2025 marks my fifteenth year in grant-making. Fifteen years is long enough to see patterns emerge: practices get stuck, ideas are revisited, and sometimes a concept is dusted off, rebranded and presented as something entirely new and groundbreaking. Every so often though, a genuine shift happens – something that feels like progress. For me, the move towards funders providing more unrestricted funding is one of those shifts.

Unrestricted funding is a no-strings donation, for general use by a charity to advance its mission. At the William Grant Foundation, we give this funding whenever we can. Read more about our flexible funding.

This is the kind of practice that you know in your gut is better. It builds trust, it gives funded partners the flexibility they need, and it shifts the focus to what really matters: the work itself. I like to think enthusiasm is infectious, but I know gut feelings are not enough to carry a movement.

For unrestricted funding to stick, we need to prove its value. We need to keep finding meaningful ways to demonstrate that value – ways that resonate not only within our own circles but also with those who fear that de-restricting grants undermines accountability for impact. And we need to develop our understanding of how it works – alongside the other tools in our funder’s toolbox – to support our own learning.

Diving into the human experience

Thankfully, insights and resources shared by organisations like IVAR are helping people to explore how we can learn from and evaluate the difference that unrestricted funding makes. This involves moving away from wordsmithing, stepping out of the spreadsheet and diving into the human experience. Unrestricted funding invites us to think differently about impact – not as a tidy and flashy report of outputs, but as a richer story of transformation, with all its ups and downs.

As I sit here, patiently awaiting the first signs of Spring, it strikes me that unrestricted funding is a bit like tending to the roots of a tree. When you offer unrestricted funding, you’re often supporting the vital systems that allow a whole tree to thrive. The thing about tending to the roots is that a lot of the action happens underground and out of sight. Development isn’t always obvious and evaluating the impact requires you to look for different signs of progress beyond counting the fruit: healthier leaves, a sturdier trunk, a tree that can weather the storms.

Exploring unrestricted funding

We hope that unrestricted funding helps partners nurture deep, healthy roots. In particular, we hope that it:

• Enables leaders to focus on creativity, investing in their teams and addressing the real challenges in communities.
• Gives breathing room to plan, experiment, and even fail without fear of losing funding.
• Encourages funded partners to tell us honest, important stories, even though they are harder to quantify.
• Shifts power dynamics in a way that pairs trust and flexibility with accountability and learning.

We want to wrestle with questions such as:

• What new possibilities does unrestricted funding unlock for an organisation’s staff and community?
• What does it take for an organisation to be empowered to maximise the potential of unrestricted funding?
• How do smaller and larger unrestricted grants make a difference?
• How does it strengthen the golden (but often invisible) threads that keep the sector together?
• Has it ever changed the trajectory of a third sector leader’s life?

Let’s learn out loud together

Unrestricted funding isn’t about letting go of learning. It is about learning differently and spending more time listening to the messy, magical stories of change happening in the real world. As part of my work at the William Grant Foundation, I will be exploring the impact of our use of unrestricted funding, and I’m just embarking on that journey now. I’ll be speaking with our funded partners and stakeholders to understand if and how it is making a difference, and what we can learn to improve our practice.

I also want to connect with others who are working on this – what questions are you asking to truly capture the value of unrestricted funding, and what insights are emerging? What’s the right balance between storytelling and accountability? If you would like to join an informal conversation on Tuesday 18 February (11:00-12:00 on Zoom), I would love to hear from you.

Join an informal conversation on ‘Unrestricted funding, unlimited learning’ – email foundation@wgrant.com to request the Zoom link.

Photo above: Saheliya

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Hosted by Foundation CEO, Nick Addington, we speak to Ross McCulloch of Third Sector Lab about the open working programme he runs for charities and to Leah Black of EVOC about her experience of working in the open as she develops a new Regenerative Futures Fund for Edinburgh.

Nick is also joined by other members of the Foundation team to discuss our own commitment to start ‘learning out loud’.

Shownotes

Third Sector Lab’s website is where you can find out more about the programmes they run, including the Open Working and Re-use programme and The Curve – a series of free digital training webinars and online resources for third sector organisations, which is supported by the William Grant Foundation alongside other funders.

You can read Leah’s blog posts about the development of the Regenerative Futures Fund here, including that initial blog that kick-started it all. More about the Regenerative Futures Fund can be found here on EVOC’s website.

