The Data
15 minute read
Introduction
The data tables and charts below draw on 20,663 grants from 84 social justice funders, with the grants being made either in calendar year 2022 or the 2022/23 financial year.
Together, these grants were worth £935.7 million. This is equivalent to c. 16.1% of giving by the UK’s largest grantmakers in 2022/23.1
Having used keywords to identify potentially relevant grants, we included 7,111 grants worth a combined £510.2 million in the dataset underpinning this edition. These grants were then reviewed in detail and put into one of the four categories of social justice work described in the Methodology or were deemed to be out of scope either because they didn’t qualify as a ‘social justice’ grant or because they were supporting work outside the UK.
Table 1 sets out how the full set of grants from the 84 funders was broken down.
The £260 million of ‘social justice’ grants can then be broken down into the four categories of social justice work as follows:
Looking across the grants from the 84 known social justice funders we find that just 27.8% of their grants by value were supporting UK projects in one of our four social justice categories. This is equivalent to c. 4.5% of giving by the UK’s largest grantmakers.
We can see that Category 1 continues to receive a tiny amount of funding relative to work falling into the other three social justice categories.
Just 2.3% of all the grants in the Funding Justice 3 dataset had organising at their core, if we look at the grants in terms of their value. They amount to c. 0.2% of giving by the UK’s largest grantmakers.
It is also important to note that, as in Funding Justice 2, the majority of these Category 1 organising grants are supporting organising work focused on a specific social issue, rather than shifting power to a specific community.
This work can often stray into ‘mobilising’ – immediate, issue-specific action which can often turn out a large supporter base, but does not prioritise long-term relationship-building or leadership development within the community.2
SURVEY INSIGHTS
When we asked the funders taking part in our survey about the barriers to them funding more work on the ground in communities two things stood out. Firstly, a concern about how funders would get to know the lie of the land in different communities, particularly if they have a small staff team, and/or staff and trustees that are not representative of those communities. The role of intermediaries was seen as potentially important here, along with learning from peers. One funder commented that:
“We know we would need to invest time and resources[s] in building trust with work at the local level so we are not out of touch, extractive, or seen to be parachuting into local issues without a long-term commitment.”
The second, and from our perspective, more alarming response was that funders weren’t convinced that local level work could contribute to systemic change. For example:
“This points to national work as we are interested in system change” and (from another funder) “we don’t support grassroot or community led organisations because they are not seen as effective in bringing about systemic change.”
This is of course, the opposite of the Civic Power Fund’s experience when looking at the vital role that community organising plays within a wider ecology of change, in particular in ‘earning the power’ that can then be spent in ‘inside track’ settings. It also runs counter to the decades (indeed centuries) of historical experience that we have described elsewhere, and refer to in Chapter 2. It was clear from the survey responses that funders are keen to hear more about the importance of community organising and other outside track work, and that in particular they feel they need trustees to be involved in this conversation.
Other funders responding to the survey acknowledged the vital importance of this kind of community organising work, but felt that the philanthropic community is behind the curve. As one respondent put it:
“I think [the] first step is the conversations about [the] importance grassroots play in system change and that no system change can happen without their involvement. We are not having this conversation yet.”
The regional distribution of social justice grants
As in the two previous editions, we categorised each grant geographically, either as a grant that supported work at the national level across the UK, or work taking place in one of the devolved nations or UK regions.
Charts 1 and 2 below show the number of grants going to each region, and the value of the grants expressed in relation to the population of that region.
With the addition of more Category 4 ‘service delivery’ grants in the new dataset the proportion of the social justice grants focused on national-level work has fallen, from 63.4% in Funding Justice 2 to 50.4% for the 2022/23 data.3
When we look at the distribution of the grants directed to sub-national work, London continues to receive the most funding on a per capita basis (as was the case in both Funding Justice and Funding Justice 2), with £411 of grants per 100 people, almost exactly the same amount as in the last edition.
Turning to the devolved nations and UK regions we see that the devolved nations continue to fare reasonably well on this per capita measure, ranging from £295 per 100 people in Northern Ireland to £178 in Scotland. Some of the UK regions have risen or fallen a little in the ranking compared to Funding Justice 2, but four of the five regions receiving the lowest amounts of per capita funding in the last edition remain at the foot of the table, albeit in a slightly different order. These are the East Midlands, East of England, South West and South East.
