Collaborate: Safer Spaces

Our main aim is to test whether a co-missioning approach can better support sustainable, equitable partnerships between grassroots organisations and larger institutions around safer spaces work. Rather than traditional competitive funding, we're exploring how funders can act as active partners, sharing decision-making and collaborative risk with grantees.

Key questions we're investigating include: How can we move from 'power-over' to 'power-with' dynamics in funding? What does it look like to distribute decision-making about community resources to communities themselves? How might participatory approaches shift power dynamics in philanthropy? Can guaranteed funding for shortlisted applicants create more space for trust-building and relationship development? How can we better support applicants (successful & unsuccessful) to collaborate with each other beyond the application process? What might co-evaluation look like when funders and grantees share responsibility for learning and accountability more collaboratively?

We're particularly interested in learning whether this approach enables more impactful collaborations to emerge from addressing locally-identified problems rather than perfectly-crafted applications.