Since 2016, our Strengthening Civil Society (SCS) programme has sought to support UK civil society organisations to use legal tools and human rights-based approaches to bring about social change. Five years into the programme, we commissioned an independent evaluation of the programme. Off the back of this evaluation, we renewed this overarching focus of the programme, choosing to narrow in on three areas:
- Access to public law – protecting and promoting access to public law remedies;
- Geography – recognising and supporting strategies in different parts of the UK; and
- Leadership – creating opportunities to develop collective leadership on legal action.
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that we delayed the operationalising of this new narrow scope to allow us to respond to the unprecedented global public health emergency.
In 2021, we reverted to our strategic focus as outlined above. That same year, we launched a fund with a dedicated thematic focus on addressing racial injustice in the criminal legal system.
In the years since, we made just under 100 grants (98, so close!) to 73 organisations totaling just over £8.5m. Alongside grantmaking, we have supported grantholders with communications, governance, and regularly organised online events to support them to stay abreast of changes to legal frameworks. We also delivered two residentials and made grants to three grantholders to each deliver a residential in consecutive years. These residentials were a chance for grantholders to reflect on their work, share strategies, identify opportunities for collaboration and network.
We began an ambitious collaboration with City Bridge Foundation (CBF) to collectively spent £1.75m over five years on a project supporting London-based CSOs to use human rights-based approaches to address discrimination and disadvantage and achieve wider social change (£1.5m of this is from CBF).
We commissioned research including reports looking at how UK civil society has used the law in pursuit of racial justice and how the law has been used to challenge racial injustice in the criminal legal system. Our learning partners also updated their framework outlining how civil can use the law more effectively to bring about social change.
We’ve also been part of pooled funds (such as the Justice Together Initiative), played an instrumental role in starting a human rights pooled fund in Scotland (run by the Corra Foundation), and contributed to efforts to galvanise more funders to support civil society to use human rights based approaches.
I am sure there are a lot of other things I am missing but this blog isn’t meant to be a giant ta-daa list of all the things we’ve done in the past four-and-a-bit years. Instead, it’s a way to share that after nearly five years of our renewed focus, in 2025, we will focus on reviewing the programme’s strategy.
We come into this strategy review with the intention that we will continue to support civil society to use the law, but we think it might be time to shift our focus areas. I say think, because we’re awaiting the outcomes of an independent evaluation which will tell us more about the impact of the programme – what we did well, what we did less well, and what we might do better going forward. Alongside this evaluation, the strategy review will see us commission research into potential new areas of focus, host roundtables for our grantholders to share their thoughts and ideas, and undertake numerous one-to-one conversations with key stakeholders to hear their views on our plans.
We are not closing the programme – it’s hard to close a programme which has largely been invite only in the past few years. We will have an open funding call in 2025 to support civil society to use legal tools to address racial injustice in the criminal legal system. Additionally, we will support our existing grantholders with their funded projects; speak to civil society around the country about their appetite for on legal action going forward; and of course, we will deliver a new strategy for the programme (that will take us to the end of the decade!).
Our new strategy for the programme will go live in January 2026 – we can’t wait to share it with you!
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