Foundational theories of change
In addition to allocating social justice grants to one of the four categories of social justice work, we used a framework for analysing movement ecologies developed by the Ayni Institute in the United States, adding a sixth foundational theory of change. This is explained in more detail in the Methodology.
When we allocate the 3,871 grants in Categories 1–4 across these six theories of change we arrive at the breakdowns shown in Charts 3 and 4.
Charts 3 and 4 show very clearly that most social justice grants are directed to either ‘service delivery’ or ‘inside game’ work. The addition of more Category 4 grants to the dataset has unsurprisingly boosted the share directed to ‘service delivery’, from 32.1% in Funding Justice 2 to 46.9% in the charts above.
Other elements of the movement ecology set out in the Ayni Institute analysis continue to receive significantly less funding, with the ‘structure organising’ element receiving just 8.4%, down from 9.4% in the previous edition.
Taken together ‘structure organising’ and ‘mass protest’ represent what is described as ‘outside track’ work. We can see from chart 4 that these two theories of change together receive less than 9% of the social justice funding in Categories 1–4.
SURVEY INSIGHTS
From our funder survey it is clear that what funders need the most in order to increase funding for ‘outside track’ work is more exposure to the evidence of its impact, along with opportunities to discuss this with their peers and to collaborate on funding. This need for evidence on impact chimes with the findings reported by the Social Change Lab based on their recent funder surveys and interviews.4
Educational work with trustees and boards was also seen as important. The quotes below give a sense of what we heard:
“Hearing about its effectiveness from other funders and people they take ‘seriously’ on policy, and having a way of seeing how the ‘outside game’ influenced the ‘inside game’, which is the thing funders still seem to care about.”
“More realism from funders about the limits to inside game work and the need for external power bases.”
“A lack of understanding of ‘outside game’ work. 99% of people working/volunteering (trustees) in philanthropy have no idea what it is.”
“Hearing from other funders about how they are doing this work – sharing challenges and building a community of support.”
“Wider dialogue about, and better storytelling of what can be achieved. Smaller trustee boards with greater campaigning/advocacy experience.”
As with the 2021/22 grants, it appears that social justice grantmakers are primarily focused on working through established institutions and channels to achieve change on the ‘inside track’ or on delivering services, rather than on building power that can help to disrupt the status quo.
SURVEY INSIGHTS
We asked funders taking part in our survey to rank the importance of the six theories of change, in relation to their organisation’s grantmaking objectives. There was widespread recognition that all six theories of change have a role to play. However, for some funders it was very difficult to give just one ranking, firstly because the mix of theories of change required is different for different thematic issues, and secondly due to the particular political (broadly defined) contexts that apply.
This being said the survey responses showed that for many of the respondents the ‘inside game’, ‘alternatives’ and ‘structure organising’ theories of change were seen as higher priorities than ‘service delivery’, ‘personal transformation’ or ‘mass protest’. Chart 5 below shows the cumulative ranking points for each theory of change.
We are encouraged to see that ‘structure organising’ featured in the top three theories of change based on this survey question, but the fact that it only receives 8.4% of social justice grants by value, and a far smaller share of giving by the UK’s largest grantmakers, suggests that there is a big gap between the importance accorded to ‘structure organising’ by leading funders and the resources currently being directed to this work.
Thematic issues
As noted in the Methodology section, for this edition of the research we intentionally expanded our coverage of grants on some thematic issues, including ‘immigration/migration’, ‘gender justice’ and ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’. This means that our dataset is becoming more robust and comprehensive for some types of social justice work than for others. It means that we can start to do more of a ‘deep-dive’ into the theories of change being used for different thematic issues, and the distribution of grants to different grantees.
Prioritising some thematic issues does, however, mean that comparisons of the total amount of funding and numbers of grants going to each of the 16 thematic issues featured in Funding Justice and Funding Justice 2 is less reliable. For this reason we have moved the thematic issue data to the Annex.
Foundational theories of change for different thematic issues
As noted in earlier editions of the research, the significance of philanthropic grants as a funding source will vary for different thematic issues. We know, for example, that foundation grants comprise c. 29% of the income of ‘core’ refugee and migration organisations,5 and c. 13% on average of the UK environment sector’s income.6
In Funding Justice 2 we compared the distribution of grants across the foundational theories of change for both ‘climate mitigation’ and ‘immigration/migration’ noting that grants to work on climate mitigation had a much stronger emphasis on ‘inside game’ approaches, whereas the immigration/migration grants leant heavily towards ‘service delivery’.
