Background
Collaboration Circle is committed to ensuring that grant making is not only effective, but genuinely equitable – from the earliest stages of programme design through to evaluation and learning. This commitment forms the foundation of the Advancing Equitable Grant Making project, a funded development initiative supported by the National Lottery Community Fund.
The project set out to map and review grant-making and management practice across a range of funding organisations, drawing on research, lived experience, and sector expertise to identify what processes best support equitable approaches. The ultimate aim is to develop a framework – and a practical library of tools and resources – that can serve as the backbone of all future collaborations hosted by Collaboration Circle, and be shared freely across the wider funding and civil society sector.
Why This Matters
For many organisations – particularly those led by and serving communities facing structural disadvantage – the grant-making process itself can be a barrier. Inequities in how funding is designed, communicated, assessed, and managed can exclude the very organisations best placed to deliver meaningful change.
Addressing this requires more than good intentions. It demands clear guidance, practical tools, and honest reflection at every stage of the funding cycle. This project was designed to help funders and civil society organisations do exactly that.
The Process
The project has been developed through a structured, participatory process, grounded in expert knowledge and guided by a commitment to transparency and co-creation.
Establishing the Task and Finish Group
At the outset of the project, a Task and Finish Group was convened, bringing together fourteen practitioners with expertise spanning grant making, programme management, equity and justice, and civil society leadership. Members were drawn from a range of organisations, including:
- Greater London Authority
- Global Fund for Children (Young Changemakers Fund)
- Rosa Fund
- Do it Now Now
- International Funders for Indigenous Peoples
- Camden Giving
- Community Southwark
- London Borough of Hackney
- The National Lottery Community Fund
- Community Foundations Canada
- LGBT+ Consortium
- Women’s Resource Centre
The group met regularly over an extended period (May to November), with its scope expanded by mutual agreement to allow for the depth of engagement the work required. Meetings provided space to explore emerging research, develop shared principles, and collectively shape the direction and outputs of the project.
Reviewing the Evidence
In parallel with the group’s work, a research team undertook a systematic review of academic and grey literature on equitable grant making. This review was structured around nine stages of the end-to-end grant-making and management process:
- Grant Design: Outreach and engagement; co-designing funding programmes; grant types and structure
- Grant Making: Application; due diligence and assessment; decision making
- Grant Management: Grant management; non-financial support; evaluation and learning
For each stage, the research team produced a summary report, a full evidenced report, a list of case studies, and a draft set of key recommendations. These materials were shared with the Task and Finish Group via a dedicated SharePoint folder, with group members invited to review, annotate, and respond before each meeting.
An important observation from this process was that much of the available evidence base is drawn from outside the United Kingdom, reflecting a limited UK-specific research infrastructure on equitable grant making. This reinforced the importance of supplementing academic sources with practice-based and grey literature, and of directly capturing the expertise and experience of practitioners – particularly through the workshops described below.
Engaging Practitioners and Communities
A series of targeted workshops was designed to centre the voices of applicants,
A series of targeted workshops was designed to centre the voices of applicants, grantees, and community organisations – those whose experience of the funding process is most directly affected by the choices funders make. Each workshop was co-designed and led by sector organisations, ensuring the process itself reflected the values of equity and participation it sought to promote.
Global Decision-Making Practices – International Perspectives Workshop
Co-designed with the Black Feminist Fund, this workshop brought together international funders and global practitioners to explore decision-making approaches from diverse cultural and political contexts.
Relational Grant-Making – Equity and Justice Infrastructure Workshop
Co-designed with the LGBT+ Consortium, this workshop brought together equity and justice infrastructure organisations and funders to examine questions of power, relationships, and trust within the grant-making process.
Reimagining Funding Futures – A 3 Horizons Workshop
Co-designed with ML Community Enterprise, Radically Reimagining Funding (Lambeth Group), focused on the pre-application phase, this workshop brought together community-led organisations, funders, and trustees to explore what a more equitable funding future could look like, using the 3 Horizons framework to surface new possibilities and challenge current assumptions
What Has Been Built: The Digital Learning Library
The primary output of this project is a Digital Learning Library – a structured, web-based collection of resources designed to support funders and civil society organisations in developing more equitable and collaborative approaches to grant making.
The library is organised around the nine stages of the grant-making cycle and includes:
- Clear recommendations for equitable practice at each stage of the process
- Summaries of research and evidence on equitable grant making
- Practical tools and frameworks that funders can apply in their own work
- Case studies and examples of collaborative and equitable funding approaches
- Interviews and insights from practitioners working across the funding ecosystem
Resources have been selected and developed with accessibility and practical application in mind, enabling organisations to quickly identify and use material that is relevant to their current work.
The library is intended as a living resource. Over time, the Collaboration Circle team will continue to curate and add new materials – drawing on learning from collaborations hosted through Collaboration Circle, events such as the annual London Funders Festival of Learning, and contributions from across the sector.
Who the Library Is For
While the library was developed primarily to support teams working on collaborative funding initiatives through Collaboration Circle, it has been designed to be open and accessible to the wider sector. It is intended to be of value to:
- Funders seeking to improve equity in their grant-making practice
- Civil society organisations involved in or considering collaborative funding partnerships
- Teams designing new funding programmes
- Practitioners interested in participatory and systems-level approaches to funding
What We Have Learned
Several important insights have emerged through this process that have shaped both the content of the library and our broader approach:
- Equity must be embedded from the very start. The Task and Finish Group highlighted that many equity-led organisations face barriers long before a funding application is submitted. This reinforced the importance of addressing outreach, accessible communication, and capacity-building support as early-stage priorities – not as optional extras.
- Participation takes time. Genuine co-creation with practitioners and communities requires flexibility. The project timeline was extended, by mutual agreement, to allow the Task and Finish Group the space needed to engage meaningfully with the material and each other.
- Practice-based knowledge is essential. Academic literature, while valuable, has limitations in accessibility and UK relevance. The most actionable and resonant guidance for practitioners tends to come from documented real-world practice – which is why the workshops and community engagement elements of this project are so important.
- Systemic change requires structural action. Equitable grant making cannot be achieved through process tweaks alone. The group consistently emphasised that equity must be embedded in the structures and systems through which funding is designed and delivered – not only in individual decisions.