The context The year ended with a new Labour government in the UK. Civil society organisations, including many of our grant partners, are already engaging with incoming ministers to urge new priorities, policies and actions. And the need is stark. Funding Justice 2, a research report by Civic Power Fund and the Hour is Late, showed that despite the growing number of funders motivated by injustice, social justice work continues to be severely under-resourced. Further, social justice grants are not shifting power to, or building the power of, communities.
Our response Being a social justice funder means focusing on systemic change that addresses the root causes of injustice. It touches every part of our work: governance, grants, learning, influencing, communicating, operating and investing. We have continued this approach under our Power, Culture and Inclusion programme. In 2025, we will launch our new strategy that reflects our learning over the last 10 years and sets the course for our next phase of activity.
The context This year, we saw the cost of living crisis continue to impact communities. In May 2023, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported that 5.7 million households in the UK did not have enough money to buy food. Research we funded, led by Professor Grainne McKeever at the University of Ulster, has shown that unresolved legal problems contribute to destitution, particularly relating to areas of law such as welfare benefits, housing, debt, employment, immigration, asylum, education and community care.
Our response We are working towards improving our funding practice to make longer term, more flexible grants and to open our programmes to more grassroots organisations who are tackling these issues. We have also been thinking more deeply about how we can prevent harms from oppressive systems, including our own role in these. We are calling this area of work ‘Power, Culture and Inclusion’ to reflect the transformation we are going through and our commitment to shifting power to confront injustice.
The context we operate in has become increasingly harsh for people and organisations in the field. The pandemic exacerbated the existing stark levels of inequality in the UK. Levels of poverty are rising and are increasingly normalised in mainstream discourse. Over two million people in the UK are living in destitution. Rising inflation and the growing cost-of-living crisis will make this worse as income drops and costs rise for the charities we support and their communities. All while the demand for their services rises.
This year we have looked more deeply at the ways we can enhance the impact of work that addresses social injustice through the use of legal education, legal services, advocacy and wider use of the law. Helped by our broader charitable purpose, we are now making longer, more flexible grants and working to make our offer more accessible to a wider pool of organisations. We now place a conscious emphasis on work that is rooted in people’s lived experience of social injustice.