Why We’re Rethinking Our Funding Approach for COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES commission

Our Grants and Programme Manager, Ashton Mullins, has written a new blog about the commissions and our thinking behind them. 

After four years of running the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, we’ve learnt a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to supporting community-led change in East London. As we launch our final funding round, COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES commission, focused on Safer Spaces collaborations, I want to share why we’ve reimagined the approach, the tensions we’re grappling with, and what we hope to learn.

Starting with what we heard

The decision to test a new ‘co-missioning’ approach emerged from years of listening to our grantees, our Community Grants Panel, our partners and the communities we serve.

During our 2024 Empowering Safer Spaces campaign, we invited young people, artists, creatives and community groups across East London into conversation about what ‘safer spaces’ mean to under-resourced and marginalised communities. What we discovered was illuminating and challenging: collaborations around safety occur at completely different scales, and while organisations from different sectors often share outcomes related to safer spaces, they don’t always recognise this in the language they use.

Meanwhile, our grantees were telling us something else entirely. While 80% reported that support from the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund helped them to build partnerships with larger institutions, there was limited success in terms of longer-term equitable partnerships. Increased levels of funding competition also made it harder to build meaningful collaborations under traditional funding constraints, where larger institutions are increasingly in competition with grassroots organisations for the same pots of funding.

Our Community Grants Panel, comprised of local residents with lived experience and expertise, provided feedback that the issues they observed in their communities required shared resourcing and partnership, yet funding models were often at odds with the practices and capabilities they wanted to support.

The problems with ‘business as usual’

Traditional project funding creates a fairly narrow and defined set of outcomes that can prove inflexible to adapt and change as work develops. Once an application is submitted, usually many months in advance of a project starting, it becomes difficult to build-in new partnerships or pivot in respond to changing context — precisely when flexibility is most needed.

There’s also a cruel irony in asking small organisations to do the hard work of finding partners to commit to funding applications when the chances of success are small. In conversations with grantees and our Community Grants Panel, we have also reflected on the scale and barriers that small diverse-led organisations have in leading work; the lack of funding for community organising; the relevance of local-level goals versus sector system change; and how we can make changes to overly competitive funding processes for safer spaces.

Designing for emergence, not extraction

Our new COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES commission aims to flip this dynamic, with a clear focus on building over bidding. Rather than asking organisations to spend weeks writing detailed applications for funding that they may never receive, we’re offering something different:

• Guaranteed funding for shortlisted applicants – Four diverse-led collaborations will be guaranteed up to £50k in flexible funding. This includes an early-stage development grant to provide the time and space to develop, test and embed collaborative work alongside partners, away from the restrictions of rigid applications.
• Co-missioning – Teams will be invited to enter a more collaborative co-missioning process alongside the Foundation. We’ll spend two to three months getting to know the teams, their collaborations and their ambitions. By working with organisations from the outset, we can bring in additional partners and support at earlier stages so they can spend more of their time building partnerships rather than bidding against each other.
• Flexible support over rigid outcomes – There are no set outcomes or deliverables. Funding can support direct service delivery, but it can also fund community organising capacity, advocacy work or the costs of engaging with local decision-makers. Whatever the collaboration needs to achieve longer-term goals, they are less likely to accomplish them alone.
• Access funding support – Small grants are available to individuals and micro-organisations to remove barriers to early-stage partnership and application development.

Building bridges beyond funding

One of the most exciting aspects of this new approach is how it creates opportunities for the Foundation to deepen our own collaborative practice with East London partners and stakeholders.

This isn’t just about bringing additional financial resources to the table, it’s about recognising that the challenges around developing safer spaces cut across sectors and require the kind of iterative cross-pollination that traditional funding silos often prevent. For example, a grassroots organisation working on LGBTQ+ safety might have insights that could transform how a local Council’s policy approaches public realm design. A community network addressing migrant safety may offer perspectives that reshape university research priorities. How lived experience of young care leavers could transform our approaches to employment support, making jobs safer for their long-term ambitions.

During the co-missioning process, we will work with each collaboration as a partner and will actively connect collaborations with relevant learning and partners from across our network. This might involve facilitating introductions between a community safety group and an academic researcher or delivering additional learning/networking sessions for partners.

By supporting small organisations to lead collaborations and then helping to broker connections with other partners and larger institutions, we can create conditions for more equitable partnerships where community expertise is at the centre from the beginning. We hope that larger organisations, for-profit institutions, Councils, universities and others will be open to supporting smaller, diverse-led organisations as part of collaborative teams. If you are not eligible to apply but are still interested in supporting the process, please get in touch to discuss.

Learning as we go

We’re still figuring out a lot about this process. Our process will be tailored around what collaborations need, and we’re committed to being iterative, open and transparent about our learnings as we go.

We’re taking on some of the risk of project delivery where needed and will be running a programme of co-evaluation on behalf of grantees. To support this, we will be recruiting one or two Critical Friends – safer spaces experts who will work with us and broader partners to answer some of our questions.

We’re also interested in experimenting with participatory budgeting and different forms of partnership agreements, such as many-to-many contracts that might better support genuine collaboration. We’re looking forward to discovering what else might be needed beyond existing capacity building offers … a dedicated workspace for organisations to meet up? Mentorship? Or legal support for consortium building?

What’s next: learning at the speed of trust

This shift has required us to be clearer about the Foundation’s role and build on our experience and learnings to date, for instance in our UK Culture Exchange programme, of co-developing and commissioning with partners.

Rather than distributing money and stepping back, we’re experimenting with how to use our position, connections and relationships more intentionally to actively facilitate the conditions that allow grassroots-led collaborations to thrive. That also includes understanding the systemic barriers collaborations face locally and using our networks and influence to help clear pathways to larger institutions, funders, and decision-makers.

Ultimately, how can we better support all the organisations in our network, both those who have been successful in securing funding and those who haven’t? How do we shift from being a traditional funder to being a collaborator – moving from “power-over” to “power-with”?

What excites me most about this approach is that it creates space for relationships and trust to develop before the scale of resources is fully committed. Traditional funding processes ask organisations to demonstrate certainty about outcomes and partnerships that they haven’t had time to develop. Our new approach recognises that the most impactful collaborations often emerge from addressing local shared problems and relationship-building, not from perfectly crafted applications.

This feels particularly important for safer spaces work, where trust is fundamental. How can we expect organisations to create safer spaces for their communities if our own funding processes don’t create conditions of safety and trust?

We see the COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES commission as a learning experience for FFL’s future way of working. It’s messier and more complex than traditional grant-making, but it also feels more aligned with the change we want to see. The questions it raises go beyond this single funding round: How can funders, community organisational and institutional partners work more collaboratively to address local issues? How might participatory approaches to resource allocation shift power dynamics in philanthropy? What would it look like to truly distribute decision-making about community resources to communities themselves?

We hope the collaborations we support through this programme become blueprints for longer-term partnership models across East London’s safer spaces ecosystem. Most importantly, we hope this approach will free up organisations to focus on what they do best: the hard, hopeful work of creating more equitable and safer communities that we all need.

Applications for COLLABORATE: SAFER SPACES commission are open for Expressions of Interest. Deadline Monday 18 August 2025 at 2pm. 

We’ll be running regular “Collaboration Cuppas” online drop-in sessions in July and August and other online and in person session on Wednesday 9 July, 10am to 12pm  to answer questions about applying.