Following a listening exercise with organisations we fund who are led by communities experiencing racial inequity, we’re pleased to share a new report by Chrisann Jarrett reviewing our approach to racial justice. We’ve also shared our initial reflections and actions we plan to take in 2025.
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation has funded organisations addressing racial inequity for many years, and included a specific racial justice priority in our strategy in October 2022. As we are new to funding more intentionally in this space, we know we have a lot to learn, and we commissioned a listening exercise to find out how organisations think we could better support them. The report is clear, useful, and challenging, and we are sharing it because we think it will be helpful to other funders and partners working on racial justice.
Download or view the report in full screen. If you would like to see the report in an alternative format, please email communications@esmeefairbairn.org.uk.
The report echoes a lot of what we already know in the funding sector. Multiple other reports, such as Ubele Initiative’s Booska Paper, Baobab Foundation’s Digging Deeper and Ten Years’ Time Racial Justice and Social Transformation have highlighted both the historic underfunding of organisations led by communities facing racial inequity and their ongoing challenges accessing funding.
The report shows the pace of change to better resource racial justice is too slow for organisations on the ground doing incredibly difficult work to shift systems in the face of racist harm and resistance to change. It clearly illustrates the huge challenge organisations face, and is not an easy read, especially for those who have experienced racism. We are hugely grateful to all the organisations who took part for their time, insight and honesty, and to Chrisann Jarrett for her excellent report with clear, practical recommendations.
It is important for everyone at Esmée to hear the challenges organisations face, and to sit with the discomfort that, despite good intentions, we don’t always get things right. Esmée has made significant changes around its work on racial justice over the last five years including recruiting new Trustees, introducing the racial justice priority and monitoring who we do and don’t support through the DEI Data Standard. But we know we have more to do. We need to consider the recommendations carefully, alongside the early findings from the New Connections programme and our ongoing DEI action plan. Both our Board and staff teams have discussed the report in detail, and we are committed to ensuring that we are always striving to improve our practice in supporting organisations led by communities experiencing racial inequity.
Next steps
The first actions that we will put in place in 2025 are to:
- Recommit to ‘larger, longer grants’, particularly for led-by organisations, and to analyse our data on this annually.
- Review our assessment process and guidance, particularly around perceived risk in governance to ensure consistency, clarity and transparency.
- Work further with organisations addressing racial justice across all our impact areas to understand how we can connect them up and support peer learning.
- Review our well-being support and think about how we best use Funding Plus to support organisations led by communities that face racial inequity.
- Ensure there is support for Esmée staff from communities who experience racial inequity to better support a culture of care. We are delighted to already be working with Vivify Therapy on this.
Our funding
In 2024, £7.8m of Esmée ’s funding went to organisations led by communities who experience racial inequity. £1.9m of this was through our racial justice priority, a further £4.2m through other priorities in A Fairer Future, and £1.6m across the rest of our strategy as is shown in the chart below.
In addition to 13 funding priorities across our three strategic aims, we provide funding towards infrastructure to support a sector fit for the future. The chart shows the primary priority that grants to organisations led by communities experiencing racial inequity are contributing to. This is based on data gathered from organisations who submitted DEI data. You can learn more about this in our 2024 report of who our funding is reaching.
The data reflects the commitment we made to racial justice as a cross-cutting issue in our strategy and means that we need to continue to learn with internal and external partners across our strategic impact areas to learn about the best ways to support racial justice.
We are grateful to Baobab Foundation for recently running a workshop for Esmée to share learning from their funding approach, to Yvonne Field from The Ubele Initiative who recently presented to our Board, to colleagues at Ten Years’ Time and our fellow members of the TYT Community of Practice, and members of Funders for Race Equality Alliance who we will continue to learn alongside over the years to come.
We will continue to share our learning, and are always keen to hear from others. Elsewhere on our website you can read latest news on our other funding priority areas, along with research and insights reports, and updates on our wider approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Let us know what you think
If you'd like to share your thoughts or have questions about this report and our work, send us an email to: communications@esmeefairbairn.org.uk.
