Our strategy

Our focus is on the power of the law as a tool for social justice.

We know that the legal system is too often used to oppress rather than defend those who need it most. Through our 2025–30 strategy, we want to strengthen the power of communities to use and shape the law to achieve justice and equity. 

Our objectives 

• To support a generation of creative and collaborative leaders who want to use the law to create lasting change in their communities 
• To help organisations build solidarity within and between communities and support broader movements to tackle injustice 
• To use our power and influence as a funder and investor to help protect and expand rights and justice for us all

For the first time, we worked with a paid advisory panel of people with lived and learned experience of social injustice to inform our 2025–30 strategy. 

We are committed to living our values in every aspect of our work. Our strategy is rooted in our Power, Culture and Inclusion work and covers the following key areas:

• Our grants and fellowships
• Driving wider change
• Aligning our investments with our mission
• Learning and sharing knowledge
• Diversifying and strengthening our leadership

We see social justice as creating a fair and equitable society where everyone has access to resources, their rights are protected and extended, and they can participate meaningfully in shaping the systems that affect their lives. It involves challenging systemic barriers and discrimination by building on the power of individuals and communities to tackle the root causes of injustice. 

We have seen people advance social justice by using the law in a way that is deeply integrated with social movements and grassroots activism. We want to build the long-term resilience and effectiveness of organisations and leaders who are doing this vital work. 

We aim to deliver our strategy in an integrated way, where all we do aligns with our mission and contributes across our objectives. 

We support organisations that are working towards wider change by using law in their sustained organising, coalition building and advocacy. We know that access to legal advice and representation can transform people’s lives. Our focus is on work that challenges and changes the conditions that create that injustice in the first place. 

We want to fund work that connects the law with communities to achieve social justice. However, we know that this is difficult and long-term work and that organisations are at varying stages of having effective legal strategies and sharing power with their communities. In response to this, our two new funds allow us to support a wider range of organisations. 

Our grant programmes are bolstered by our work supporting the next generation of social justice leaders through the Justice First Fellowship, our work in partnership with other funders in our Justice Together Initiative, and the extra support we are developing to increase the sustainability and impact of the sector. 

Our board has committed over £50m to our 2025–30 strategy, a £15m increase on our previous strategy, in response to the current challenges and opportunities for our sector. These resources will be available to the sector through our grants and extra support for our grant partners. 
 

Over our 2020–2025 strategy, we worked to align our grant processes with our values, recognising that poor grant making practices can be harmful to the organisations and movements we aim to support. 

We have committed to flexible funding, working in line with IVAR’s Open and Trusting initiative to reduce the burden of applications and reporting and help organisations we fund focus on their work. We are also part of the Funders for Race Equality Alliance and Ten Years’ Time Community of Practice, which help us tackle racial inequality, repair harm and rebalance power. 

We are continuously working to ensure that our decision-making and processes reflect our values and so these are under regular review. 

We offer a range of optional, additional support tailored to the varying needs of our grant partners. We have some support in place, for example for wellbeing and legal strategy. We will also work with our new grant partners to develop further provision which may include help with organisational development, navigating transitions or with specific learning or influencing activities. 

Helping to shape the laws and policies that affect the communities we work with is another key part of our strategy. Building on our grant making, we will support organisations through convening, advocacy and policy insight with the goal of creating the conditions for systemic change. We will also use our role as both funder and investor to influence beyond individual grants. 

Reaching new stakeholders and potential grant partners is vital to achieving these goals and we plan to do this by improving our communications to better amplify the work we fund, and what we learn from it.

Since 2021, we have worked to ensure that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors have a greater influence on our investments. This commitment has evolved to the point where we now aim to align our investment strategy with our mission. 
 

Learning has been a key part of developing this strategic plan, including identifying key insights from our grant partners, understanding how we are viewed by stakeholders, and seeking to answer outstanding questions about specific issues. Learning is how we listen and reflect on our work. 
 

Strengthening the accountability of law and legal organisations to communities facing injustice is at the heart of our new strategy. We are asking grant applicants and partners difficult questions about their accountability – so it is vital that we also ask ourselves difficult questions and acknowledge that we are at the start of our own journey on this. Formal accountability for funders is limited and given the power that we hold through how we spend our money, we believe we must be held accountable in a deeper way. We have begun to strengthen our accountability to communities facing injustice. 
 

Speaking to the social justice sector and reflecting on what we learned from those conversations was central to the development of our 2025–30 strategy. Throughout the process, we consulted people with expertise on the issues we fund. We also surveyed all our grant partners and applicants from the past five years.

In addition to this, for the first time a paid advisory panel of people with lived and learned experience of social injustice worked alongside us for 18 months to inform our strategy. 

• Farida Elfallah, Senior Associate Solicitor at JustRight Scotland and Justice First Fellow 
• Fazilet Hadi, Head of Policy at Disability Rights UK 
• Chrisann Jarrett, CEO of We Belong
• Avila Kilmurray, Migration and Peacebuilding Executive at The Social Change Initiative in Northern Ireland
• Alexander Lyons, co-founder of Held

We also consolidated our learning from our previous strategies, especially on accountability, improving funder practice and on how organisations are using the law for social justice, as part of our strategic development.