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Our People
16 Jun 2021
In the past few years, I have had the opportunity to work alongside funders to inform resource allocation and learn from changemakers. Last year, I worked with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation on collaboration and movement building support for grantees. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the inequalities and systemic injustices embedded in our societies. At the same time, heightened economic inequality fuelled by the pandemic also led to greater civic engagement – in the form of new social movements and protests. Since the pandemic, a growing number of funders in the UK have committed to reducing inequity and advancing social justice. Between 2021-2022, data from 60 key funders revealed 5.7% of investment from UK foundation goes to the justice sector, with 0.3% going towards building power through community organising. In the past few years, a number of funders have also committed to building stronger civic infrastructure to allow social movements led by local communities to thrive.
In June 2024, I joined London Funders to lead a piece of work to map the infrastructure and funding needs of the equity and justice sector. We currently lack deep understanding of the infrastructure support available to equity and justice organisations.
As inequity gaps continue to widen, equity led organisations (by which we mean those led by and for their communities) are often left to plug the gaps and take action on issues caused by institutional and systemic failures
Therefore, now more than ever, it is important for us to have a better understanding of their strategic needs to ensure effective allocation of resources and efforts in the future.
In the first few weeks at London Funders, I have also been working on an Advice Mapping project alongside the GLA to map out the current state of funding going into social welfare advice. This has been a really timely project given the high demand on advice services across the capital. Firstly, we worked with 360Giving to analyse data shared on their platform. This revealed useful insights about who is funding advice services, but also showed some gaps – not least from local authorities, who provide a huge chunk of advice funding, as very few currently report funding data to 360Giving. To plug some of the knowledge gaps we used qualitative stakeholder interviews and case studies.
Learnings from the project around the difficulty in accessing clean and nuanced data on funding for systems change work will help us as we begin our research on funding for equity and justice infrastructure
In phase 1 of the Equity Mapping project, we are conducting a literature review on the gaps in the equity and justice sector in the UK and the state of funding for equity and justice infrastructure in the UK. Early stages of research reveal that there is no comprehensive study of the state of funding for equity and justice infrastructure. Civic Power Fund’s Funding Justice project provides a helpful overview of the state of funding into social justice which lays the groundwork for our research into equity and justice infrastructure. There are however significant knowledge gaps on the needs of the sector, with most of the research focused on London.
In the upcoming months, we will be sharing more learnings from our literature review. Based on identified gaps, we will be collecting quantitative data on the funding provided for infrastructural support for equity and justice organisations in London using existing databases and accounts/financial reports of organisations in the ecosystem alongside qualitative data from stakeholder interviews. This project comes at an exciting time, with wider recognition of the importance of a resilient civil society and stronger social movements. The project has the potential to inform funder investment into justice and equity infrastructure to build great civic power.
Shreya joined the team in June 2024 as a Research and Evidence Manager. She previously worked at Paul Hamlyn Foundation's Migration Fund as a Project Manager leading their Grants plus offer and assisting with the fund review work. Prior to that, Shreya worked on international development research and advisory projects for funders across India, Indonesia, Kenya, and the US, advising funders to make strategic investments in the government & community capacity building and digital gig-economy sectors.
If you are interested in finding out more about our equity infrastructure mapping work, you can contact Shreya by emailing her at shreya.gautam@londonfunders.org.uk.