Learning and insight
We focus our learning on what we need to know to drive forward our strategy and improve how we work. Reflection is one of our organisational values and a key element of our 2025–30 strategy
On this page, we share more about our learning approach to be transparent about how we work. We don’t expect you to address this directly in any grant application to us.
What we want to learn
We’re exploring two broad questions over the course of our 2025–30 strategy:
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How is the law contributing to movements for social justice?
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How are legal organisations working with communities to build social justice?
We also want to find out what supports and advances this work, as well as barriers and challenges and how they can be overcome.
Other areas that we want to understand through our learning activities are:
- The context we and our partners are operating in, and what this means for our funding
- How our internal processes, such as grant application and management, are working and how we can improve
- Our Theory of Change and the progress we are making towards the outcomes we want to see through our work.
Collaborating on our learning
We want our grant and sector partners to help set our learning agenda and help us to understand how we can best explore these questions. We’ve shared our initial ideas below and will be working with our funded grant partners to further develop this approach over the coming months. If you have suggestions, please get in touch with us.
How we learn
We recognise that learning happens in different ways and with a range of different types of information. We want to embed learning in everything we do, drawing on different methods and sources of information, but always in ways that are manageable and proportionate. Some of the activities that contribute to our learning and insights are outlined below.
Understanding our processes
We regularly gather feedback on people’s experience working with us and how they think we can improve. This is mostly through short online surveys.
We also welcome and encourage feedback in other ways, such as by email or in calls with our grant managers. We recognise it can be difficult to give feedback directly, so our online surveys are usually anonymous and we also have an anonymous feedback form.
We regularly reflect as a team on the feedback we receive.
Understanding our grants and applications
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We present information about grant applications and recommendations to our staff and grants committee to help them to understand and interrogate our decision making. We’ll be sharing more of this analysis via blog posts on our website.
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We also publish information about our grants through 360Giving to allow us to compare our grantmaking to other funders, identify funders in common and contribute to wider knowledge sharing in the sector.
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For the last three years we have conducted the Funders for Racial Equality Alliance (FREA) Racial Justice Audit to examine our grants through a racial justice lens.
We also hope to generate relevant and useful insights from our grants that will support others undertaking similar work, as well as informing our grant making and wider work. We recognise that social change is not linear or neat, and that there will be challenges and surprises along the way. We’ll do this by:
- Having grant management calls with our grant partners
- Organising convening and peer learning opportunities with our grant partners
- Commissioning focused pieces of research on specific topics
- Engaging with the wider social justice sector, including other funders.
Sharing and using our learning
We are committed to sharing more insights from our work in a way that is open to feedback and challenge, and to contribute to wider thinking. We want to get better at sharing things that have not gone well and how we have learned from them.
We will add to this page as we develop learning and insights from our current strategy.
Get in touch about learning
Want to find out more about our learning approach, give us feedback or collaborate and share insights?