Executive Summary

This report looks at how social justice funders are responding to the complex and interconnected challenges of our time.

With this edition of the research we have begun to build comparable, year-on-year data that tells us what is happening in UK social justice funding, and whether funding flows are keeping pace with rhetoric, ambition, and need.

In addition to expanding the scope of the research from 60 funders to 84, we have added qualitative insights, based on a survey completed by 33 leading social justice funders.¹

Key data points:

Funding Justice 3 drew on over 20,000 grants worth £935.7 million from 84 funders in 2022/23. It found that:

• Grants directed to social justice work account for c. 4.5% of the funding from the UK’s largest grantmakers, with just 0.2% being directed to community organising work.
• Of the grants reviewed from the 84 funders, 27.8% were supporting social justice initiatives (compared to 27% in the previous year).

As in previous years, we found social justice grants to be heavily weighted towards ‘service delivery’ and ‘inside game’ theories of change.

• 46.9% of social justice grants (by value) were directed to ‘service delivery’ work.

• 26.3% of the funding analysed was directed to ‘inside game’ work. This was down from 37% in Funding Justice 2, but this work was still the second most funded theory of change.

We found once again that very little social justice funding went to ‘outside game’ work that excluded communities rely on to be heard.

• 8.4% of social justice funding was directed to ‘structure organising’ work, down from 9.4% in 2021/22. This is despite ‘structure organising’ being ranked by funders completing our survey as one of the three most important theories of change.
• Overall, ‘outside game’ work received less than 9% of social justice funding.
• Funders cited a lack of connection to grassroots organisations and movements, and insufficient exposure to evidence of the impact of power building work in achieving systemic change, as barriers to funding more ‘outside game’ work.

The data shows continued unequal distribution of funding across the country:

• The proportion of social justice grants focused on national-level work fell, but remained high at 50.4% in 2022/23.
• At a sub-national level, London continued to receive the most funding on a per capita basis, with £411 in grant funding 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. These are the East Midlands, East of England, South West, and South East.

The ‘wide and thin’ distribution of grants that we have observed in the past was also very evident in the new data:

• The 3,871 social justice grants in our 2022/23 data were distributed to 2,238 different grantee organisations. On average, each organisation secured just 1.7 grants.
• The median grant size was just £15,000, and 1,270 organisations (32.8%) secured less than £50,000 in grant funding, with 881 (22.8%) receiving £10,000 or less.

This wide and thin distribution of grants is a feature of other research into philanthropic funding, for example from UK-based environmental funders.²

• Research into the way in which ‘radical right’ foundations make grants suggests that they take a very different approach to ‘progressive’ funders, emphasising the building of long-term movement infrastructure, engaging in politics, and supporting ‘movement ecologies’, including community organising capacity.
• Responses to the funder survey suggested that few funders are implementing focused ‘political’ strategies, with many funding a wide range of work and relying on their grantees to have developed effective theories of change.

The Funding Justice 2 data suggested that social justice funders were replacing their grantees regularly, rather than providing long-term funding. In this edition we looked at the grants collected across the three years of the research for which we have information on grant duration in months:

• Just under half of these grants (49.3%) were for 12 months or less, with a further 46% supporting either two or three years of activity, and only 4.7% providing more than three years support.³
• Turning to the dataset for 2022/23, there were 2,238 different grantee organisations receiving social justice grants in 2022/23, as noted above. Of these, 60% had only received a grant in one of the three years for which we have data. A further 26.2% had received a grant in two of the three years. And just 13.7% (307 organisations) had been funded in all three editions of Funding Justice.
• This lack of repeat funding contrasts with what we heard from funders completing our survey, where nearly four-fifths of the respondents reported that they had supported the same grantee organisation for five years or more.