We believe that to bring an end to the inequalities and injustices within our society, we must tackle the underlying causes and repair the harm. We need to put more power into the hands of those working to address inequality and injustice, and create new systems that put equity, justice and peace first.
The work and leadership of grassroots social movements to challenge the profound and connected inequalities in our society is vital. But such movements suffer from a lack of funding, infrastructure, and access to resources and networks. JRCT’s Grassroots Movements Fund has been created in response to these gaps to support the sustainability of this work.
After many nourishing conversations with movement organisers and activists we developed these guiding principles to hold ourselves accountable in how we administer the fund and give out grants.
- Support transformative change – Funding groups that are doing long-term relational work to challenge systems of inequality
- Use collective and movement-centred decision-making – Sharing power and modelling some of the tenets of participatory grant giving
- Have an intersectional framing – Seeking to connect struggles, and acknowledging and addressing differences of power among those involved in the fund
- Be accountable – By being closely connected to and answerable to grassroots groups, through formal mechanisms and informal relationships
- Be accessible – Embedding the learnings from disability justice groups in removing the barriers which “disable” people from being able to participate equally
- Be transparent – Clearly communicating processes, decisions and learnings and where power is held
- Be regenerative not extractive – Leaving movements with greater capacity and resources rather than depleting them
- Be a space for learning – Testing out new ideas, sharing learning and acknowledging mistakes.
We are grateful to have received over 300 requests for eligibility calls for the Grassroots Movements Fund since our launch in December 2022.
This is an incredible response as we will only be funding 10-12 groups with the £500,000 available in this pilot funding round.
As this phase of the process was designed to respect the time and limited capacity of groups wishing to apply, we have decided to pause taking any more eligibility call requests, closing the programme to new applications.
This will allow us to ensure that applicants receive the best support and accompaniment from our programmes team with the time and resources we have for this area of work.
Unfortunately, if you have not yet been in touch to book in a call or make an enquiry, this means you will no longer be able to apply to this funding round.
This is our first ever round and we are so grateful to everyone who has engaged with us. We will be open for another funding round at the start of 2024, having learnt from this current process. Crucially, we will continue to make the case for resourcing grassroots movements and supporting work that goes unnoticed and underfunded.
If you would like to stay in touch, please sign up to the mailing list or follow us on social media. You can read more about the fund here.
In gratitude,
The Grassroots Movements team (Elena Blackmore, Mumbi Nkonde, Sophie Pritchard)