This year, we’ve worked side by side with the people and organisations we fund to think about where our support can be of most value.
In response to the growing needs and to the possibilities for change that we see in each of our areas of work, we’ve also given out more money in grants than ever before.
We approved a total of 265 grants from 1,626 decisions.
We gave out grants totalling £57.1 million over the 2023/24 financial year.
As a grant-maker, we have maintained our focus on working towards a positive vision of the future, which has felt more important than ever in an increasingly unstable global landscape. This idea has been at the heart of the Foundation’s strategy, operations and the changes we’ve made to our grant-making throughout the past year.
Through extensive consultations, we’ve reshaped our Arts, Migration, India, Backbone and Ideas and Pioneers funds. We hope these changes will make our grant-making even more relevant, informed by those who know what will have impact.
We’ve also made Major Grants to organisations we’ve funded for many years, like YoungMinds, who we know will deliver work of significant value to the communities they support.
We’ve welcomed two new trustees, Silaja Birks and Tom Palakudiyil – and after a decade of extraordinary leadership, our Chief Executive, Moira Sinclair, will step down early next year.
As we publish our Annual Report, we’ve taken this moment to reflect on some of the themes that guided our grant-making and how they’ve shown up in our work.
“Over the past year, Paul Hamlyn Foundation has invested more resources in many excellent organisations and initiatives than ever before. This increase in our grant-making has come in response both to the growing needs and to the possibilities for change we see in each of our areas of work.”
The drive for social justice and belonging fuels and guides everything we do. For us, this means believing that a just society is both necessary and attainable and using our funding to help us all reach that future.
“Systemic Justice is radically transforming how the law works for communities campaigning for racial, social, and economic justice. We do this by building communities’ knowledge of using litigation in their campaigns, and by supporting them in designing and bringing changemaking court cases on their own terms.”
We wanted to better understand how much of our funding goes to organisations serving and run by leaders from racialised communities. To help us do this, we applied the Funders for Race Equality racial justice audit tool to our grant-making.
The analysis revealed that we had reduced the discrepancy in our racial justice funding and, for the first time, the average grant size we awarded to race equity sector organisations was 10% larger than those awarded to organisations outside this sector.
Greater equity is as relevant to us as an organisation and employer as it is to our funding approaches. With the support of our colleagues, we’ve set out to prioritise diversity, equity and inclusion across our operational plans. Our staff worked with external consultants to help develop a new internal forum to reflect on Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion and to help move them forward.
This work has been designed, led and championed by staff, who have thoughtfully and carefully created a space where staff can have reflective and sometimes challenging conversations about who we want to be as an organisation.
Strong relationships between us and the organisations we fund is a cornerstone of our work. Our intention is always to work alongside the people we fund, valuing their expertise and vision and being as responsive as we can as a funder. This insight from those we work with was invaluable in informing key decisions we’ve made.
Over the course of the year, we reviewed four of our open funds: Arts, Ideas and Pioneers, India and Migration. In developing our new Migration Fund, we consulted widely with those working on migrant justice and related fields as well as migrants, refugees, people from diaspora communities and other funders.
As a result, we introduced a more relational and straightforward application process and longer-term funding, with the ambition of this leading to more funding for community-led groups.
We also consulted extensively with a range of stakeholders about our Arts Fund, and about what a better, more regenerative and expansive cultural sector might look like.
Through this, we identified areas where we feel more action is needed, including supporting more organisations led by and serving artists and freelance workers, paying attention to working conditions in the sector, and funding more organisations working at the intersections of art, activism and social change.
“We are the world’s first Museum of Homelessness, created and developed by people who either have been or are still homeless. Every element of our work is designed by the community…In May 2024, we opened our first bricks and mortar site in Finsbury Park and Paul Hamlyn Foundation have been alongside us from the very beginning.”
This year, we have continued to find value in collaborating with other funders, creating more resources and capacity to make change and giving us access to more ideas and perspectives. As part of this, we committed £2 million to the Justice Together Initiative, a funder collaboration that works to increase access to justice for people in the immigration system.
“It’s crucial to have a fair, efficient and humane immigration system in the UK that grants people who migrate to this country the legal status that enables them to access their rights and entitlements and live a human life.”
We’re also part of a group of six funders who’ve made a ten year investment in LocalMotion – a social, economic and environmental justice movement, by and for communities. LocalMotion brings people, organisations and institutions together, so that communities in six places – Carmarthen, Enfield, Lincoln, Oldham, Middlesbrough and Torbay – can benefit from joined up thinking, pooled resources and long-term collaboration and planning with the UK funding community.
“LocalMotion is not about traditional grant-making, it’s about changing people’s mindsets so they can shift power dynamics, more honestly learn from mistakes, and change deep-rooted structural challenges. Funders’ continued involvement recognises the power of working together and using strong community ties to help drive change.”
Our commitment to young people – especially those facing a challenging transition to adulthood – runs through all of our grant-making. We have a particular interest in helping organisations that centre and prioritise youth voice and experience to influence decision-making and which support young people to actively shape the world in which they live.
This year, we’ve furthered this commitment by funding more youth organising, recognising the value of young people being supported to build their power and lead the change. To support the infrastructure for this work, we’ve funded the Civic Power Fund’s Alliance for Youth Organising – a new intergenerational collective that will work together to invest in the structures, spaces, networks and organisations needed for youth organising to thrive.
This year we also launched Kinship Discovery – a year-long programme of exploration, research, thinking and insight-generation to inform a major new funding initiative focused on young people and hope for the future.
“Paul Hamlyn Foundation support has transformed Peak’s work…A dedicated co-leadership role for Young People’s work and an ecosystem of paid roles and opportunities allows us to shift power to Young People as co-leaders of our rurally-based arts organisation.”
The past year has been full of exploration, analysis and reflection – which has informed change in our funds and in our wider grant-making. We expect this theme to continue next year as we begin to review our strategy and welcome our next Chief Executive and new trustees to the board.
To sit alongside this strategic review, we will develop a new learning framework to help us reflect on our role as grant-makers and to better understand the impact we and those we support have.
To celebrate 30 years of supporting artists at critical points in their careers, our Awards for Artists, given annually to five visual artists and five composers, will increase from £60,000 to £75,000.
The 55 grants described here have been awarded between April and June 2024 and total over £12.22 million.
