One question recurred throughout every session: how can funders resource the deeper transformation needed to shape the conditions for change, rather than simply respond to symptoms?
Again and again, the answer was a shift away from short-term responses, and towards funding practices rooted in solidarity with communities. In practice this means being intentional about sharing power, building community leadership, providing flexible, long-term funding and being explicit about trusting communities to know what they need to deliver change.
Solidarity in Action
Across the Festival, we heard incredible examples of how communities and civil society are responding to this moment with courage, creativity and resilience, and how hope is built through organising, solidarity and shared infrastructure.
"Hope is sustainable. It does self-sustain and it particularly self-fills when you have multiple movements working together".
In a session led by Funding Justice Collective, we were reminded of both the history and the ongoing power of movements working together to create change. In 1971, a coalition of Caribbean parents and Disabled activists in the UK came together against segregated "educationally subnormal" schools that were harming both Disabled and Caribbean children. In 1977, disabled activists in the US sustained the longest sit-in in a federal government building, materially supported throughout by the Black Panther Party, who supplied food and resources. Both were cited as reminders that movements have always been stronger working together than apart.
That spirit is alive in current organising too. Civic Power Fund described how Refugee Action Network used to primarily be a service-delivery organisation supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It has since built such a sense of collective power that 70 local people recently came together in solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers. They are now building on this momentum by coordinating a network of small groups helping migrants integrate and build power. Another example comes from One Parent Scotland, which has organised single parents across Edinburgh and Glasgow, and is now partnering with nationwide climate campaigns.
Georgia Bondy - founder of Well Adapt (a social enterprise imagining health and social care through the lens of disability justice) and chair of the Disabled People's Organisations Forum - gave a live example of what that solidarity looks like in practice. The Forum itself formed during the pandemic, after government repeatedly failed to turn up to its own consultation meetings with Disabled people's organisations, prompting those organisations to work together regardless of whether government showed up. More recently, it has had to decide how to respond to EHRC guidance on toilet access for trans, non-binary and intersex people, which in practice would leave many with no option but to use disabled toilets. Georgia described choosing solidarity over exclusion — welcoming trans and non-binary people into disabled-only spaces rather than treating the guidance as a reason to close ranks. Her argument was that the guidance itself, not each other, is the problem.
The Ubele Initiative's session on African-centred systems change offered a further example of what this looks like in long-term practice. A safety-focused project with Impact on Urban Health, developed with Black community leaders in Southwark, reframed "safety" for Black communities to cover more than violence, including racism in schools. This led to assemblies and events designed to help schools recognise and address racist environments, not just individual behaviour. Ubele has since built this into a systems change academy and a fellowship programme connecting UK and Kenyan social activists on a shared course in systems change and leadership.
These examples offer real hope. But none of them happened by accident, and none can be taken for granted going forward. If funders want more of what's described above, flexibility and trust can't be the exception, it needs to become how funding works as a rule.
What this moment asks of funders
Across the strand, solidarity showed up less as a word people used and more as a set of concrete choices: who gets believed, who gets flexibility, and who funders are willing to stand alongside when it's costly to do so.
The clearest ask was for funders to build in enough flexibility that organisations can act on a solidarity moment without having to hide it. The Funding Justice Collective session gave a concrete example of why this matters. During the Covid Inquiry, once organisations noticed the chair was listening to some marginalised groups but not to migrants, other groups began repeating migrant organisations' testimony in their own submissions until it couldn't be ignored. That work that only happened because there was enough funding for legal teams to do more than their own narrow remit. Without that flexibility, organisations are left choosing between ignoring a moment like this or quietly redirecting restricted funds without telling their funder. The ask was for funders to proactively signal, with real examples, that shifting capacity this way is expected and welcomed, not something to hide.
The Ubele Initiative went further: funders need to stop trying to be neutral altogether. One of its core conditions for funders is "explicit solidarity" - taking a clear position rather than pretending to be impartial, and inviting challenge to that position rather than hiding behind it. As Michael, facilitator and Director of Ubele, put it: funding systems carry a "memory of harm" for minoritised communities - and funders too often only fund what's visible above ground, the finished programmes and outputs, while overlooking the relationships, trust and history-building work that make those outcomes possible in the first place.
Some funders are already restructuring how decisions get made, not just what they fund. The Collaboration Circle is a pooled fund whose board is split 50/50 between funders and equity and justice organisations, so decisions about where the money goes are made jointly rather than by funders alone. During the Festival, it also tested a practical tool for embedding that thinking into everyday practice: the Advancing Equity Learning Library, which breaks the grant making process down into nine steps so equity is considered before, during and after a grant is made, not only at the decision point. It includes reports, real-life examples, practical guidance and reflection prompts, and will update as a live resource with input from communities.
Change is a long-term investment
None of this happens quickly, and every session in the strand pointed to the same underlying problem: funding structured around short-term cycles cannot build trust, test genuine participation, or hold the kind of relationships this work depends on. Routes to Power, an intersectional disabled women's forum discussed in the Funding Justice Collective session, took two and a half years of organic relationship-building before any formal structure existed. Funders deliberately recruited women of colour as co-facilitators to keep it genuinely intersectional. The Meeting the Moment session made the case for funding designed around uncertainty and changing political conditions rather than fixed outcomes, and the Funding Justice Collective session pushed funders to proactively signal flexibility, so grantees feel safe responding to live issues.
