Using all the tools in our toolbox
Participatory City
We use all our tools to unlock change
We want to play an active role ourselves in responding to the critical issues facing our society. As a funder we have a range of tools – including grants and investments - we can use to effect change.
We will now use all our tools to broker alliances, use our influence and remove barriers to achieve our impact goals.
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Grants
We support organisations' charitable work with unrestricted, core and project grants. Learn more about our approach to funding and what you can expect from us.
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Social Investment
We use social investment as a tool, alongside our grants and our own actions, to achieve our impact goals. Learn more about our social investment opportunities.
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Funding Plus
Funding Plus is funding for capacity building provided to organisations we fund to help them achieve greater impact. The maximum Funding Plus award is £9,000.
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Funding partnerships
We want to be at the forefront of new approaches to funding - working in partnership with other funders and organisations to increase our reach and make more of a difference.
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Infrastructure support
We want to enable a sector fit for the future by supporting work that contributes to our impact goals and work across our aims by enabling a stronger, inclusive and innovative sector.
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Impact Investing
Insights and learning from our impact investing, which we hope is helpful to others looking to be more impact-driven through their investment strategy.
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Convening and connecting
We connect people and organisations to foster dialogue, share learning, create joint opportunities and develop new, collective approaches. We also work in partnership ourselves.
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Impact and learning
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is a charity with our own mission and strategy, but we do nothing alone – we fund or work with others to achieve our goals. So how can we evaluate whether our work is making a difference?
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Communications about our funding
Guidance for organisations we work with on communications about our funding, including logo files, press release quotes, and how to get in touch with our Communications team.
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Feedback
We gather regular, anonymous feedback on the way we work at key points, and survey all applicants and organisations we fund every other year.
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Safeguarding
Learn about our approach to safeguarding at each stage of our funding process.
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Our funding data
We publish all our grants and social investments on 360Giving, an initiative that aims to help UK funders share their data in an open and standard format online.
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Useful sector resources
Find useful sector resources on a range of topics including legal, fundraising, campaigning, digital and safeguarding.
Find out moreYou might be interested in
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03 August 2026What do people think about Esmée Fairbairn Foundation 2026
Read the key findings from a 2026 survey of successful and unsuccessful applicants on their experiences of working with Esmée, alongside what we plan to do in response.
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People can’t build for the future while they're fighting fires
In Gina Crane’s final project for Esmée, she has been working with Oliver French to pull together six years of learning about Esmée’s strategy for Trustees. In this blog, Gina shares the challenges organisations we fund are facing and shares three things she'd like funders to do.
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Pre-application Q&A webinar: 28 September 2026
We're hosting a pre-application Q&A webinar on 28 September at 2pm for organisations interested in applying to Esmée for support who have questions about our application process or guidance.
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Annual Report and Accounts 2025
Our 2025 Annual Report and Accounts gives an overview of our funding, investments and operations during the year.
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