We also observed that for those thematic issues driving discussions about how philanthropy might better support social justice work (e.g. ‘racial justice’, ‘gender justice’, ‘immigration/migration’, and ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’), it is ‘service delivery’ that is receiving the largest proportion of funding from social justice grantmakers. Having intentionally added grants in the ‘gender justice’ and ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’ issues to the dataset for this report, we provide breakdowns here for those two categories, as well as ‘immigration/migration’ grants, and those focused on ‘economic justice’.
The addition of a wider set of grantees working in the thematic issues of ‘immigration/migration’, ‘gender justice’ and ‘LGBTQIA+ rights’ reveals just how much of the funding from social justice grantmakers is being directed towards ‘service delivery’ work, at least on these three issues.
As shown in Chart 6 the share of the funding going to ‘service delivery’ for all three is above 80%, much higher than for the full set of 3,871 social justice grants (46.9%). There are many hundreds of small grants being made to local projects across the country, but it seems that very few of these grants are moving beyond the provision of services towards building power on behalf of their beneficiaries. It is hard to avoid the feeling that effort is being directed towards ‘supporting women who have been victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault’, rather than ‘trying to stop violence against women’, to pick just one example.
As far as we can see, there is also limited funding being directed to work challenging narratives on these issues (this work would fit in the ‘alternatives’ category in the charts above). The LGBTQIA+ rights theme fares better in this respect than the other two, in large part due to the funding for events like Pride festivals that help to challenge public perceptions.
Given the impact of social media influencers when it comes to misogyny, homophobia or inflaming anti-immigrant sentiment, we find it worrying that so few grants from social justice funders seem to be directed towards countering harmful narratives.
These three thematic issues also have low proportions of funding being directed towards the ‘inside game’ theory of change, so work focused on institutional power settings. This might be a rational allocation of resources, for example if there is little that needs to be changed via ‘inside game’ work, or limited opportunity for influence (a hostile political environment, for example). Or it may be that funders are unaware that their grants are largely supporting ‘service delivery’ approaches. Alternatively, funders could be doing this intentionally to avoid projects that more directly build power and challenge the status quo. We are keen to discuss this with both funders and grantee organisations.
By contrast, when we look at grants in the ‘economic justice’ thematic category we see a very different distribution across the theories of change, with much more emphasis on ‘inside game’ work, and nearly 23% of the grants by value being directed to ‘structure organising’, the highest share for any of the 16 thematic issues. Average and median grant sizes are also significantly larger.
We would encourage funders to think about where philanthropic capital is most needed across the different theories of change for the issues they focus on, keeping in mind the importance of ‘outside track’ power-building work (whether through ‘structure organising’ or ‘mass protest’) in creating demand for change in other arenas.
SURVEY INSIGHTS
Taking all of the responses to the survey together, we were struck by the fact that few of the funders taking part seem to have explicit political strategies of their own. When we asked funders about their organisation’s strategy for achieving social change, more than a third of the respondents said that they were funding a wide range of approaches, often relying on their grantees to have developed effective theories of change, and then supporting grantees with core funding.
At the risk of being unfair, we got the feeling that funders were devolving responsibility for effecting change on to their grantees. This is very different to what ‘radical right’ funders do7 (see box below) or indeed to the way in which progressive funders in collective impact networks operate.8 It is also different from the approach of early British philanthropists who, as Rhodri Davies notes, were often hands-on campaigners who: “were [not] defined by the size of their largesse, but rather by their tireless efforts to push for justice and reform”. 9
As Nina Luo argues, if social justice funders are going to get serious about politics in the same way as those advocating for greater inequality, or for less tolerance of diversity, then they will need to focus much more on political strategies that help change the terms of the debate, rather than responding to a political context that is the making of their opponents.10 The quotes below convey the status quo:
“We don’t have one singular theory of change, we try to fund with intention (conscious of other resource providers in the space) across a range of change strategies, with a strong emphasis on listening to the voices of those with most engagement and lived experience of the issue at hand.”
“We do not have a single strategy for this. We fund across a broad range of sectors and contexts. Our role is to support organisations that themselves have a clear strategy and vision for achieving social change and help them do their work.”
“We fund a wide range of work across our priority areas… We largely believe in finding organisations which we believe have a good approach and align with our values – and that we support their visions for change. While we have an overall mission, we believe that it’s not our role to be prescriptive around how change happens in our priority areas, but to provide flexible support to what we believe to be good organisations doing good work.”
