UK Community Foundations: the place-based read

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UK Community Foundations (UKCF) brings together the 47 accredited UK Community Foundations and is a UKGrantmaking partner organisation. Here, Sam Grimmett Batt, UKCF’s Director of Partnerships and Insight, reflects on what this year’s edition tells us about place-based grantmaking

Place-based philanthropy is firmly on the national agenda. The Government’s ‘Our Place to Give’ strategy, a wave of national match funding initiatives and Pride in Place all point in the same direction: where money is invested, and how it is rooted in local relationships, matters as much as how much is invested. 

The headline picture of grantmaking is one of growth just above inflation against a backdrop of high demand and rising costs in civil society. But beneath the top-line figures sits a more layered story, which this year’s geographic focus helps to reveal.

Small grants are getting bigger, and larger grants are getting more concentrated

Three editions in, a clear pattern is emerging. The median size of published grants has risen from £13,194 in 2023-24 to £19,620 in 2024-25. The share of grants under £10,000 has fallen sharply: from around half of all grants in 2022-23, to 40% in 2023-24, to around a third in 2024-25. At the same time, large grants are concentrating: fewer than 2% of grants are now for £1 million or more, but they account for over half of the total amount granted, and that percentage has increased year on year.

Much of this is welcome news. The National Lottery Community Fund’s decision to double the Awards for All cap to £20,000 has lifted thousands of grassroots grants into a more substantial bracket and explains much of the trend above.  For many recipients that will mean a more meaningful award. But it also means the data on small grants is a little harder to read than it was. We can see the shape of grantmaking changing; what we cannot yet tell is whether the smallest, often volunteer-led organisations are receiving more, the same, or less in real terms as a share of the overall picture. It’s a question worth watching, because the communities grassroots groups support, and the routes that funding takes to reach them, matter more than ever.

What place looks like in the data

Community Foundations are one part of this landscape: 47 independent, locally-governed funders working across every part of the UK. As the data shows, their grantmaking varies widely from place to place. Foundation Scotland’s grew by over 40% in the year; Community Foundation for Northern Ireland’s reduced significantly, reflecting the planned close of a time-limited programme rather than any change in underlying activity. That local variation is what a place-based network looks like, with each foundation responding to the needs, partnerships and opportunities of its own area.

Place-based funding is its own discipline. It depends on being in a community for long enough to know what is needed, and being trusted enough to fund it well, often through small, flexible grants to small charities and community groups. The data tells this story too. Community Foundations are consistently identified across the years as making smaller, shorter-term grants, alongside other funders whose grants also reach recipients with an income of less than £100k – the volunteer-led groups, mutual aid networks and user-led organisations that make up so much of grassroots civil society. The persistence of short-term grants surfaces a tension the main analysis touches on, and that Community Foundations feel on the ground: despite recent drives toward, and appetite for, longer term grants in the sector at large, Community Foundations are still experiencing a reluctance from funders and donors to resource this, especially for smaller groups.

Community Foundations also hold significant donor-advised funds (DAFs). The data shows DAFs distributed £2.4 billion in 2024-25, up 8% on the year and 29% on 2022-23, making them one of the fastest-growing routes for private philanthropy in the UK. DAFs held by Community Foundations aren’t captured in that segment of the analysis, which means the true scale of growth is likely to be larger still.

Trends in multi-year funding

UK Grantmaking data doesn’t yet tell us whether multi-year funding is increasing or decreasing across the different categories of organisations making grants in the UK.  So we cannot know whether this tension is playing out to a greater or lesser degree in other parts of the funding landscape. Other sources suggest a shift is underway among larger foundations: The Association for Charitable Foundation’s (ACF) Foundations in Focus 2025 reports a noticeable move toward longer-term, flexible funding, and 134 funders had signed up to IVAR’s Open and Trusting commitments as of April 2024. What is less clear is how far that shift is reaching down to the smallest organisations that Community Foundations and other grassroots-focused funders work with. Encouragingly, more funders are now choosing to report on grant duration in their published data, so the picture should become clearer over time. If you fund grants and you don’t yet publish duration data, this is the year to start. The clearer the picture, the better the questions we can all ask.

The case for multi-year funding

In our own national partnerships with funders, coordinated by UKCF and delivered locally through Community Foundations, we are seeing the extraordinary benefits of longer term funding, even for very small organisations, and even where the annual award is small. We encourage public sector, national and regional funders, and philanthropists buying into the place-based model, whether they fund grassroots groups directly or through place-based intermediaries like Community Foundations, to consider adopting a long-term view wherever possible. Multi-year funding beyond the typical 12 to 24 months is where the biggest gains lie.

Longer-term, place-based funding, when done well, is one of the most powerful ways to amplify community voices in funding decisions and to ensure that funding remains closely aligned with what communities themselves identify is needed. There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating what this kind of funding can achieve, alongside a wider field of place-based funders ready to work with partners to deliver it. 

Better data, better decisions, better grantmaking

UKGrantmaking is a real act of sector collaboration, and we are proud to be part of it. 360Giving and our fellow partners ACF, ACO, London Funders and Pears Foundation, have built a shared, open, comprehensive picture of grantmaking in the UK, which is invaluable. Used alongside the additional analysis that partners produce in their own right, such as ACF’s Foundations in Focus, it becomes even more powerful. It has become an important facet of our insight work at UK Community Foundations. Funders, policymakers, researchers and civil society can all now see more clearly where investment is growing, contracting and where the gaps sit. At a moment when philanthropy, government and civil society are asking deeper questions about how to invest in places, that shared picture makes better decisions possible.

More place-based funding, designed and delivered with communities at the heart of it, is what we are championing, and as the data sharpens, so does the case for it.