Giles Turnbull: The Agile Comms Handbook is an inspiring and short read for anyone wanting to get started with working in the open.

You might have noticed a green badge at the bottom of this website. If you haven’t then do take a look. It indicates our commitment (alongside many other trusts and foundations) to work towards being an open and trusting grant-maker as part of a campaign run by IVAR, the Institute for Voluntary Action Research.

The aim is to encourage funders to make grants in a way that demonstrates confidence in and respect for the organisations they fund and makes life easier for them in the face of the many challenges they currently face.

I am not going to go into detail about our participation in the campaign – there’s a page on this website that shares our open and trusting commitments, actions and plans.

Instead I want to use this space to draw some attention to the importance we place on this as an integral part of the William Grant Foundation’s approach and development, and to:

• help you understand a bit more about what drives us as a funder
• share our open-ness to learn more about how we can improve and do better
• maybe even encourage other funders share more of their own open and trusting journeys

With significant and often increasing scrutiny of charities, often related to less (and therefore more competitive) resources and higher expectations; it is important that funders hold a mirror up to themselves, too, including seeking the views of those they support and acting on what they find. 

Reflections of a former fundraiser

I’m not from a funding background. With over 20 years spent working in the third sector and in support of community and voluntary organisations, I come from more of a fund-seeking background.

In most of my previous roles fundraising was for me (like many others) a task built into, or onto, my job. Helping smaller voluntary organisations to apply for funding to enable them to resource their activities and working on continuation or project fundraising for my own organisation.

Back then, would I have recognised any of the 8 open and trusting principles in my dealing with funders?

Don’t waste time

Ask relevant questions

Accept risk

Act with urgency

Be open

Enable flexibility

Communicate with purpose

Be proportionate

I feel I may have reacted fairly sceptically had these ideas came onto my radar… that’s not to say that my past experience with funders has always been difficult or negative. However I recognise now my tacit acceptance of the power imbalance, of the amount of work to tailor the application to each funders’ requirements, and of the sometimes difficult balance of managing funders’ reporting expectations vs getting on and delivering the work.

I probably moaned and grumped to colleagues, and we’d have shared our collective pain points.

Would I have had an idea to feed these feelings and thoughts back (constructively) to a funder? No, probably not. I don’t remember a route to do so, and I wasn’t going to raise my organisation’s head above the parapet. 

At one time I do clearly remember a funder staff member who flipped a switch and created a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. They said: ‘it’s our job to give money away – if we don’t then we are not doing our job’. It was a significant revelation at the time – looking back understanding this shifted the dynamic in my head a little. And so here I think it is important to acknowledge that funders have been thinking about and making progress on how they can do things better for a lot longer that I have been in this space.

Reflections from a funder perspective

When I started with the Foundation, I very much had the above statement in mind – but very quickly this understanding jumped forward in a big way with the addition of one small word:

“It’s our job to give money away well – if we don’t then we are not doing our job”

I know this is true because three months after joining the Foundation in 2018 I wrote a short piece for our Management Committee to share some of my early reflections – I had not looked at it again until writing this, but this is what I wrote:

I am still excited by the way! The open and trusting journey and community is one that has, and continues to, turn up the dimmer switch for me on that early, pre-Foundation, lightbulb moment.  Not only does it help us to continue to develop our learning about how to be a better funder and partner to the organisations we support, it also allows us to contribute our own experience of this to a wider group of funders in the hope we can add value more widely (here’s an example).

IVAR’s leadership and facilitation of this collective approach – where we can scratch our heads, learn and share in a safe space is hugely valuable. Have we cracked it? Absolutely not – the improvement journey is not one with an end – and here at the Foundation we do like a cycle.

We call this our strategy for effectiveness cycle.

Going forward

We are making changes – you can read more about some of these in our main Open and Trusting webpage that we will update as we go. Changes include our Feedback Project introduced in 2021, which offers a way for our grant-holders to tell us what they think and to rate our performance (More to come on this in another post).

But back to my original question is it time for funders to start holding themselves to account more critically? It’s not time to start – it is time to keep going and to ensure that we continue to provide easy ways for those we support to tell us what they think and to make this feel less risky to do.

The open and trusting initiative will help us to continue this and we hope our commitments demonstrate we are genuine in our effort to listen, learn and improve.