Catherine Hillis, Director of A Fairer Future at Esmée, shares her reflections on her first year leading the team to deliver the first full year of our new A Fairer Future strategy and how the wider context is shaping our work.
2023 was Esmée’s highest ever funding spend year, and in A Fairer Future, we made £17.7m of grants and £3.1m of social investments to organisations that share our goals.
Since we relaunched, we have funded more organisations for the first time. For example: Intercultural Youth Scotland, a Black and People of Colour-led organisation, who deliver creative, advocacy, and influencing work with young people; Glitch, who tackle online abuse, particularly for Black women and marginalised people, through influencing and awareness campaigns; and Rainbow Migration, who support LGBTQI+ people through the asylum and immigration system, and influence policy and practice.
We have also continued support to organisations we have worked with before including Article 39, Chineke!, IKWRO, Voices from Care Cymru and the Traveller Movement.
You can find a list of recent grants along with case studies in each of our priorities using the links below:
- Arts and creativity making change
- Children and young people’s rights
- Gender justice
- Migrant justice
- Racial justice
And a list of social investments is here. A full list of our funding in 2023 is also in our Annual Report.
We are excited to work alongside these organisations, to try and create change on the deeply entrenched social issues they are addressing. Our Theory of Change is to strengthen organisations tackling injustice and resource collaboration, in order to change systems, policy and practice. The learning through the seven years of the Leaving Care learning programme has shown us the impact of collaboration and collective action but we know it takes time and resource to do it well. With a new administration, we are cautiously optimistic about opportunities to unlock change, and will continue to support the organisations we fund to do so.
It’s a really challenging time for organsiations working to deliver social justice
We hear this constantly in our conversations with colleagues working at the coalface. And our recent applicant survey by nfpResearch has confirmed what we hear every week – the levels of need in the sectors we support is rising, whilst funding, particularly from statutory sources, is getting more difficult to access.
We have been listening to organisations about what they need and this means continuing to prioritise unrestricted multi-year funding: 86% of the grants under A Fairer Future in 2023 were unrestricted. In response to feedback in our learning conversations, we are offering wellbeing support as part of our Funding Plus offer. And we are committed to helping connect organisations, which is another issue that came through strongly in the applicant survey.
When we launched the strategy, we stated that we are keen to support organisations led by the people they serve and that was the case for 76% of the organisations we supported in 2023 (see more in our Who our funding is reaching report). We also want to think about supporting lived experience with care, and we are delighted to have supported peer learning on this issue.
But we can’t support everyone, and decisions are tough
We have felt this tension acutely this year, knowing how strong the need is but also that we can’t support all the organisations that are a fit to our strategy. In 2024, we have grants totalling £30m in A Fairer Future ending this year, and a grant budget of around £14m. We know that the organisations we are currently funding need long-term funding to create change, but we don’t want to be a ‘closed shop’ and only support organisations we have funded previously. The consequence of this is that we have had to turn down many requests for continuation funding from organisations doing valuable and excellent work.
We are trying to be honest about how we are making decisions. We have added more detail on how we are targeting support into our funding guidance, and are making some tweaks to the outcomes in our strategy to be transparent about what we will fund. In Children and young’s people’s rights, we have also agreed with our Board to make our early years funding by invitation only, as we don’t want to waste organisations’ vital time in applying when the chances of success are low. We are committed to working with partners and other funders in the early years sector to target our support where it can be most useful
But despite our efforts to try and reduce the negative impact, we know that there is rarely anything positive about being turned down for funding.
What does this mean if you want to apply for funding?
As a team, we make decisions about how applications fit our strategy based on our long-term outcomes and the work we are looking to support for each outcome (in our guidance for A Fairer Future, you can find these as points under ‘we want to support’). As with all our grant funding, we also take into consideration connections to work we’re currently supporting, the broader context, and how our support could add particular value. We explain more about how we make decisions in a recent pre-application Q&A webinar (about 11 minutes in).
We need to listen to do our jobs well
To navigate these tensions and make the best use of our resource, we need to listen to organisations and those impacted by the issues we are looking to change. We have just established our Advisory Panel for A Fairer Future, to bring in expertise from the sectors we work in and to provide us with vital support, challenge and horizon scanning. We’ll be sharing more about the Panel soon, so watch this space.
We continue to work with our Involving Young People Collective to ensure young people’s views are central to our thinking about A Fairer Future. This has included working with the Collective to design and deliver our Youth-Led Creativity funding to ensure the criteria and supported work reflect what young people want and need.
We’re also delighted to have commissioned Chrisann Jarett of Frameworks & Narratives Consulting to undertake two listening exercises. Firstly, we are undertaking a consultation exercise with organisations we have funded under our Racial Justice priority, to understand how we can best support beyond funding. And secondly, we are connecting organisations we fund that are working to prevent school exclusions and promote inclusive education to discuss areas of mutual interest. We look forward to putting what we hear into action.
And we need to work collaboratively
No single funder can begin to tackle the complex issues we are seeking to address, so we need to learn from and work with our peers in the funding world.. We are part of many funder collaborations across our priorities in A Fairer Future: Justice Together Initiative, Corston Independent Funders Coalition, Alliance of Youth Organising, Migration Exchange, the Listening Fund and Ten Years’ Time’s Community of Practice to name just a few.
I know that we will learn a lot as we continue to deliver our strategy for A Fairer Future, and that there will be things we get right and things we get wrong. I look forward to sharing our experiences as we go. I’m also keen to hear from you so, please do share your reflections on our work so far!
