Future Communities Fund
Shifting power to young people
“Having unrestricted funding means we can truly respond to young people’s ideas—working at their pace, following their aspirations, and validating their choices.”
— Funded Partner
Download our learning reports…
- Exploring approaches to assessing the impact of unrestricted funding
- Enhancing stability and responsiveness: How multi-year unrestricted funding enables organisations to support young people
About the Fund
In 2022 we launched the first round of our Future Communities Fund to help us deliver on our Building Communities of the Future Together strategy. This was the first time for us to provide multi-year, unrestricted funding, with a total investment of £1.5 million. The first round of the fund was set up to support organisations working with diverse young people who face structural barriers into leadership positions. We awarded grants of up to £150,000 over five years to smaller organisations with an annual turnover below £250,000.
We designed and delivered this fund in a participatory and co-operative way in line with our commitment to be an open and trusting grantmaker. Through this fund we wanted to make unrestricted, long-term funding accessible and facilitate co-operation between our funded partners during and beyond the funding programme.
At the heart of the fund design and delivery were our Future Communities Collective—a group of young people from diverse backgrounds. They played a central role in allocating the funding, co-designing our Theory of Change, and commissioning our learning partner, IVAR.
Our Approach to Learning & Impact
Understanding the impact of unrestricted funding is a challenge that few funders have tackled head-on. From the outset, we knew that measuring the change achieved by flexible funding would require a new way of thinking. In partnership with IVAR, we set out to co-design an evaluation framework with our funded partners. The intention was to design a framework that meets our needs as a funder and creates meaningful opportunities for our funded partners to learn and grow.
Our approach is grounded in deep collaboration. Each year, we conduct interviews with funded partners, facilitate peer learning and networking sessions, and support youth-led research to understand how our funding is influencing young people’s lives. Pause and reflect sessions for our funding team ensure we remain open, adaptive, and driven by genuine learning. We recognise that impact is the result of a collective effort and that our funding is just one part of a much larger story.
Measuring the Impact of Unrestricted Funding
At the start of our learning and impact work, we explored how other funders assess unrestricted funding. The research conducted by IVAR found five approaches:
- Organisational development: are we helping the organisations to get stronger?
- Outcomes oriented: is our funding helping organisations to deliver positive outcomes for their communities?
- Systemic change: Are we seeing progress being made towards our long-term change goals?
- Funder performance: Does the way we fund grantees support them to deliver their best work, or could we do better?
- Adaptation oriented: Do we understand the changing context for funded charities, and are we adapting quickly enough to better support them?
We see the value of each of the approaches and are using them as a flexible framework to guide our learning journey. Inspired by sector leaders such as the Ford Foundation, we are particularly interested in how unrestricted funding strengthens organisations and, in turn, leads to better outcomes for young people. Throughout this process, we remain transparent and realistic, recognising that many factors contribute to impact and our financial support is just one element among many.
What We’ve Learned So Far
Our first annual report, based on in-depth interviews with funded partners, highlighted the transformative effect of unrestricted funding. Many organisations reported:
- Enhanced organisational stability by creating the space for long-term strategic planning, offering permanent and long-term contracts to staff, investing in staff training and boosting their emotional resilience.
- Being able to quickly adapt to young people’s ideas and needs using the financial freedom afforded by the unrestricted grant
Funded organisations understood that their own stability and responsiveness are essential to their mission of supporting and shifting power to young people. This is because:
- Organisational stability is crucial for developing long-term, consistent relationships with young people, which form the foundations for effective support.
- Organisational responsiveness is required to react quickly and positively to the ideas and needs of young people in an ever-changing world. With greater capacity to respond, organisations can shift power to young people more effectively.
As one partner put it, “We’ve been trusted to follow the needs of the young people and our community—the people we know best.”
Looking Ahead
Our learning journey is just beginning. Future reports will dive deeper into the impact of unrestricted funding on young people themselves, as well as offer practical insights for both funders and charities on how to give and make the most of flexible, unrestricted funding to fulfil their missions.
We’re committed to sharing what we learn—not just to improve our own practice, but to support the wider sector in making unrestricted funding more effective.
Subscribe to our blog, or email Dr Asimina Vergou, Head of Learning and Impact asimina.vergou@coop.co.uk to find out more about how we evaluate and learn from our Future Communities Fund.