Follow the Money, Then Follow It Back: A Funder's Reckoning With Grant Distribution

Every funder in Britain can describe the map of deprivation in their sleep. We know, with statistical confidence, where child poverty concentrates, where life expectancy dips, where youth services were cut first and deepest. The uncomfortable question is not whether we know where the need is. It is why the money so rarely follows.

The Pattern Nobody Intends

Look across the sector and the same asymmetries recur. London and the South East command a share of charitable grant-making wildly disproportionate to their share of deprivation. Rural coastal towns — the very places where a single youth club might be the last universal service standing — submit a fraction of the applications their urban equivalents do. Organisations with a dedicated fundraiser win; organisations run by three volunteers and a spreadsheet do not.

None of this is the product of malice. It is the product of process. Application forms that assume professional grant-writing capacity. Deadlines that reward groups with someone whose job it is to watch for them. Assessment criteria that privilege track record — thereby rewarding those who have already been funded — over demonstrable local knowledge. Each filter, individually, seems reasonable. Stacked together, they form a sieve that sorts applicants by administrative sophistication rather than by need.

The Feedback Loop We Built

The result is a feedback loop that funders would never design deliberately but have designed collectively. Funded organisations gain experience, evidence and confidence, which makes them more fundable. Unfunded organisations gain nothing, which makes them invisible. After a decade of this, a funder can look at its portfolio and conclude, honestly, that it backs the strongest organisations. It can do so without ever noticing that the shortlist was rigged before the first assessment meeting.

There are demographic dimensions too. Research by the sector's equity campaigns has repeatedly shown that organisations led by and for racialised communities, and those serving them, receive a strikingly small share of mainstream grant-making — often funneled instead through intermediaries. Whatever the explanations, the arithmetic is stubborn.

What We Owe the Data

At the Fraser Thomson Foundation we have spent the past year pulling apart our own figures, and we do not much enjoy what we have found. Our outreach, like our awards, clusters where the applications are — not where the need is. We have therefore made three commitments, offered here in the spirit of accountability rather than virtue.

First, we publish our application and award data annually, broken down by region and deprivation decile, so that others can hold us to it. Second, we have abolished the requirement for two years of accounts from groups applying for grants under £10,000, because that requirement exists to protect us from risk we can otherwise manage. Third, we have moved to proactive, place-based calls in the areas our data shows we have historically overlooked — writing to groups directly rather than waiting to be found.

None of this is heroic. It is the bare minimum that a sector built on the redistribution of private wealth should consider obligatory. The honest test of a funder is not the elegance of its strategy document but the geography of its grants. We would encourage every foundation in the country to print that map, pin it to the wall, and be prepared to be ashamed of it.