Collaboration across funders and communities has been at the heart of our work across the organisations which now make up Funders Together. London Funders have led collaborative funding programmes for many years, enabling funders to distribute
£4.7m in response to the Grenfell Tower fire and over £57m through the
London Community Response to covid-19.
Each of these collaborations happened because community groups and funders have come together, pooling their knowledge, funding and experience. Their impact has made
us even more committed to working together to create lasting change.
However, it’s also shown us why it can be difficult to collaborate at scale. Funders
tell us there are still too many barriers to creating truly collaborative spaces where
they can work with others to design, learn and make funding decisions together.
Over recent years we’ve seen a growing appetite to use pooled funds to not just achieve lasting change but also shift power in the way we work and address some of these challenges. We are building on some inspiring examples of pooled funds from across the UK and globally, where funders have been able to act in ways that would be too risky for
them to undertake alone.
We want more funders and communities to benefit from the opportunities presented by pooled funds. The Collaboration Circle provides the infrastructure, governance and space
to make pooling funds easier, to embed more equitable decision making and to
overcome the processes, and cultures, that can sometimes hold us back.