Over the past few years, the festival has grown into one of the largest collective learning spaces for funders in the UK. Our previous festivals have brought together more than 2,000 people from funding organisations across over 100 sessions, exploring topics ranging from participation and place-based funding to systems change, collaboration and equity in grant making.
At its heart, the festival is a space for funders and partners to learn together. It is an opportunity to surface emerging practice, reflect on what is working (and what is not), and explore how the funding sector can respond more effectively to the challenges facing communities today.
This year, we are taking a slightly different approach to shaping the programme.
Rather than opening submissions across a wide range of topics, the 2026 Festival will focus on three key areas of learning that reflect some of the most pressing questions facing the funding sector today. These themes have emerged from conversations across our networks, recent policy and funding developments, and learning from previous Festivals.
By focusing the programme on a smaller number of shared learning questions, we hope to create a Festival with strong coherence, purposeful and strategically focused, helping us move beyond sharing ideas and practice to developing a stronger collective understanding of what is needed from funders in the years ahead.
We are inviting colleagues across the funding sector, including funders, partners, community organisations and researchers, to share learning that can contribute to these areas of focus.
You do not need to have a fully developed session idea at this stage. We are interested in the learning, insight or experience you would like to share, and how it might help other funders reflect on their own practice.
Deadline for submissions: 3 April 2026 at 5pm
Once submissions close, we will work with contributors to shape the final programme, identifying connections between ideas and designing sessions that draw out the most useful learning for the sector.
Festival in Focus – Our Learning Themes & Questions
This year, the Festival of Learning will focus primarily on three key learning themes. You are invited to submit ideas into one or more of these themes. Submissions will then be considered for inclusion as part of the Festival programme. We will analyse all submissions, and consider cross cutting or complimentary ideas as well as individual suggestions.
Justice, Solidarity and Social Cohesion
What can we learn about strengthening justice, solidarity and social cohesion in a time of rising division — and how can these insights shape funders’ future practice?
Across the UK, funders are operating in a context of rising division, economic uncertainty and declining trust in institutions. At the same time, communities, organisers and grassroots groups continue to build solidarity, counter harmful narratives and create new possibilities for justice and belonging.
This theme explores what funders can learn from those efforts, what other funders are doing in this area and how that learning can guide future practice with clarity, courage and care. We are also interested in data and insight that help us understand what work is being funded, where the gaps are, and how funders can strengthen social cohesion and solidarity over the long term.
Community Wealth, Power and Place
What can we learn to strengthen community power and local wealth-building in a new age of devolution?
Across the UK, work to build community power and local wealth has been growing for many years - from resident-led, long-term place-based programmes to community ownership, local enterprise and neighbourhood-level organising. Today, this ongoing work is being met with new momentum: strengthened community rights, expanding devolution reforms, and major investment programmes such as the Community Wealth Fund and Pride in Place, all of which are shifting how power and resources flow into places.
This theme focuses on learning from both the past and the present to help shape what comes next. We are particularly interested in insights on community ownership and assets, resident-led investment models, participatory and collaborative approaches that deliver meaningful change in place, the relationships that enable this work, and the data and evidence that help funders build a clearer, more coherent picture of what is being funded, what’s working and where the gaps lie.
Building a Stronger Funding Ecosystem
How do we build a more effective and equitable funding ecosystem fit for the future?
The scale and complexity of the challenges facing communities today require funders to work differently. Across the sector there is growing interest in new forms of collaboration, funder practice and different models of investment.
This theme explores how we build a more connected, responsive and effective funding ecosystem in the future. It invites learning from initiatives that bring different funders together, share intelligence and data, align resources around shared goals, and give space to imagine the sector in the next five to ten years.
We’re particularly interested in insights, ideas and learning that help funders build a more joined-up and responsive funding ecosystem — one that uses shared data and intelligence to understand need, acts collectively when it matters, and is able to hold different approaches and tensions across the system in ways that better support communities.
Submitting ideas outside the themes
In addition to the core themes for 2026, you are also welcome to submit ideas without a theme category, and we will review these submissions to consider how they could form part of the Festival, or alternatively our wider learning programme, networks and insight meetings.
Submit your idea
Please submit your learning idea using the submission form here