Methodology
7 minute read
Who are the funders?
The data in this report draws on grants from 84 different funders, up from 60 in Funding Justice 2, and 47 in the first edition, Funding Justice.1
Our focus remains funders that are active in social justice philanthropy networks of one kind or another and/or that we know are likely to be making relevant grants.
Not all of the funders are UK based, but all the grants that we analyse in detail are supporting work in the UK.
A list of the 84 funders is provided in the Annex, and we would very much welcome suggestions of other funders that might be added to the research in the future. 31 of the funders feature in the new list of “Top 300 Foundations” used by UK Grantmaking.2
As in the previous edition, we took a look at the more than 12,000 grants made by The National Lottery Community Fund in 2022/23. Rather than attempting to read every grant description, we used an expanded set of 72 keywords (listed in the Annex) to identify a subset of these grants that was then reviewed in detail.
We used this keyword approach for a number of other funders who make large numbers of grants each year, such as BBC Children in Need, Lloyds Bank Foundation for England & Wales, and the Tudor Trust.
We augmented the results of the keyword searches by reviewing grantee names in a bid to pick up any relevant grants missed through the keywords. While we may have missed some grants, we think this approach makes sense in terms of allowing us to include grants from funders making many hundreds or thousands of individual grants.
The challenge of defining social justice
As in the two previous editions, the biggest methodological challenge for this work is to decide whether or not a grant qualifies as a ‘social justice’ grant. There are differences of opinion as to where the boundaries should be drawn and the debate on this continues to evolve.
We have not stepped into this debate here, instead retaining the five principles of social justice that are commonly included in definitions, and that were used in Funding Justice and Funding Justice 2. These are included in the Annex and we welcome feedback on them. They do not specifically identify transformative justice approaches, but could include them.
SURVEY INSIGHTS
Interestingly, in the survey responses we received from funders nearly half had no formal definition of social justice, or didn’t see themselves as a ‘social justice funder’. It is clear that the concept is being understood in different ways across the funding sector.3 The five principles included in the Annex do, however, overlap with many of the survey responses.
In the survey responses we see a concern for: systemic change (root causes not symptoms); the advancement of human rights; equity and ‘fairness’; and centring communities and individuals who are experiencing discrimination. The quote below gives a flavour of the responses:
“As a result of deep-rooted inequality, many people are excluded from the political, economic and cultural decisions that shape their lives. This can have detrimental consequences for every aspect of life. It needs to change. Social justice – working towards a just and equitable society – is at the heart of our vision and is the thread that links all our work. We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are determined to challenge racism and address the root causes of inequality in everything we do. This means acknowledging the power imbalance inherent in our work and holding ourselves to account. We are responsible for our working culture, the transparency of the decisions we take, how and to whom we distribute funding, and the way in which we develop relationships.”
As for the last edition we have allocated grants that we consider to be social justice grants to one of four social justice categories:
Category 1: “organising at the core” grants.
This includes grants that focus on building power behind a specific thematic issue and grants heavily focused on activism alongside grants that support grassroots community organising, where local people set the priorities and plans of their organising work.
Category 2: “justice and power” grants.
Grants where a concern for social justice clearly runs through the work and there is a clear focus on political or social change. This category has been used in the same way as in Funding Justice 2.
Category 3: “advocating for change” grants.
Grants that are seeking to change policy, corporate practice, or social norms, but are less focused on the five principles of social justice. For example, a grant towards policy advocacy in respect of management of the natural environment.
These first three categories cover work addressing the root causes of injustice, and seeking systemic change.
Category 4: “justice rather than social change” grants.
Grants that help communities facing injustice, but where the work is not strongly focused on social change. Many of these organisations provide support to individuals, seeking to mitigate harms that they have experienced. For example, a rape crisis centre, or a place-based refugee organisation providing services for refugees and asylum seekers. Much of the work in Category 4 falls into the ‘service delivery’ theory of change, described below in more detail.
These organisations often talk about ‘empowering’ the individuals that they are serving, but they tend to use the term in the sense of helping people to overcome challenging circumstances, rather than encouraging these individuals to get directly engaged in social change.
We would welcome feedback on these categories, and suggestions on how they might be developed in the future. We have taken care to be consistent in how grants are assigned to the different categories, but there remain many borderline cases and we know not everyone would agree with the decisions we have made.
As with the foundational theories of change explained below, our goal is to provide the sector with an increasingly comprehensive overview of where social justice funding is being directed, and then to evolve the methodology in the light of feedback.
