The context The far-right riots and racist attacks of summer 2024 had a profound impact on our grant partners and colleagues. Immigration advice agencies and staff faced threats, abuse, intimidation and vandalism, highlighting the dangers of defending rights and the toll this takes on those most affected. Overall, progress on rights is constrained by weak legislative scrutiny, cautious politics and limited appetite for bold reform. Across the UK, progressive legal work is under increasing strain. We no longer see the government targeting “activist lawyers”, but organisations face surveillance and restrictive charity and counter-terror rules.
Our response We responded to the summer’s events in solidarity and in line with our commitment to anti-racism and social justice, working with other funders, particularly the Civic Power Fund, to provide urgent support for security and wellbeing. We also contributed to a joint public response and adapted internal processes to enable faster, more flexible action in future crises. We developed our new 2025–30 strategy, launched in July 2025, which puts work to strengthen the power of communities to use and shape the law at its centre.
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.