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
We offer a range of capacity building support to organisations we fund to help them achieve greater impact.
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Insights and learning
We share insights from our work along with research and evaluation we've commissioned, and key publications from work we fund.
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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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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.
New ideas
We support new ideas which contribute to our impact goals as well as those which work across our aims to unblock barriers, test new approaches or build movements for change.
Influencing and co-design
We back the work we care about: co-designing initiatives, making links, and amplifying impact through our communications. We push for change on issues that are key to our impact goals. We recognise the expertise of others, through the Involving Young People Collective, and Our Natural World Advisory Panel.
Data and digital
We value the role that data and digital play in both our own strategy and those we fund. We publish our funding as open data, and embrace opportunities brought by tech innovation and are open to experimenting with new technologies that support our aims.
Infrastructure
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. This includes key infrastructure organisations and new ideas that unblock barriers, test new approaches or build movements for change.
Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Investment Strategy
We are exploring how we might better use our role as an asset owner in support of our impact goals. We have also signed up to the funder commitment on climate change.
Impact Investing
We are testing the potential in achieving market-like returns by investing into impact funds which align to our impact goals and which generate a measurable impact. This work will be used to inform our longer-term investment strategy. Learn more about our approach to impact investing.
Endowment
We aim to align our investments with our charitable objectives, whilst maintaining a consistent real value for the endowment over the longer term. This ensures we can keep working to improve our natural world, secure a fairer future and strengthen the bonds in communities in the UK for decades to come.
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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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Leave feedback for Esmée
Find out about the different ways you can leave feedback for Esmée.
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Our language and classifying our data
Learn about what language we use when talking about people and communities.
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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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Safeguarding
Learn about our approach to safeguarding at each stage of our funding process.
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Living Wage Funder
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is a Living Wage funder. Read more to find out what that means for our funding.
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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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24 July 2024Youth-Led Creativity funding: update
An update on our Youth-Led Creativity funding, which launched earlier this year. In it, we share more about the design of the fund, our approach to assessing applications and what’s next.
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Working towards A Fairer Future: reflections so far
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.
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Annual Report and Accounts 2023
Our 2023 Annual Report and Accounts gives an overview of our funding, investments and operations during the year.
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Research to analyse DEI Data Standard's impact on UK funding
We are pleased to announce that the National Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise Data and Insights Observatory, in partnership with The Social Investment Consultancy, has been commissioned to analyse the impact of the DEI Data Standard on the UK funding landscape.
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