London has a dynamic funding ecosystem, with hundreds of cross-sector grantmakers and thousands of recipients, from large charities to local grassroots groups. We know how important sharing data is to see the grantmaking picture across London and to give funders and civil society the transparency of where the money is flowing, to what causes and what organisations. We hope the data below, while not perfect, helps add to the picture of London’s funding.
The way funding flows between the capital and elsewhere in the country can be a challenge in understanding the grantmaking picture in London. Often we are unable to identify where grants are delivered or where the people supported are based; we are only able to see where the organisation receiving the funding is based. It is particularly difficult to distinguish between funding that is intended to benefit London and national funding received by an organisation based in London due to the disproportionate number of larger and national charities that have a head office, or are registered in London.
As more organisations become remote, we are also seeing the impact of registered addresses not reflecting the areas where the charity operates. This deep dive with London Funders aims to identify potential approaches to better understanding this geographical picture.
London Funders members
London Funders is a cross-sector membership and includes national funders as well as regional and local ones.
It should be recognised that these figures include all spend by those grantmakers, not just spend in London. In our commentary below we have estimated the proportion that is distributed in London.
Local authorities play a huge role in supporting London’s civil society. Unfortunately, data on grantmaking by local authorities is not widely shared or collected to a common standard. This greatly impacts our understanding of the grantmaking picture. Attempts were made to collect data through surveys and other mechanisms, but we don’t yet have enough data to give an overview. 360Giving will continue to work with London Funders to support more local authorities to collect and publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard over the coming years to improve data available in the future.
The total grantmaking of London Funders members (including spend outside London and excluding local authorities, corporations and organisations) where accounts could not be identified is estimated to be £2.5 billion.
Propel: a cross-sector funder collaboration in London
The Propel funders and equity partners are united in the recognition that the challenges London face are too big for any funder, charity or community to tackle alone. Our shared ambition is to build a long-term collaboration that draw on the strengths and assets of us all so that, together, we can tackle the issues facing London.
Over the next ten years, Propel will provide flexibility and capacity to organisations led by and for groups experiencing structural inequality so that they can explore, develop and lead collaborative ways of tackling some of London’s biggest challenges. This includes providing support for young people, women and girls, LGBT+ communities, Deaf and Disabled people, and communities experiencing racial inequity.
So far, Propel has distributed nearly £37 million through 131 grants, of which 79% have gone to organisations led-by-and-for their communities. The participating funders in the Propel collaboration include City Bridge Trust, London Legal Support Trust, Mayor of London, The National Lottery Community Fund, John Lyon’s Charity , Lloyds Bank Foundation and Bloomberg.
Being a cross-sector collaboration means we all have different internal challenges, structures and attitudes to risk. Taking a principle-led approach (which include being bold, equitable, flexible and more) means we can hold the collaboration as a whole accountable to these principles and avoid slipping into old and comfortable funding patterns.
As a long-term funding programme focused on systemic change, it’s impossible to map out what the next nine years could and should look like; instead, we need to be responsive and reflective, learning as we go. From the outset, Propel has worked with equity partners(3) to shape the fund, and make it more accountable to communities. Funded organisations are also essential in this process, and they’re currently working alongside funders to establish transition options for their grants.
Local authority grantmaking is an important part of the London picture. The following local authorities do publish their grantmaking using the 360Giving Data Standard:
Greater London Authority and five departments
London Borough of Southwark
London Borough of Hounslow
London Borough of Hackney
At the outset of this project, the intention was to include a table of London local authority grantmaking, and we carried out a survey to collect data on total grantmaking for the remaining local authorities. However, we received only two responses, so we have not been able to include the data.
Information about local authority grants for the VCSE sector needs to be clearly accessible and provided in a standardised format and unfortunately many councils are still not meeting the guidance set out in the Local Authority Transparency Code 2015. Despite their best efforts, this data was not available publicly from most local authorities, and it proved very difficult for this data to be collated across departments. This echoes the findings of the 2023 research(1) by Directory of Social Change.
Other funders have highlighted the impact of the lack of visibility of local authority grantmaking data on decision-making and strategy development. 360Giving is exploring options to support local authorities to publish to improve data availability in the future.
Place-based giving schemes
Place-based giving schemes provide funding to London’s communities at a local or hyper local level within their boroughs. Place-based giving schemes are growing in number and scale in London, but the data available on most is limited: some schemes are very new and have limited capacity, and many are operating within a larger organisation and extracting the information can be difficult.
There isn’t enough standard data from place-based giving schemes to include on this site, however, information from other sources is available in the London’s Giving dashboard. 360Giving will continue to work with London’s place-based giving schemes to support them to publish data using the 360Giving Data Standard to enable more in-depth analysis in the future.
London Funders Case study
London’s Giving
“Thanks to funding from City Bridge Foundation, London Funders has provided support to develop and grow the London’s Giving movement for nearly a decade, supporting place-based giving schemes to get off the ground and grow in strength (there are now place-based giving schemes in over half of London’s boroughs).
Place-based giving is centred on the belief that we all have something to give – whether that is time, money, skills or connections. Place-based giving schemes bring together businesses, funders, community representatives and other local organisations to work collaboratively to think about the best way to use these shared assets. In the past 5 years they’ve distributed over £25m to grass roots groups across London, and engaged over 13,000 people through collaborative projects, funding rounds, campaigns and partnerships. New alliances have been built, and new funding approaches tested, bringing in resources to address inequality in the city.
