(2 minute read)
Published: 30 January 2026
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director
In June 2025, we launched our strategy for 2025 to 2030. You can learn more about the strategy, and how we wish to achieve our aim to advance wellbeing for people, society and the natural world, by clicking here to the blog we shared as part of the strategy’s launch.
Writing the strategy and the associated funding guidelines in this age of interconnected global threats affecting people, society and the natural world was not straightforward. In the end, our strategy became an opportunity for us to take decisions on what we wished to prioritise as an organisation and why.
Our strategy was devised over the course of 18 months. In that time we committed to continuous improvement, proactively engaging and seeking feedback from stakeholders (including those with direct and personal experience of the issues we are supporting), ensuring contributions, understanding and buy in from staff and the Board, using data and insights (including foresights trends and analyses) generated internally as well as from trusted external sources, and responding to the context as it is now and as it will be.
We feel that many of the challenges facing people, society and the natural world are systemic, which means that we want to fund work that will reform or replace those systems. This is also part of the reason for us removing our previous funding categories. We have also seen increasingly in the last few years that these areas are interconnected, and that our previous approach created unhelpful boundaries and limited our ability to fund ambitious work in pursuit of our organisational aim. We also felt that this approach meant organisations sometimes said what they thought we wanted to hear, rather than what they actually wanted or needed to say and share with us.
Our new approach is to focus our grantmaking on supporting changemaking organisations. We want to partner with those that have a clear understanding of their role within existing and/or new systems and a clear strategy on how they intend to make change, and are committed to advancing justice through the active involvement of individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues they tackle. If you want to learn more about our new funding approach, then you can do so by clicking here on our website.
Six months on, we are sharing a blog series written by our Grants Team that say more about what we mean by the different systemic issues and areas that we highlight in our funding guidelines, which you can read by clicking here.
In Stephanie’s blog, which can be read by clicking here, she reflects on tackling the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and pollution. She brings in her personal experience of living alongside active volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest and the importance of being prepared through adaptation and mitigation, and what taking a justice based approach to environmental work looks like.
In Beth’s blog, which can be read by clicking here, she considers reducing polarisation and increasing political equality through building trust, strengthening and repairing relationships. She reflects on the role of wider systemic factors in causing and contributing to these issues too.
In Kate’s blog, which can be read by clicking here, she explores developing new economic systems and challenging wealth inequalities. Kate considers the importance of reimagination and redesign work that is systemic, plausible and actively seeks to improve current systems whilst developing new ones.
The eagle-eyed amongst you might be wondering why there isn’t a separate blog on our desire to advance equity and justice for marginalised communities. This is a deliberate omission, and one that we are addressing in this blog.
In our funding guidelines and strategy for 2025 to 2030, we explain that we want to support work that is advancing equity and justice specifically for marginalised communities impacted by the issues that are covered in Stephanie, Beth and Kate’s blogs. Effectively this means work relating specifically to communities impacted by the triple planetary crisis; polarisation and loss of trust, or exclusion from the political process; and/or harmful economic systems and wealth inequalities.
Applications under this area must be clear how one or more of these issues are at the heart of their work and a core issue for the people they support – not an add on. The reason we have taken this approach is because we know that that the issues outlined in the three areas listed above will not be felt equitably and that some people and communities will be more impacted than others. It also ensures that our funding will stay focused on the areas where we feel we can make the biggest impact with our limited resources.
In the blogs written by the Grants Team, you will see that each references the different ways in which advancing equity and justice for marginalised communities across these areas can be pursued.
We have noticed in the first six months of the strategy that organisations are not always linking their work on advancing equity and justice back to one of the other three areas, and this makes them weak or ineligible applications.
For us, equity and justice are about the search for fair and just access to opportunity and outcomes within the procedures, processes and distribution of resources by institutions or systems. Tackling this requires an understanding of the underlying or root causes of disparities, both at the point of access and in terms of outcomes, within our society. We believe that this is essential in truly securing justice, access and rights, especially for those experiencing exclusion and the most adverse impacts of this age of significant disruption and interconnected global threats.