REFLECTIONS ON THE PRACTICE OF ‘RADICAL RIGHT’ FOUNDATIONS
In the recently published Where the Green Grants Went 9 report from the UK Environmental Funders Network the authors looked at research from the United States into the effectiveness of ‘radical right’ Conservative foundations, and the ways in which their approach to grantmaking differs from that of progressive funders. The U.S. research was complemented by evidence from surveys of UK environmental organisations. Much more detail is available in Section B of that report,11 but key observations include:
- Long-term funding being common (20 years or more), allowing infrastructure organisations to grow and become influential
- A narrow focus on a limited number of objectives
- Direct engagement in public policy and politics
- Tight coordination and alignment between donors
- Conservative funders providing very flexible funds to grantees.
Philanthropy blogger Vu Le, lamenting the failure of progressive funders to learn from their opponents, put it this way:
“Conservative funders focus on the big picture, act quickly, do not micromanage, provide significant general operating funds, fund for twenty or thirty years, support leaders and movements, engage in policy and politics, and treat grantees as equal partners. Progressive funders – with a few exceptions – intellectualize [sic], are severely risk-averse, focus narrowly, fund isolated strategies and programs, avoid politics, and treat grantees like parasites and freeloaders.”12
We are not suggesting here that UK social justice funders could (or should) try and directly copy the approach of ‘radical right’ funders. The two groups are trying to achieve very different things, and have different resources (both financial and non-financial) at their disposal. That being said, we encourage readers to reflect on the very different approaches to grantmaking taken by conservative funders, and whether there might be something that progressive funders can learn.
Grants are spread wide and thin
As in the earlier editions, we looked at the way in which the 2022/23 grants in the four categories of social justice are distributed across different grantees, and then expanded the analysis by looking at all the organisations that have received a social justice grant across the three years for which we have data.
The ‘wide and thin’ distribution that we have observed in the past is very evident again for the new data, with the 3,871 social justice grants in 2022/23 being 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.13
This broad but shallow allocation of grants is partly influenced by the addition of the Category 4 ‘service delivery’ grants for some of the thematic issues, and by small cost of living uplift grants. Even taking this into account, however, there are strong indications of a scattershot approach to social justice funding. Furthermore, we found there to be very little money going to organisations providing the infrastructure necessary to scale the work of grassroots organisations and achieve long-term change.
In Funding Justice 2 we commented that there seems to be considerable ‘churn’ in social justice grantmaking, with funders changing the organisations that they support from one year to the next.
This is despite the history of power building through organising, which shows time and again the need for patient investment and the fallacy of ‘quick fix’ responses. The research into the way in which ‘radical right’ foundations support their grantees (as noted above) also reveals their willingness to support infrastructure and institutions over decades.14
In a bid to explore the ‘churn’ in grants, we identified all the grants for which we have data on grant duration. This was the case for 1,717 of the 7,803 social justice grants that we have tracked across the three editions of Funding Justice.15 When we cluster these grants into years of support we see the distribution shown in Chart 7.
Just under half of the 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. Funders may, of course, be repeating two or three-year grants to the same organisations, and thereby providing steady support, and in due course we hope to develop a longitudinal dataset that allows us to see whether this is the case. But for the time being we are struck by the short durations of many social justice grants.
The lack of sustained funding shown in Chart 7 is also borne out when we look at the experience of the organisations receiving social justice grants in 2022/23. There were 2,238 different grantee organisations receiving social justice grants in 2022/23, as noted above. Of these 1,344 (60%) had only received a grant in one of the three years for which we have data (2022/23). A further 587 organisations (26.2%) had received a grant in two of the three years. And just 307 organisations (13.7%) had been funded in all three editions of Funding Justice (grants from 2018/19, 2021/22, and 2022/23).
As we noted in Funding Justice 2 it is hard to avoid the feeling that funders are contributing to the fragmentation of civil society, and perhaps not providing enough sustained support to a core group of partners. By working more closely together, funders might be able to target resources more intentionally, to build stronger movement ecologies for social justice including more power at the grassroots level.
SURVEY INSIGHTS
Interestingly, data that we have on grant duration from 360Giving (see Chart 7 above) is somewhat contradicted by the responses to our funder survey. As is clear in the table below, many of the survey respondents have supported at least one of their grantees for five years or more, with nearly 80% of respondents having provided 5 years or more of funding to the same grantee. It seems that at least some grantees are benefitting from longer-term support, even if this pattern is not established across the wider philanthropy sector.