‘Leaning in’ to thematic issues
In this edition of the research we intentionally included an increased number of grants on certain thematic issues. In earlier editions we had better coverage of grants in the ‘immigration/migration’, ‘gender justice’, ‘racial justice’, ‘climate mitigation’ and ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’ categories than for other thematic issues where the boundaries between ‘social justice’ and ‘non-social justice’ can be particularly hard to determine.4
In the new dataset we have prioritised inclusion of grants relating to ‘immigration/migration’, ‘gender justice’, ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’ and issues including human trafficking and modern slavery.
The reason for prioritising these grants is that we wanted to be able to explore the way in which funding on these issues breaks down across the foundational theories of change described below. In order to do this we decided to include Category 4 (“justice rather than social change”) grants that we would have omitted in the earlier editions of the research. Along with the addition of new funders, the active inclusion of grants in these categories is one of the main reasons for the increase in the number of grants in the dataset, compared to Funding Justice 2.
The foundational theories of change
Having received positive feedback on Funding Justice 2 we have repeated the allocation of each grant to the six foundational theories of change that we used in the previous edition. These draw on research by the Ayni Institute in the United States.5
We retained the ‘service delivery’ theory of change that we had added to the Ayni Institute model, because we believe that projects which provide support to disadvantaged individuals without trying to help those individuals become agents of change are better described as ‘service delivery’ rather than ‘personal transformation’.
Funding Justice addition
Service delivery – grants focused on the provision of services, often for individuals.
The Ayni Institute Foundational Theories of Change
Personal transformation – grants helping individuals to learn new skills and become active citizens or acquire ‘voice’. For example, advocacy training, or grants supporting youth leadership.
Alternatives – work demonstrating new approaches as alternatives to the status quo, or helping to establish new narratives and public understanding of an issue. For example, new models of social investment; credit unions; projects lowering community carbon emissions; work that reframes issues and helps establish new narratives.
Inside game – grants advocating for change on the ‘inside track’, i.e. via legislation, policy, fiscal changes, strategic litigation, or changes to corporate practice.
Structure organising – ‘outside track’ power building, in communities either defined by geographic location or thematic concern (e.g. worker rights, racial justice).
Mass protest – activism, direct action, street-level mobilisation.
In order to get through all the grants, we quickly reviewed the websites of grantee organisations (particularly ‘About Us’ pages) and we used a ‘rule of thumb’ approach to apportion the funding across the six categories, striving for as much consistency as possible.
Our findings shouldn’t be seen as definitive, but we hope that they will provide some useful insights that encourage debate and further efforts to map movement ecologies.
Illustrating the theories of change
The six photos here (and the captions below) give a visual representation of what we mean by these theories of change, in relation to the Gender Justice theme in the research.
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Service delivery
Hull Sisters provides a daily lunch service for women and children fleeing violence and abuse, and facing social exclusion and poverty. Photo Credit: Hull Sisters.
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Personal transformation
A leadership workshop with young women of colour, run by GirlDreamer as part of its capacity building programme for social leaders. Photo Credit: GirlDreamer. -
Alternatives
Futures Theatre amplifies the voices and stories of women and non-binary people. Here actors are developing their new play – Argos Archives. Photo Credit: Dylan Tate. -
Inside game
Elect Her‘s workshop in the Scottish Parliament for women of colour to explore their journeys towards democratic leadership. Photo Credit: Tiu Makkonen.
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Structure organising
Love & Power’s action in Parliament Square, demanding better support for those experiencing domestic abuse during the COVID-19 lockdown. Photo Credit: Dave Bird. -
Mass protest
Patsy Stevenson being arrested by the Metropolitan Police at a rally on Clapham Common after the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard. Photo Credit: Reuters.
Analysis of the data
In addition to the categories of social justice and the foundational theories of change above, we analyse where the work funded by the grant is taking place, using the devolved nations and standard set of UK government regions.
We also categorise the grants into one of 16 thematic issue categories, the same ones that were used in Funding Justice and Funding Justice 2. These are set out in the Annex. We have provided a table with a breakdown by thematic issue in the Annex, but this comes with a big caveat. Due to our decision to prioritise some thematic issues, as mentioned above, the breakdown of grants across the 16 categories is becoming less and less meaningful. In this edition we also lack climate mitigation grants from one significant funder. We encourage readers not to use the thematic issue data in the Annex to try to prove that issue X receives more (or less) support from funders than issue Y, and/or that it deserves more funding.
