A Decade of Backing: What Happens When Funders Stop Watching the Clock
Photo: Rjruiziii, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The standard rhythm of British charitable funding is a year at a time. A grant is awarded, a project is delivered, a report is filed, and then the whole cycle begins again — usually with a new application, a new funder, and a new set of outcomes to prove. For the organisations on the receiving end, this rhythm has a cost that rarely appears in any evaluation framework.
A growing number of funders are experimenting with a different model: long-term, unrestricted core funding, sometimes stretching across a decade. The Fraser Thomson Foundation has been watching these commitments closely, and the pattern in the evidence is difficult to ignore.
Retention Is the First Story
Consider what twelve-month funding does to a staffing structure. Recruitment freezes begin months before a grant ends. Skilled staff — particularly those with families and mortgages — move to more secure sectors. When funding resumes, organisations rebuild from scratch, retraining new starters and re-establishing relationships with the very communities they serve.
Organisations operating under decade-long commitments tell a different story. One youth service in the North East, backed by a ten-year core grant, reported staff turnover falling to a fraction of the sector average within three years. Its managers could offer permanent contracts. Its youth workers, in turn, could commit to young people for the length of their journey rather than the length of a financial year. In youth work especially, relationships are the intervention. A worker who leaves after eleven months takes the trust with them.
Boards Grow Up When Money Stays Still
The second pattern concerns governance. Trustees of project-funded organisations spend their meetings in a perpetual cycle of renewal: chasing the next grant, adjusting the mission to fit the next funder's priorities, restructuring to survive. Governance becomes a fundraising function.
Under long-term core support, boards behave differently. Freed from the immediate scramble, trustees invest in the unglamorous infrastructure of a healthy organisation — financial reserves policies, succession planning, safeguarding review. Several organisations we have followed used the early years of long-term funding to build reserves for the first time in their history. That single shift transformed their negotiating position with every subsequent funder.
The Outcomes Comparison
Direct comparisons are hard, and honest funders should say so. Organisations that attract decade-long commitments are often stronger to begin with. But the longitudinal data emerging from long-term funding programmes points consistently in one direction: organisations with stable core income deliver more consistent outcomes, hold onto their community relationships, and — perhaps most strikingly — raise additional funds more effectively, not less. The fear that long-term funding breeds complacency is not borne out by the experience of funders who have tried it.
What Would Change if We Changed
The question for UK funders is not whether long-term core funding works. It is whether we are willing to accept what it demands of us: patience, a longer reporting rhythm, and the loss of the annual narrative of novelty that grant-making so often rewards.
The problems our sector exists to address — loneliness, disadvantage, crumbling community infrastructure — do not run on twelve-month cycles. It is time our funding stopped pretending otherwise.
