Working together for places and communities: An invitation to the new Prime Minister
The challenges facing the UK cannot be addressed by government, philanthropy or civil society alone. As a new administration begins its work, Funders Together believes there is an opportunity to build stronger partnerships that make better use of evidence, collaboration and shared investment for communities across the country.
The arrival of Andy Burnham as Prime Minister marks the beginning of a new chapter for the UK. We congratulate him on taking office and recognise the scale of the challenges facing his newly appointed cabinet. From economic growth and public service reform to tackling inequality, strengthening communities and rebuilding trust, the decisions taken in the coming weeks and months will shape places across the country for years to come.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, when campaigning, and in his first days as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has spoken about the importance of doing politics differently: working more closely with communities, renewing trust and building stronger partnerships across and beyond government. These ambitions resonate strongly with our own experience. Lasting change is rarely achieved by any one institution acting alone. It depends on collaboration, shared responsibility and recognising the knowledge, expertise and leadership that already exists within communities.
As the government begins that work, we believe this is a moment to build a closer partnership with the UK's funding sector.
There is already important work to build on, including programmes such as Better Futures and Pride in Place, which have started to demonstrate the potential of working differently with places and communities. If the new government is serious about deepening collaboration, there is an opportunity to build on this progress and go further, bringing together government, independent funders and civil society more intentionally, and learning from the knowledge, relationships and approaches that already exist. By doing so, we can make better use of our collective resources and insight to create lasting change.
One place to begin is with evidence.
Every year, UKGrantmaking brings together data on around £24 billion of grantmaking across the UK. Central government departments already publish billions of pounds of grant funding using the 360Giving Data Standard, helping to create an increasingly comprehensive picture of how grant funding reaches communities. Together, we’re harnessing data to better understand how public and philanthropic investment interact across places and priorities.
While the Prime Minister's plans for greater fiscal devolution develop, and mayoral authorities and local government gain greater influence over funding decisions, there is an opportunity to build on what we already know about places.
Data published to the 360Giving Data Standard provides a rich evidence base on how existing grant funding interacts with geography and community need, helping to identify where investment is already flowing, where gaps remain and where greater coordination could make a difference. Used alongside local knowledge and other sources of evidence, these insights can help inform future funding decisions and support more coordinated, effective place-based investment.
This isn’t about creating new systems or duplicating existing work. It’s about making better use of the infrastructure, data and relationships that already exist, and ensuring they can support more effective decisions about the future. We would welcome the opportunity to work with government to help translate this evidence into action.
Our experience also suggests there is much to gain from closer collaboration in how funding itself is organised.
Funders Together was created to unite organisations with complementary strengths in data, collaboration and place-based funding. This experience has shown that when funders align around shared priorities, pool resources and learn together, they are often able to respond more effectively to complex challenges than any single organisation could alone.
Following the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, London's funding community came together to coordinate five collaborative grant programmes, distributing more than £4.7 million to local organisations within weeks as communities responded, followed by a further longer term core funding. The response demonstrated what was possible when funders worked collectively, they trusted local organisations and focused most on what communities needed .
Those lessons proved invaluable during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the London Community Response, we brought together 67 funders to distribute close to £60 million through a single application process, reaching over 3,300 organisations supporting Londoners through an unprecedented period of need.
Today, through Collaboration Circle, the £100m Propel programme continues that commitment to collaboration through shared governance and long-term investment. We demonstrate how funders and communities can make decisions together, building the relationships and confidence that lasting change requires.
These experiences show that collaboration can be about much more than pooling money. At its best, it brings the different resources, expertise and influence of every partner to bear on a shared challenge. Through programmes such as Propel, that means funders and those in power, contributing meaningfully to policy and systems change, alongside funded organisations and communities, sharing responsibility together - for creating the conditions in which lasting change can happen.
The challenges facing communities today are increasingly interconnected. Economic insecurity, inequality, declining trust, racism, polarisation and the spread of misinformation all affect people's ability to participate fully in civic life. They require us to think not only about how we fund change, but about the infrastructure, relationships, policies and collective action needed to sustain it.
This is work we are already committed to.
Through the emerging Centre for Place-Based Giving and our growing community of networks which span different themes and geographies we are strengthening the infrastructure that enables funders, communities and local partners to work together for long-term change in places drawing on learning from programmes such as Big Local to inform the next generation of place-based investment. We have contributed to the development of a national philanthropy strategy and we are creating new connections between civil society and the private sector on equity and social change, including through our partnership with the Equality Impact Investing Project.
These experiences reinforce our belief that there is significant potential to bring government, philanthropy and civil society together more systematically. As greater responsibility and investment move closer to places, we want to help connect national ambition with local knowledge, build stronger infrastructure for collaboration and ensure that communities themselves have a meaningful role in shaping the decisions that affect them.
No single institution has all the answers to the challenges the country faces. But together we do have evidence, experience and a shared commitment to improving people's lives. By building stronger partnerships across sectors, we have an opportunity to make investment work harder, respond more effectively to local need and strengthen the civic infrastructure that enables communities to thrive.
So our invitation to the new government is simple: work with us. Draw on the evidence that can help us understand where investment is flowing and where it is needed most. Build on what we have learned about collaboration, from responding together in moments of crisis to investing for long-term change. Tap into the tools, relationships and partnerships that already exist, and help us build new ones where they are needed.
We are ready to bring what we have learned and to learn alongside government in return. If this is to be a new chapter for how government works with places and communities, we want to be part of it: bringing together public and philanthropic investment, sharing power and knowledge more widely and more equally, and helping create the conditions for communities everywhere to positively shape their own futures.
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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0
Photographer: Sergeant Tom Robinson RLC
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