Core funding carries its own version of this tension: unrestricted funding enables solidarity and adaptation, but it often flows to established organisations with track records, leaving newer intersectional groups excluded. This could mean smaller core pots for organisations without a financial track record, or funders convening their own core-funded grantees together to build cross-movement relationships that outlast any single grant.
Investing in safety, resilience and narrative change
Several sessions grappled with the conditions organisations are now operating under: growing mobilisation from movements that centre hate and extremism, online abuse, doxxing and civic restriction. Frontline organisers described having their addresses shared online and absorbing the emotional toll of sustained hostility on top of the work itself. The ask, repeated across sessions, was for funders to resource staff wellbeing and organisational resilience directly, rather than treating these as separate from programme delivery.
One example of being proactive is reviving the community-tension monitoring and horizon-scanning capacity local authorities used to run routinely, so a likely flashpoint can be spotted and acted on before it lands, rather than funded as a response only after tensions flare. As one speaker put it, this can be understood as "investing to save" - a long-term prevention approach rather than a crisis response.
The storytelling and film screening session led by Media Trust made a direct case for communications capacity to be treated as core infrastructure for justice work, not a "nice to have":
"Storytelling has a transcendental power to give us a more expansive view of who we are. And that helps us realise that what unites us all is actually far greater than what divides us."
Panellists were practical about what that means for funders: organisations working on race, religion or migration need risk assessments and platform accreditation built into that work from the outset, because visibility itself can invite backlash. Funders were encouraged to support communications capacity directly, accept visual and video evidence of impact, and treat storytelling as part of long-term systems change rather than a one-off product.
Beyond silos: working across movements and systems
Many sessions challenged siloed thinking. When discussing social cohesion, funders argued it should not sit within one council department or grants programme, but be embedded across health, safety, employment, inclusion and community systems. In practice that means co-commissioning, systems-wide audits and preventative investment - treating cohesion as foundational rather than a niche concern.
What this can look like at scale was demonstrated during the Beyond Cohesion session, led by Belong Network. The Greater London Authority (GLA) partnered with the National Lottery Community Fund to create The Loved and Wanted Fund, a grant programme rooted in London's Social Integration Strategy. It builds on the Mayor of London's Loved and Wanted campaign, launched to address increasingly divisive public discourse. Key design principles — like supporting and amplifying existing work rather than asking for new projects — helped build trust within communities. This approach also supported organisations such as food banks, places of worship and advice centres to find the right language to describe work they were already doing as a form of movement building. The fund launched with £900,000 for 15 places; once the National Lottery Community Fund matched it, that grew to 30 places. The GLA team also described visiting funded spaces directly, and finding that what looks like a nationally-driven tension is often rooted in something much more local. One organisation linked division less to national politics and more to the issue of housing in their local area, a reminder that funders need to understand what's actually driving tension in a place before assuming they know.
The Meeting the Moment session also framed climate justice, racial justice, migration justice, disability justice and social cohesion as interconnected. Speakers described how racialised, disabled, migrant and low-income communities often face overlapping harms, while public narratives and policy responses treat issues separately. Across sessions, the implication for funders was clear: funding strategies need to support collaboration across movements, sectors and geographies, because the challenges communities face do not present in neat categories.
This requires funders to look at their own internal practices, not just what they fund. A session led by Trust for London, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Lumos Transforms, shared learning from a pilot supporting individuals and organisations to stabilise chronic stress, reduce burnout, and strengthen the relational conditions for coordinated action. The pilot ran across six organisations and 119 participants, with an initial evaluation after eleven weeks. It found that a one-off training or retreat produces only a temporary shift, and durable change needs ongoing practice over time, properly resourced. Drawing on the neuroscience of chronic stress, the session argued this isn't just a wellbeing issue: sustained stress narrows people's capacity for trust, creativity and collaboration. A burnt-out workforce produces a more reactive, short-termist organisation, and a field of stressed organisations produces exactly the fragmentation funders are trying to solve for. Funders in the session were candid too: one warned against treating "one-off breathing exercises” as the fix to the structural challenges facing organisations; another shared that while it sounds obvious that an organisation's internal health and its external impact can't be separated, funders don't always treat it that way in practice.
What we’re taking forward
Taken together, the conversations across Strand One point towards a funding ecosystem that moves from rigid power dynamics to shared power, from short-term relationships to long-term trust, and from single funders acting alone to a connected, collectively resourced response — one that resources not only the visible, "above-ground" work, but the relationships, safety, wellbeing and narrative capacity that make change possible in the first place.
We're grateful to everyone for their time, insights and honesty in discussing these issues. What we took away is that the forces pulling communities toward division are well organised and well resourced. If funders want to stand alongside communities who are already doing this work, we need to be equally willing to move: to take risks, to be joined up with each other rather than working in parallel, and to resource people and organisations so they're in a genuine position to fight for a future rooted in justice, equity and community power. We look forward to continuing these conversations and to supporting funders to act in solidarity with communities for lasting systemic change.