Social justice funders ‘not doing enough to support people and communities’
Howard Lake | 28 February 2025 | News
The third edition of the Funding Justice research has been published, looking at the work of funders in supporting projects that tackle injustice and strengthens the power of communities.
The research, carried out by the Civic Power Fund and Jon Cracknell from The Hour is Late, has mapped where UK social justice grants go. It has analysed over 20,000 grants worth £935.7 million from 84 funders made in 2022-2023.
The research reports that new funder initiatives have emerged to invest in work that supports community organisation and the wider infrastructure that is needed to support and sustain it. However, the authors argue that funders are not doing enough to enable this work to thrive.
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Funding Justice 3‘s analysis of the grants made to social justice found that, while 4.5% of the funding from the UK’s largest grantmakers in 2022/23 went towards work to tackle injustice, just 0.2% was directed to community organising work. Both figures represented drops from the previous year (5.7% and 0.3% respectively).
Of the grants reviewed from the 84 funders, 27.8% were supporting social justice initiatives.
Social justice grants were “heavily weighted towards service delivery”. While this work provides much needed care for communities, in general it “doesn’t go further in addressing the causes of injustice and agitating for change”.
There was still a clear divide between the proportion of social justice grants which went to “inside game” work aimed at decision-makers and “outside game” work which often included excluded communities. Less than 9% of social justice went to the latter kind of work.
“Wide and thin distribution”
The report found the same “wide and thin” distribution of grants which it had detected in the two previous editions of the research.
Social justice funding is still focused primarily on work at the national level, with over half of the funding benefiting work at that level. As such London received the most funding per capita, and four of the five regions that received the least amount of funding per capita in Funding Justice 2 remained at the bottom of the list for 2022/23 grants.
New insight
The research has expanded its scope, from 60 to 84 funders, and added qualitative insights based on a survey completed by 33 leading social justice funders.
This broader picture of three years of data enabled the researchers to look more closely at the turnover of grantees. They found that just 13.7% of the grantee organisations in this edition’s dataset had been funded across all three years of the research, indicating that longer term community support was the exception.
Funders who responded to the survey suggested that they were not able to provide more funding for local level social change for several reasons including insufficient exposure to the evidence of its impact, and lack of connection to the grassroots.
The authors argued that their research “provides evidence and impetus for funders to come together to direct their resources to the people and infrastructure that will drive the systemic change they are committed to supporting.”
- Fathers4justice launch charitable foundation (6 December 2018)
- Centre for Social Justice sets up foundation for grassroots charities (10 December 2021)
- Racial justice and structural inequalities still not addressed by funding (11 April 2021)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.