Collaboration across funders and communities has been at the heart of our work over the years. We worked with funders to distribute £4.7m in response to the Grenfell Tower fire, £58.7m through the London Community Response to covid-19 , and now £100m through Propel, an ambitious ten year funding programme. Each one of these collaborations has happened because community groups and funders have come together, pooling their knowledge, funding and experience. All of these approaches have made us even more committed to working together to create lasting change.
However, it’s also shown us why it can be difficult to do collaboration at scale, and helped us to see some of the barriers to creating truly collaborative spaces for funders and civil society to design, plan, learn and make funding decisions together.
All of this has been the driving force behind creating an exciting new collaborative space that we launched in May 2024– Collaboration Circle. This is a new charitable company that creates the space which holds ‘pooled’ money on behalf of multiple cross-sector collaborations. And importantly, it will also be a space where people will come together to design and decide how this money should be used – people with experience across the funding and social justice sectors.
We believe this can be a game changer in the way we create change with and for communities.
- It will provide a simple and effective way for funders and civil society partners to come together in equal number to collaboratively design and distribute funding.
- It will enable funders in London and beyond to pool funds more easily, overcoming some of the systems, cultures and restrictions that can sometimes hold us back
- It will create opportunities to learn collectively, testing new ways of making grants and taking risks which we cannot take alone.
The Collaboration Circle has it's very own website, where you can read more about it's ambitions and how it will work in practice. You can also read more about the Board of Directors who will be overseeing it's development.