OCT Funding Impact: 2023-24

Every year at the OCT we look at the reach and outcomes of the funds distributed that year. The headlines for 23/24 are shared on our website here and a summary follows below. It’s not an exact science, but it requires us to stop and consider our contribution to the VCFSE sector as a general funder.

Giving summary

• At just over £3m, total giving increased this year by almost £180k on the previous year.
• Grants were bigger than in the previous year, largely spent on continuing existing work, or stabilising organisations by providing unrestricted or core costs. The relational nature of how we work enabled us to make grants to existing grant holders at almost twice the value of new grants approved in the previous year.
• However, there were fewer grants (6) to organisations that hadn’t been funded before. Although we don’t fund the same organisations indefinitely, we do support stability where that is needed and where funds allow. This means that we were less able to start or progress as many new funding conversations as we would have liked.
  
• Although grants were relatively evenly distributed across our four focus areas (Arts & Culture, Environment, Health and Tackling Inequality), when we look at this by outcomes, the majority have a social inequalities focus, whether or not the organisations that were funded identify as such. 12 organisations were engaged in ‘social change’ activity, despite not being rooted in this sector; this has been the pattern for the last three years.
• The rise we expected to see in environmental funding was not as significant as we had expected, due to delays to projects and lack of capacity within some organisations.

What does this mean?

These and other observations have raised the following considerations: 

Grant length: It has been difficult, this year, to make grants to organisations that we haven’t funded before due to so much (82%) of our funding being committed at the beginning of the year through multi-year grants. We have updated our policy regarding continuation funding, such that if funding is granted after a first grant, it will usually taper down throughout the funding period, and then end. We are keen to ensure we reach a wider spread of organisations in need, but need to offset that against the repercussion: exposing others to the merry-go-round of finding new support for work that just needs to keep going.

Focus: Climate change is an escalating threat to every organisation’s mission, yet still woefully underfunded by philanthropy and other voluntary funding sources. We have been working on adding value to our general grantmaking through green grants and some large environmental projects, but we will be focusing more intentionally on work in this sector, looking at which groups are most impacted by climate change in GM. 

Size: £1.2m went to the 42% of organisations that we funded that have an income of under £1m. We are acutely aware that many small organisations can struggle to get funded, and not all have survived the punishing last few years. This is inequitable, and perpetuates existing inequalities; we will continue to focus new grants on underfunded organisations that fall within our Purpose Framework, particularly those with a total income of under £1m.

Conclusion

In 23/24 the OCT and other funders have had to ‘cut their cloth’ in line with the operating context, and this has been challenging for all of us. Although the total funds distributed was greater than the previous year, we had to decline more opportunities at the end of 23/24 and into 24/25 than ever before.

At the same time, we have been working on new projects for 24/25 and developing our Funding Plus offer. The best way we have found to do this is through active listening, and collaborative, cross-sector working, knowing that the answers to the challenges being tackled are most likely to come from the communities most affected.