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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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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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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Research and evidence building
We are not a research funder, but we will commission research and build evidence where it can help us to achieve our impact goals. We share this under insights and learning.
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 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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Our language and classifying our data
Learn about what language we use when talking about people and communities.
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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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21 November 2023Using social investment to improve our natural world
Sarah Hedley, Esmée’s Social Investment Portfolio Manager, writes about our social investment plans to improve our natural world. This is part of a series of blogs on how our social investment strategy will contribute to Esmée’s mission.
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Changing how we fund youth-led culture and creativity
We are changing how we fund youth-led culture and creativity and plan to share our plans for a new funding programme in the New Year. To prepare, we will close to applications towards youth-led culture and creativity at 5pm on 10 November 2023.
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Developing our social investment strategy to support our mission
Jonny Page, Esmée’s Head of Social and Impact Investment, outlines our plans for social investment and the opportunities it offers to support our mission.
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Testing a new approach to make New Connections
We want to test a new approach to funding and are ringfencing £1.5m for New Connections funding to find and support organisations that could not, or would not, usually apply to Esmée. For the first phase in 2023 and 2024, we are starting with work led by and for communities experiencing racial inequity.
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