As a Deaf person, the opportunity to undertake an internship with Funders Together through the 10,000 Able Intern programme was invaluable. Funders Together is a Disability Confident Employer, and the team treated my accessibility needs seamlessly and attentively, allowing me to show up, learn and contribute as best as I could. Unfortunately, this has been an uncommon experience for me in the past, where I have faced numerous significant accessibility barriers.
When I started my six-week internship with Funders Together, I knew relatively little about the funding sector. As a recent History graduate with an interest in the charity sector, research, policy, civil society and social impact, I was drawn to the opportunity to apply the research skills I had developed through my degree to meaningful work in the sector.
I was hoping to learn more about how research works outside an academic setting: how organisations gather and use evidence, how research informs decisions, and what it looks like to translate information into something useful for practitioners.
Six weeks later, I have come away with answers to some of those questions – but also with many more questions and ideas, and a hunger to continue learning and contributing.
What I worked on
My two main projects focused on researching equitable grant making processes and mapping Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy (NCIL) funding across London boroughs.
For Collaboration Circle’s Advancing Equity project, I researched examples of organisations taking different approaches to equitable grant making and wrote 12 practitioner-facing case studies for its library of resources. One of my favourite parts of this project was the process behind the writing. Before writing a case study, I had to identify relevant examples, research organisations and their approaches, and then turn sometimes extensive source material into something concise and useful for practitioners.
More importantly, the research changed how I thought about equity itself. It can be tempting to judge whether a funding process is equitable by looking at who ultimately receives the money. But the project encouraged me to look further upstream, at the processes that shape funding.
Who knows that a funding opportunity exists? How difficult is the application? What assumptions are made about organisational risk? Who participates in decision-making? What reporting requirements are attached to funding?
Questions like these helped me recognise that apparently neutral procedures can create very different experiences for organisations with different levels of time, resources, knowledge and capacity.
A principle I will take away from the internship is that formal access is not necessarily the same as meaningful accessibility, and that equitable grant making is relational, not transactional.
What can we learn from what we cannot find?
My second main project took me into a different area: researching the Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy across London.
The initial question sounded relatively straightforward: how are London boroughs using and publishing information about NCIL?
The reality was considerably more complicated.
I researched all London boroughs and quickly discovered how inconsistently information was organised. Councils used different terminology, published different levels of detail, allocated information in different ways and sometimes spread relevant information across multiple webpages and documents. There was no neat dataset waiting for me. I effectively had to construct one through the research itself.
That became a valuable methodological lesson for me. I had to think about what counted as comparable evidence, how to record uncertainty and what to do when information simply could not be found.
This project moved into helping to design a survey for boroughs, using the gaps I had identified to determine what we needed to ask local authorities directly. I particularly enjoyed seeing that progression: what can we find out ourselves, what remains unknown, and what could primary research help us understand next?
This brought me back to some of the same questions I had encountered through the Advancing Equity work. Different boroughs use different mechanisms and approaches to distributing funding. And some organisations have dedicated funding staff, greater administrative capacity, stronger professional networks, or previous experience navigating council processes.
The same opportunity can therefore be formally available to everyone without being equally accessible in practice.
Learning beyond my projects
Some of the most valuable parts of the internship happened outside my immediate project work.
I had the opportunity to participate in board-level discussions, team meetings, learning sessions and cross-sector forums. This gave me insight into how organisations think about strategy, governance, risk, evidence, learning, partnership and institutional change.
Coming into the sector as an outsider was occasionally daunting, particularly when conversations involved terminology or organisations that were completely new to me. But I also came to see that being new to something can be useful. Not knowing what you are ‘supposed’ to assume gives you permission to ask why. I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have been in such a warm and passionate environment – the spirit of collaboration made every meeting feel safe, productive, and creative.
I became interested in what institutions actually mean when they refer to ‘the community’ or talk about giving communities greater power.
A community is not a single, uniform voice. Simply asking whether communities have participated tells us relatively little about where power actually sits. Who was able to participate? Who was absent? Whose knowledge was listened to? Who had influence over the final decision? Who controlled the resources? That distinction between participation and real authority is something I will continue thinking about long after the internship.
I was similarly interested in discussions around institutional attitudes to risk. One idea that challenged me was the suggestion that experimentation can sometimes be necessary, and that refusing to take risks is not always the neutral or responsible option it appears to be. If existing systems are producing inequitable outcomes, continuing with what is already known can carry risks of its own.
Where do I fit?
Before starting the internship, I wasn’t sure where, I fit within the funding sector. I knew I was interested in progressive and innovative infrastructure charity work.
I still don't think six weeks is enough time to answer that question definitively. What the internship has given me instead is a clearer understanding of what I am interested in contributing.
I realised that I enjoy finding patterns within complicated information and thinking about how they can contribute to meaningful change. More importantly, I enjoy moving beyond describing what the evidence says towards questioning why the pattern exists in the first place.
Institutional procedures create incentives and barriers, even when they appear neutral. Participation does not necessarily mean power. Community knowledge and lived experience are forms of expertise. Evidence becomes particularly valuable when organisations are prepared to learn from it and change what they do as a result.
And perhaps the idea that brings all of those lessons together for me is: systems are designed, which means they can be redesigned.
I started the internship hoping to learn how research could be applied within the social impact sector. I leave it much more interested in how research can help us understand not only what institutions do, but why they work in the ways they do, who those arrangements work for, and what might be possible if we designed them differently.
What I’m taking with me
If I could tell myself something before starting the internship, it would probably be not to worry about arriving without extensive knowledge of the funding sector.
At first the terminology, organisations and structures felt unfamiliar and overwhelming. But everybody was incredibly helpful and I learned that understanding a new sector is not about knowing everything immediately. It is about being curious, asking questions, listening to people who know it better than you, and gradually understanding how the pieces connect.
A significant takeaway for me from Funders Together is that the way something is designed matters just as much as its stated intention.
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