Less than 5 per cent of funding from the UK’s largest grantmakers in 2022/23 supported work tackling social injustice, a report has found.

The third edition of Funding Justice, published by the charity Civic Power Fund and the consultancy The Hour is Late, found that just 4.5 per cent of the funding from the UK’s largest grantmakers supported social justice work in 2022/23. 

This was despite nearly 28 per cent of the grant applications reviewed by the funders having been to support social justice initiatives, according to the report, which analysed more than 20,000 grants totalling £935.7m from 84 funders.

The 4.5 per cent was a decline compared with the year before, when 5.7 per cent of funding supported social justice work.

The research found just 0.2 per cent of the funding from these grantmakers went towards community organising work.

According to the report, social justice grants remain “heavily weighted towards ‘service delivery’ and ‘inside game’ theories of change”.

It finds that nearly 47 per cent of social justice grants, by value, were directed to service delivery work, while 26 per cent were directed to ‘inside game’ work – grants that advocate for change via legislation, policy, fiscal changes, strategic litigation or changes to corporate practice.

Just 8 per cent of funding was directed to structure organising work; 6 per cent went to personal transformation work and just 0.1 per cent went towards mass protest work.

The report says there has been a “continued unequal distribution of funding across the country”, finding that more than half of the social justice grants focused on national-level work.

At sub-national level, London continued to receive the most funding on a per capita basis, the report adds, receiving £411 in grant funding per 100 people.

The report also found that just under half of all of the social justice grants awarded were for 12 months or less, with a further 46 per cent supporting either two or three years of activity.

Just under 5 per cent of grants provided more than three years of support, the report adds.

It says: “Funders may, of course, be repeating two or three-year grants to the same organisations, and thereby providing steady support, and in due course we hope to develop a longitudinal dataset that allows us to see whether this is the case.

“But for the time being, we are struck by the short durations of many social justice grants.”