Trust for London is part of the Funders for Race Equality Alliance, a group of charitable foundations working together to advance race equality in the UK and support a sustained and thriving race equality sector.
Using a simple audit tool, funders analysed their portfolios to help them develop targets and strategies to ensure they are properly supporting race equality work. Here is Trust for London's analysis.
This week (15 April 2021), the results from the first Racial Justice Funding Audit were published, bringing together the data from £122 million-worth of grants from multiple funders.
Trust for London participated in this audit, contributing data analysing 270 active grants at a combined grant value of £21m.
As well as contributing to this wider audit, we also analysed the grants internally, using it to dig deeper and think about our own grant-making – the details of this analysis are shared in this document.
Please note: We’ve used the language and definitions in the FRE audit throughout this document, but are looking at how best to describe communities experiencing racial discrimination in this kind of analysis in future, mindful of current debates around language and the use of the acronym BAME.
We found that 70% of our grant spend goes to projects with Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities as beneficiaries, but a smaller amount of our spend (14%) goes to projects led by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic sector organisations.
Looking more closely at the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic organisations we fund, we found that on average they were smaller, with lower annual incomes than other organisations and were over represented in our small grants programme 'Connected Communities'.
As a result of this analysis, we are working up plans to make a significant investment to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic-led organisations to increase their skills, capacity and policy influencing activities in tackling racial injustice.
21 April 2021