Using all the tools in our toolbox
Participatory City
We use all our tools to unlock change
We want to play an active role ourselves in responding to the critical issues facing our society. As a funder we have a range of tools – including grants and investments - we can use to effect change.
We will now use all our tools to broker alliances, use our influence and remove barriers to achieve our impact goals.
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Grants
We support organisations' charitable work with unrestricted, core and project grants. Learn more about our approach to funding and what you can expect from us.
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Social Investment
We use social investment as a tool, alongside our grants and our own actions, to achieve our impact goals. Learn more about our social investment opportunities.
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Funding Plus
We offer a range of capacity building support to organisations we fund to help them achieve greater impact.
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Insights and learning
We share insights from our work along with research and evaluation we've commissioned, and key publications from work we fund.
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Funding partnerships
We want to be at the forefront of new approaches to funding - working in partnership with other funders and organisations to increase our reach and make more of a difference.
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Infrastructure support
We want to enable a sector fit for the future by supporting work that contributes to our impact goals and work across our aims by enabling a stronger, inclusive and innovative sector.
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Convening and connecting
We connect people and organisations to foster dialogue, share learning, create joint opportunities and develop new, collective approaches. We also work in partnership ourselves.
New ideas
We support new ideas which contribute to our impact goals as well as those which work across our aims to unblock barriers, test new approaches or build movements for change.
Influencing and co-design
We back the work we care about: co-designing initiatives, making links, and amplifying impact through our communications. We push for change on issues that are key to our impact goals. We recognise the expertise of others, through the Involving Young People Collective, and Our Natural World Advisory Panel.
Data and digital
We value the role that data and digital play in both our own strategy and those we fund. We publish our funding as open data, and embrace opportunities brought by tech innovation and are open to experimenting with new technologies that support our aims.
Infrastructure
We want to enable a sector fit for the future by supporting work that contributes to our impact goals and work across our aims by enabling a stronger, inclusive and innovative sector. This includes key infrastructure organisations and new ideas that unblock barriers, test new approaches or build movements for change.
Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Investment Strategy
We are exploring how we might better use our role as an asset owner in support of our impact goals. We have also signed up to the funder commitment on climate change.
Impact Investing
We are testing the potential in achieving market-like returns by investing into impact funds which align to our impact goals and which generate a measurable impact. This work will be used to inform our longer-term investment strategy. Learn more about our approach to impact investing.
Endowment
We aim to align our investments with our charitable objectives, whilst maintaining a consistent real value for the endowment over the longer term. This ensures we can keep working to improve our natural world, secure a fairer future and strengthen the bonds in communities in the UK for decades to come.
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Communications about our funding
Guidance for organisations we work with on communications about our funding, including logo files, press release quotes, and how to get in touch with our Communications team.
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Leave feedback for Esmée
Find out about the different ways you can leave feedback for Esmée.
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Our language and classifying our data
Learn about what language we use when talking about people and communities.
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Our funding data
We publish all our grants and social investments on 360Giving, an initiative that aims to help UK funders share their data in an open and standard format online.
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Safeguarding
Learn about our approach to safeguarding at each stage of our funding process.
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Living Wage Funder
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is a Living Wage funder. Read more to find out what that means for our funding.
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Useful sector resources
Find useful sector resources on a range of topics including legal, fundraising, campaigning, digital and safeguarding.
Find out moreYou might be interested in
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01 May 2024Increasing Funding Plus support for wellbeing
We are committed to targeting more Funding Plus support towards preventing burnout and improving wellbeing for the people we fund.
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Esmée’s allocation to social investment increased to £60m
We are delighted to announce that Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is increasing our allocation to social investment to £60m.
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Diversity, equity and inclusion: progress in 2023
A summary of key actions we have taken during 2023 to make progress on our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Who our funding is reaching 2023
To help us understand who our funding is reaching, we ask all applicants and organisations we fund to complete a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) monitoring form. See a report analysing the data we collected for grants awarded and applications decided in 2023.
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