We cooperate, enabling funders to commit to working together to tackle the issues facing London. Our aim is to strengthen practice, increase the impact of assets and resources through aligning these effectively across funders, and create the mechanisms that enable collaboration to work.
We do all this whilst aiming to be an exemplar organisation ourselves – with a focus on ensuring our own ways of working are effective and efficient, and that we celebrate the diversity of the funding community and of the city we love in all that we do.
In the past few years we have focussed on getting the nuts and bolts of collaboration right. We’ve enabled our members to work effectively together to increase their impact through developing protocols for how members work together (for example the Serious Youth Violence funders alliance), and by further developing our unique portal and application process learning following our review of the 2017 emergency responses from funders.
We have also continued to provide leadership for The Way Ahead in London and have been proactive in identifying opportunities to bring funders together linked to this work (building from the establishment of the Cornerstone Fund which supports collaborations and partnership approaches). Moreover, we deliver cross-sector projects that demonstrate the positive impact of collaboration, through highlighting what works on initiatives such as London’s Giving.
Currently we are paying particular attention to where funders can share resources to increase effectiveness, from joint “funder plus” work through to shared due diligence – whilst also maintaining our agility, and responding directly and proactively if the situation in London requires us to step up.