In 2023, London Funders announced the establishment of a new Resource Hub which will build on the strong foundations of the London’s Giving movement and take place-based giving to the next level. We will continue to support the existing network of place-based giving schemes but also lead new programmes of work to strengthen and amplify its reach.
One of the areas the Hub will support is participatory grantmaking. Across the London’s Giving network so far, schemes have been testing and embedding different ways of participatory work at all stages of the grantmaking process . The Resource Hub offers an opportunity to build on this, and become a ‘beacon of excellence’ in participative giving practice.
There are also ambitions for the Hub to do more to help place-based giving challenge and influence the wider funding system. How can we best share and transfer some of the ideas we’ve seen so far to other sectors or actors in our communities? The Hub will provide more opportunities to do this – visit the London Funders website to find out more!“
Livery companies
A livery company is a type of guild or professional association that originated in mediaeval times in London. Livery companies comprise London’s ancient and modern trade associations and guilds, almost all of which are styled the “Worshipful Company of” followed by the name of their respective craft, trade or profession. There are 111 livery companies in total. They play a significant part in the life of the City of London, including through philanthropic activities.
The order of precedence included in the table was first set down in 1515 by the Aldermen of the City of London for the 48 livery companies which then existed. The list was based on the companies’ economic or political power at that time. Since then organisations have broadly been added in date order of being established.
As you might expect, the organisations distributing the largest amount of grants currently tend to be the older organisations which are high in the original list of precedence and which have the largest assets then and now. The Carpenters Company Charitable Trust are a notable exception being 26th in order of precedence but shooting up to 8th largest in 2022-23 grantmaking.
These organisations contribute over £42 million in direct grantmaking, but in addition to making grants from their own funds, several of the worshipful companies distribute funds on behalf of other foundations – for example the Mercers’ Company is a corporate trustee for several trusts including The Mercers’ Charitable Foundation (grantmaking of £1.7m), The Charity of Sir Richard Whittington (grantmaking of £5.14m) and The Earl of Northampton’s Charity (grantmaking of £0.7m).
Many of the companies have a wider charitable role beyond grantmaking.
Recipients
Understanding how much grant funding is given to London compared to other towns and cities is a question of great interest, but is difficult to estimate given the available data. Typically, researchers use the address of grant recipients to estimate where grants are spent. However, this can produce inaccurate estimates as recipients may have headquarters in one area, but expend grants in another area. Using this approach to estimate the amount and value of grants received for London will likely result in an overestimate of what is actually provided to London.
In the analysis below we have experimented with different approaches to estimate the amount of grants likely to be received and spent by London charities. Registered charities report their area of operation to the Charity Commission, selecting up to 10 local authorities that they work in. Options include ‘throughout London’, UK constituent nations or picking from a list of overseas countries. Examining all charities that have registered London addresses, alongside data on their areas of operation, we have categorised London registered grant recipients into:
London registered and operate in London only;
London registered but operate nationally;
London registered but operate nationally and overseas;
The data shows that 56% of the number of grants awarded to London registered charities were provided to charities operating in London only. This amounted to 34% of the value of grants, worth £221.3m.
The majority (72%) of the London only operating charities are small with a turnover of under £1m
London only charities received the highest proportion of grants that were less than £10,000 compared to other London registered charities, and all grants in general. Examining the overall grant amount, London only charities had the smallest proportion of grants valued over £1m.
As with the overall grant recipients, a higher proportion of grants to London only charities went to charities supporting children and young people. As you might expect reflecting the diverse communities, a higher proportion of London only grants supported people of a particular racial or ethnic origin (22%) compared to 19% of all London based recipients and 14% of grants nationally.
London only grant recipients were more likely than the overall recipients in London to be working in causes related to poverty, community development, disability and arts and culture.
London Funders: Who funds with who
There is an ecosystem of funding between different London Funders members to charities in London. In the diagram below, the thicker the chord, the more recipients the funders have in common.
As we can see from the data and tables above, London is a dynamic and complex city. London Funders are the only cross-sector membership network that brings together public, private and independent funders to build a better London by taking action on what matters to our city and our communities.
We know the story is incomplete, but drawing together this information is a really important step in achieving our ambition of a learning culture where shared data, intelligence and insights can lead to better decision-making and action.
From our bi-annual member audits we know that what is distributed in London is not done evenly. Many outer boroughs are still ‘cold spots’ compared to inner London Boroughs with Bromley, Sutton, Havering, Redbridge, and Richmond Upon Thames receiving the least funding through our members. By sharing data, funders have become more aware of these ‘cold spots’ and have stated that they are proactively looking to increase their grantmaking in some of these areas.
In our 2023 audit, our members gave out an estimated £704m in grants across London in 2022-23. Applying the 9% average increase in grantmaking, across our members, this would be around £767m in 2023-24. This aligns with 48% of our members telling us that they are giving out more funding than in previous years due to the cost-of-living crisis and the lasting impacts of the pandemic.
And how funders give out their money is changing too. 29% of our members said they want to ‘change how they fund’ in the future, for reasons such as:
Increasing larger, longer term/multi-year grants and moving away from shorter term investments
Providing or moving towards more core and unrestricted support
Co-funding with others
Targeting funding and support towards specific groups/causes
Increasing or exploring social investment
Increasing non-financial support alongside grants
Engaging with VCS and infrastructure organisations to understand what types of funding are most helpful to them
From the recipient data we can see that children and young people (CYP) are the largest community served. This reflects what our audit found which was that 77% of our members fund CYP work and 62% of our members are funding work around poverty.
We hope this data and our reflections highlight how important it is to keep sharing data, allowing us to learn, collaborate and make positive changes in funding.
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