Is your community space bringing people together around a local sustainability issue? Or do you have an idea you’d like to take further?

Westfield Better Futures Hubs will offer up to £6,000 in seed funding, alongside training and practical support from our Community Ambassadors and a range of partners, including the Greater London Authority’s London Resilience Unit. Build on what you’re already doing, connect with others and develop longer-term plans for sustainability and resilience in your local area.

Westfield Better Futures is a programme from Foundation for Future London, powered by Westfield Stratford City. It brings community organisations, local people, businesses and partners together to take practical action on sustainability and resilience across East London. Westfield Better Futures builds on our work from our award-winning Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, powered by Westfield Stratford City, which invested £10 million in communities across Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest and aimed to support trusted local infrastructure, funding long-term collaboration and shared leadership, creating clear, two-way routes from community insight to real influence.

Register your space as a hub. This is the first step, and it’s open now.

Why hubs, and why now

The grass may be green again, and the fans are back in the cupboard, but we haven’t forgotten this summer’s heatwaves and flash flooding. Brown parks, overheated homes and flooded streets were a stark reminder that extreme weather is no longer a one-off, and that its impact lands hardest on the communities with the least room to absorb it. Despite rising energy costs adding to the pressure on households and on the community spaces that support them, community spaces and local networks are often the first to respond. This summer, community centres, faith spaces, food projects, youth clubs and local organisations across East London opened their doors, checked on neighbours and kept people connected.

This isn’t new. Local organisations have long led this work, often reaching people and issues that mainstream funding and institutions can’t. Westfield Better Futures Hubs is our invitation to celebrate and support this work, with up to £6,000 per hub, plus training, practical support and connections, to help you take your work further.

We aren’t the first, and we won’t be the last to support community and sustainability hubs. That’s why we’re partnering with GLA’s London Resilience Unit to build on the community hubs and networks they have been developing across London rather than creating something new in isolation. This includes the London Resilient Communities programme, delivered with Groundwork London and the British Red Cross, which has helped voluntary, community and faith groups across London develop Community Emergency Plans and set up Community Resilience Hubs that residents can turn to in a crisis. Our funding aims to build on this work in East London.

Our ambition is a sustainable, climate-ready East London: investing in practical, community-led solutions so that the places people already rely on are ready for what is coming.

What we’ve learned from our COLLABORATE: Safer Spaces programme is that most places don’t need a whole new model. Four local place-based hubs are now bringing people together around a shared local issue, in ways larger institutions often can’t. What they need is recognition, resources and support to do more of what they’re already doing (repair, care, skills, employment and climate resilience, often under one roof), in ways that align with their needs and ambitions rather than those of funders or institutions.

This matters more than ever with national programmes such as Pride in Place, and the wider push to devolve power closer to communities, asking neighbourhoods to lead their own renewal. But as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns, “weaker social infrastructure and rapid delivery timelines may lead to challenges when turning ambition into reality.” Community hubs are part of that infrastructure: trusted places where local people already have the relationships and know-how to lead, if they’re given the time and resources to do so.

A new report from NPC, Green Alliance and ACEVO, Together for a fairer, greener future makes the same case. It finds that “communities hold trust, knowledge and legitimacy”, while “institutions hold resources, access and decision-making power”. It also finds that under-resourcing keeps community insight out of the decisions that shape climate and environmental action.

The Westfield Better Futures Hubs aim to support better connection and resources for communities in East London around sustainability to develop longer-term action and partnerships, not one-off projects. The Hubs will sit alongside a broader one-year programme of networking, capacity building and a range of other development funding, building towards the launch of COLLABORATE – Westfield Better Futures in 2027.

What is a Westfield Better Futures Hub?

A hub is a place where local people come together and where action on a shared local issue is already happening or could happen. It might be a community centre, library, faith space, arts venue, sports club, café, garden or shopfront. It could also be a small network of organisations working together across a neighbourhood.

Hubs will anchor the programme. They host, convene, connect and learn together with their local communities. They will lead their own work, and they will help shape where Westfield Better Futures goes next.

