 32.8% of grantees secured less than £50,000 in funding, and 22.8 received £10,000 or less.
Looking at the grants collected across three years of the research for which we had information on grant duration, we found a lack of long-term social justice funding. Just 4.7% of these grants were providing more than three years of support. We also found that just 13.7% (307 organisations) had received a grant in all three editions of Funding Justice.
Responses to the funder survey in the report also revealed a lack of clear, shared strategy amongst funders when it comes to advancing social justice. The scattershot distribution of grants suggests that this lack of focussed ‘political’ strategy risks fragmenting attempts to drive social change. This contrasts with the way ‘radical right’ funders have invested in key movement infrastructure and organisations over the long-term.
Funding Justice 3 shows that despite increasing evidence and growing recognition amongst funders of the importance of organising in driving social change, the organisations and communities doing this vital work still lack adequate funding and support.
Civic Power Fund’s Community Action Fund, launched at the beginning of 2023, received around 900 potentially in-scope applications (from 7,500 who took an initial eligibility questionnaire) for UK-based groups that were campaigning and organising at the grassroots. Ninety shortlisted groups came from 42 different cities, towns and villages, and all UK nations and regions. This demonstrates the abundance of grassroots groups nationwide that could benefit from increased investment and support from UK grantmakers.
If progressive movements are to triumph over the politics of division, social justice funders must pool their resources to dedicate more, and better funding to grassroots community organising, and the infrastructure needed to sustain it.