In the survey we asked funders what barriers they saw to providing longer-term support to their grantees. These included understandable concerns about how the external operating context might change during the period of a long-term grant, or the risk that a grantee might lose inspirational staff part-way through the grant.
What we found particularly striking, however, was the concern that making longer-term grants would mean the funder would have to support fewer grantees. This concern seems likely to perpetuate the “wide and thin” distribution of funding, as opposed to the long-term resourcing that meaningful social change and power-building work requires.
As we note elsewhere in the report, grants are already spread very wide and thin across a large number of different grantees, most of whom seem to be struggling to secure steady support from philanthropic sources. In this context the question of whether or not funders should measure their success in terms of the number of different grantees they can support seems to be a priority topic for discussion. The quotes below provide contrasting perspectives:
Barriers to providing longer grants: “Single long term grants are difficult to give in quantity so there is a trade off between how many organisations can be supported and for what duration – if we did more [of] this we’d support far fewer organisations.”
Barriers to providing longer grants: “Our own funding resource horizons, board member (funder) desire for what’s shiny and new, the weird philanthropy assumption that after a couple of grants then funding won’t be needed, or at the same level, as if it were a scalable business model with a revenue stream that will only need funding for a certain amount of time.”
Deep dive on immigration/migration
As noted earlier, the datasets underlying Funding Justice provide particularly comprehensive coverage of social justice grants on certain thematic issues.
Immigration/migration is one of the issues where we have the strongest set of grants data. Across the three editions we have recorded 1,667 grants to organisations doing work that in some way fits within the immigration/migration category. We explored these grants in more detail in order to see whether they have similar characteristics to social justice grants in general.
As with the overall dataset we see a scattershot distribution of funding to organisations working on ‘immigration/migration’, with the 1,667 grants being distributed to 663 different civil society organisations, so an average of 2.5 grants per organisation. Of the 663 organisations only 9 had received more than £1 million across the three years of data, and just 57 had received £500,000 or more. By contrast 292 of the grantee organisations had received £10,000 or less. These are mainly organisations added in this third edition of the research, providing services to refugees, migrants and asylum seekers at a community level around the UK.
The average grant size for the immigration/migration grants was £58,864 but the median grant size was just £20,000.
When we look at the stability of the funding for work on immigration/migration we found that just 77 out of the 663 organisations had received a grant in all three years for which we have data. 109 organisations had received a grant in two of the three years, and the remaining 477 had only been funded in one year. This figure of 477 is boosted by the addition of the small grants supporting service delivery work, and in future editions we would expect to see some of these organisations becoming repeat grantees. But if we take the data here as a snapshot of the distribution of philanthropic resources across this thematic issue, then we can see that funding is being spread very far and wide. We question whether this is an optimal allocation of philanthropic capital.
Turning to the geographic distribution of grants on immigration/migration across the three years we find the following breakdown.
As with the data for all social justice grants, we can see that London receives the largest amount of funding on a per capita basis, with nearly three times the per capita funding of many other regions. Three of the regions that consistently feature at the bottom of the list for all social justice grants are among those receiving the least funding for work on immigration/migration, namely East of England, the South East and the South West.
We haven’t provided breakdowns of the foundational theories of change for the immigration/migration grants across the different editions, as we lack this information for Funding Justice 1. If we develop future editions of this research then it will become possible to track the funding allocated to different theories of change from one year to the next, and to include this analysis for a wider range of thematic issues.16
We don’t want to overclaim in terms of what the data shows us so far, but we are keen to discuss these findings, and to get reader feedback on how we can best develop this kind of analysis going forwards.
The ten funders granting the most money in categories 1–4
As in the first two editions, we include a table showing which of the 84 funders in the dataset provided the largest amount of funding to grantees in categories 1–4.
The ten funders in the table together accounted for 60% of the social justice funding by value, and for 41.3% of the total number of grants.17
The share of the funding by value accounted for by the ten largest social justice funders is significantly lower than the equivalent figure for UK environmental funders. Environmental philanthropy, and particularly climate philanthropy, has been characterised by the emergence of very large philanthropic funders, and also by the development of extensive networks of pooled funds and re-granting organisations.18
We would appreciate feedback from readers as to whether the creation of additional aligned and pooled funding infrastructure for social justice might be helpful in terms of reducing the scattershot distribution of grants documented in Funding Justice, or whether the benefits might be outweighed by an increase in the gate-keeping power of funders.