Hubs are more than buildings. They are places to recover and reconnect, to organise around what matters locally, to learn together and to share decisions about the future of their area. The success of hubs lays not simply in terms of the activities that happen, but by whether decision-making opens up to more people, resources reach further into communities, local knowledge stays local, and new leaders keep emerging.

This is modest funding, but our hope is bigger. Communities have always produced their own knowledge, ideas and solutions, even when institutions have failed to recognise where they came from. Too often they are asked for their views and then left out of what happens next. We want the hubs to help move place-based work beyond consultation, towards communities having real power over the resources, relationships and decisions that shape their lives.

As with our COLLABORATE: Safer Spaces programme, we want communities to define what sustainability means to them. Those closest to an issue are best placed to understand what it looks like in their own context, and different communities will have different priorities.

So there is no single definition: tell us what sustainability means for your community. For example:

• Climate and heat resilience — cool and warm spaces, preparing for extreme weather, local emergency planning
• Reuse, repair and the circular economy — repair cafés, swaps, textiles, reducing waste
• Food — growing, surplus food, community kitchens
• Economic sustainability — green skills, local jobs, cost of living, keeping a community space open and thriving
• Nature and green space — gardens, greening streets, access to nature
• Creative climate action and wellbeing — using arts, music and storytelling to bring people in

These are examples, not a checklist. If your local priority looks different, tell us.

What partner hubs will receive

• Funding of up to £6,000 to support your work over 6–9 months. You can use it flexibly, for example, on staff or volunteer time, running activities, equipment, developing a plan or building partnerships.
• Connections to Westfield Stratford City. Depending on your plans, this could include space, technical expertise from retailers, volunteers and capacity-building support.
• A place in the Westfield Better Futures network. You’ll join peer learning with other hubs, work with us and our FFL Community Ambassadors to create events, activities and training, and have routes into further opportunities, including COLLABORATE – Westfield Better Futures in 2027.
• Resilience training and tools. We’re working with London Resilience (Greater London Authority) and its London Resilient Communities partners, Groundwork London and the British Red Cross. Where relevant to your plans, this could include access to resilience training, webinars, templates and practical resource kits, as well as support to develop a Community Emergency Plan or take first steps towards becoming a recognised Community Resilience Hub. Find out more from the London Resilience website.

What we’ll ask of hubs

Hubs will lead their own work. Alongside that, we’ll ask you to:

• Take part in a small number of hub network sessions during the funding period
• Host a Westfield Better Futures activity, such as a workshop or networking session, bringing together other hubs, local councils and Westfield retailers
• Share what you learn in a light-touch way. Your insight will feed directly into our work and GLA’s London Resilience Unit and its longer-term approach to support spaces in East London.

Who we want to hear from

We’re looking for a small cohort of hubs from across Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Barking and Dagenham.

We are particularly keen to hear from community centres and faith venues, recognising the vital role they play as trusted spaces at the heart of their communities. Helping these spaces become more sustainable and climate-resilient means they can keep supporting local people for years to come.

We are keen to hear from two kinds of spaces:

1. Hubs ready to go further. You may already have partners in place and work you want to take further, or be part of GLA’s London Resilience network, for example through the London Resilient Communities programme.
2. Spaces ready to start. You’ve wanted to develop your sustainability work but haven’t had the time or resources.

Who can apply

To apply, you should:

• Be a diverse-led not-for-profit organisation that is formally constituted, i.e. has a signed governing document in the group’s name. This includes unincorporated associations and community groups, registered charities, social enterprises, Community Interest Companies (CICs), Charitable Incorporated Organisations (CIOs), companies limited by guarantee and faith groups where there is a clear community focus, and the project does not promote a particular religious view.
  • Be connected with and meet the needs of the local communities in the London Boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and/or Barking and Dagenham.
• Run, lease or regularly use a physical space that local people use.

There’s no minimum income. We particularly welcome smaller organisations that find mainstream funding hard to access. We also welcome approaches from partnerships, collaborations, e.g. where one organisation might be applying as the lead on behalf of a network of spaces or organisations.