Looking back at 2024/25: a year of change

Looking back on our grant-making in 2024/25, three key themes came through our work: renewal, strengthening relationships and meeting the challenge.

As we publish our 2024/25 Annual Report, we have taken a moment to share how these ideas show up in the grants we make and the way we work.

This year has been a time of new beginnings, endings and renewal. After a decade of exceptional leadership, we said farewell to Moira Sinclair – and we welcomed Halima Khan as our new Chief Executive. Alongside this, four new trustees joined our board: Bernard Dallé, Marcus Davey, Jennifer Forster and Martha Mackenzie.

This year also marked the 30th anniversary of Awards for Artists, a celebration of the power of the arts to inspire, seek justice and build hope. The Awards recognise the importance of artists and the benefit that an award with no strings attached can have on their lives and work. In this publication, 12 artists who have received the Award throughout its history explain the impact the Award has had on their lives and practices.

In our grant making, we also hit some milestones. We opened up our refreshed Arts Fund and Migration Fund, as well as our Ideas and Pioneers Fund, each having gone through thoughtful consultation processes to ensure they are fit for the people and communities they intended to support. While these changes are still new, we have been encouraged by the breadth of organisations applying and the deeper understanding we have gained of the fields we work in. 

As well as change internally, externally, we saw a change in UK government. The government committed to a curriculum review, with an aim to broaden access to music, art, sport, and drama. Given the central importance of arts in the curriculum to our funding, we submitted evidence to the government’s curriculum review, advocating for a refreshed approach that centres the arts in education. 

By drawing on all of the ways we can effect change, beyond our core method of grant-making, we hope to further the missions and visions of the people we support.

This learning isn’t new for us, but it is reinforced with every grant we make. As the circumstances for the people we fund become all the more challenging, we know how important it is for us to be a responsive and responsible funder. At the core of this is being connected to the people we work with.

This year, we convened grant holders from our Backbone Fund for the first time. Backbone seeks to support organisations who work to strengthen the sector as a whole – be that investigative journalism to identify shared threats to progressive movements or work to help charitable organisations build inclusive practices and deal with significant moments of change.

This approach – bringing grant holders together – has strengthened our work tremendously this year. In refreshing our Migration Fund, we introduced a Migration Advisory Group, made up of a cross-section of PHF staff and representatives from organisations we fund across the migration sector. The contributions of the people we fund have added a depth of richness and insight into our grant-making process, and we are better able to make informed, strategic grant-making decisions as a result.

As well as bringing the people we fund together, this year we have also focused on bridging the gap between grant-maker and grant-holder. In refreshing our Arts Fund at the start of 2024, we recognised that to be more effective in our decision making, we had to develop a greater understanding of the work of applicants.

For the first time, our Arts Team met every organisation who progressed to the second stage of our application process in their place. We took a similar approach in our re-opened Ideas and Pioneers Fund, where we met with every second stage applicant to talk to them about who they are and their idea. 

We’re tremendously grateful to each and every organisation and individual for their openness and generosity in bringing us closer to the work they do.

This has also been a year of meeting the challenge of the moment we are in. A key part of our role is being attentive to this wider context and thinking about how we can be most helpful given constant change and new threats, as well as emerging possibilities. 

We know that there are multiple and increasing pressures on the organisations we support. We have seen an increase in demand for our funding, with the number of grant applications up 75% on the previous year and the value of grant applications up almost 90%.

Events like the racist riots, which took place across the country last summer, directly impacted many of our grant holders. This reinforced the need to tackle long-term root causes of division and violence, as well as immediate needs. 

In this spirit, we remain active in a number of collaborations with other funders – such as Justice Together, Power of Pop Fund, Civic Power Fund, LocalMotion and UK Democracy Fund – which seek to build and rebuild the foundations needed for a just society. 

While this year has been characterised by change, it has also been characterised by an enduring commitment to building a more just future. You can read our full annual report to find out more about our work this year, and that of the incredible people and organisations we fund.