Photo: Outfit Moray

We take a place-based approach to our Youth Opportunities funding, staying close to a small number of communities and often building long-term relationships with the organisations working there. Reflecting on some of these long-standing partnerships for our annual review has reminded us why this matters – not just for young people, but for the organisations themselves, and for us.

Staying close to change

When we focus on specific places, we often hear early or in real time when something is shifting – whether that’s rising demand, more complex needs, or local services under increasing pressure. This information often emerges not through numbers and data, but through regular conversations, honest reporting and trusting relationships.

In one town, youth workers told us that specialist mental health and family support services were “at capacity and breaking,” with long waiting lists.

They heard this directly through day-to-day‑ conversations with young people and families – not through statistics. Because they had this local insight, they knew they needed to step in, adapt their own support, and bring in extra relief staff to cope with rising need.

Local insight shapes how we respond

Sharing this kind of insight helps us think more clearly about our own role. It means we can be proactive and look for other ways to support action on the changing challenges young people were facing.

When a grantee shares what they’re seeing on the ground – whether that’s pressure on mental health services, a spike in food insecurity or young people struggling more with transitions – it has a knock-on effect. It shapes how we think about our funding, where we focus our attention and how we support organisations to respond.

In recent years we’ve consistently heard from local youth organisations about the value of working through young people’s interests – from sport and creative arts to outdoor activity – when supporting those facing significant challenges. In response, we gradually increased our support for this work, which is now embedded within our Youth Opportunities funding.

Photo: Outfit Moray

Creating space for partners to adapt

When funding is steady and the relationship is strong, youth organisations can adapt their work without hesitation. Over the years, partners have redesigned sessions and support in many ways.

These changes happen because organisations are close to their young people and communities and they happen more easily if they feel confident that we will back their judgement — even when the work looks different from year to year.

A strategic example from one organisation related to its staffing structure. After recognising the risk of burnout in a small core team, and experiencing several staff departures at the same time, they took a step back rather than rushing to fill gaps. They reviewed their whole approach and redesigned roles to create a more balanced and resilient team.

This included promoting internal staff into new leadership positions, reducing pressure on the manager and building in more flexibility across full‑time and part‑time roles.

We hope they felt able to make this change confidently because funders gave them some of the stability they needed to think strategically instead of staying in firefighting mode. This kind of shift is easier when an organisation trusts its funders to back decisions that don’t produce quick wins and strengthens the organisation for the long run.

Photo: Elgin Youth Development Group

Trust and honesty lead to better support

One of the biggest benefits of local long-term partnerships is the honesty they allow. We want organisations to tell us openly when something isn’t working, when they’re stretched too thin or when external pressures are affecting their work – but we know it’s not always easy to share uncomfortable truths with funders.

Yet this honesty is often where the real learning sits. It helps us make better funding decisions, and in some cases, to step in with additional support. In this portfolio, this includes examples such as:

• a time-limited restricted grant to pay for specialist HR support to help a charity navigate a specific issue
• having open and honest conversations when we see opportunities to strengthen organisations and their governance – and often signposting partners to free sector support available to charities.

All of this speaks to our intention to support our partners to be more resilient and adaptable – so they can continue to be there for young people in the ways that matter.

Staying rooted in place

Our strategy for our place-based work has grown from our local relationships – from listening to local youth workers and from watching their organisations and young people evolve.

Because we stay in a place over many years, we see the full arc of youth work: the early relationship building, the moments of strain, staff changes, and the gradual, steady impact that isn’t always visible in the short term.

This wider view helps us support organisations not just for the activities they deliver, but for the people, spaces and systems that make the work sustainable.

As we look ahead, our intent is to continue help create the conditions where this kind of work can flourish.

Photo: Edinburgh Tradfest 2025 by Douglas Robertson.

As an open and trusting funder, we aim to give grantees as much flexibility as possible in how they use our grants. 

When we talk about flexible funding, we mean any grant that isn’t tightly prescribed – from fully unrestricted support to funding that can be used across a broad area of an organisation’s work. Around two‑thirds of our recent funding has been flexible in this way.

This blog draws on direct reflections from grantees, sharing in their own words how flexible funding is supporting their work. 

Exploring what becomes possible

Alongside other trusts and foundations in the open and trusting grant‑making movement, we believe that simpler, more flexible funding practices can be transformative for charities. But we also know flexible funding itself is still far from the norm for many of the organisations we support.

Over the past year, we’ve been exploring what becomes possible when partners have flexible funding. Much of what we’re hearing reinforces learning collated by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research (IVAR) – stewards and champions of the open and trusting grant-making movement – around what works. Listening closely to our grantees also continues to sharpen our understanding of why this approach matters, and where we can go further.

These insights come from many places, such as our own observations as a team, responses from the organisations we fund to our regular anonymous feedback surveys, conversations and written grant reports, and what we hear when grantees speak to each other in peer learning spaces.

Across the diverse strands of our work, several themes stand out.  

1. Flexibility helps organisations be responsive to what people need

The strongest theme is responsiveness. Flexible funding gives organisations the space to respond to real-time feedback and what is happening in people’s lives and the world around them – not what was written in a funding application months earlier.

For youth organisations, this means being led by young people’s ideas, energy and capacity. As one partner told us:

“It means we can be truly responsive to what the young people want to do… and that’s so important as we work to build and deepen trusting relationships.”

For arts organisations, responsiveness can mean adapting to context, place and what communities are experiencing. As one arts leader put it:

“When you’ve got a flexible pot, you can actually meet the moment… not be restricted to deliver something that no longer makes sense.”

Across all these examples, flexibility supports work that is people‑led, not funder‑led.

Flexible funding is enabling Young Sea Changers to experiment and adapt their approach to empowering young people to shape marine policy – read more in their spotlight story.

Photo by Rosa Payne.

2. It reduces pressure and creates space to think

Partners spoke openly about the human impact of flexible funding: lower stress, more clarity, and space to breathe because it can cover the essential core costs that sustain the organisation. One partner captured this feeling as:

“It means I can sleep at night because I’m not lying awake wondering how to pay wages. When we secure unrestricted funding, we literally do a wee dance in the office.”

3. It strengthens relationships – and unlocks trust

Flexible funding is often interpreted as a sign of confidence in a charity’s judgement and experience. One grantee said:

“I feel like you respect what already exists and you allow us to be the experts in our field and actually deliver the work.”

This trust also changes the relationship. People described feeling more able to speak openly to their funders, adapt plans or ask for support.

Several partners also noted that flexible, multi‑year grants can strengthen their standing with other funders, helping them secure additional support or agree expectations that feel more realistic. Signalling trust and stability through longer-term, flexible funding can help ease other funders’ concerns around organisations – concerns that may otherwise lead to applying restrictive conditions to grants.

4. It supports stability, especially for staffing 

Partners spoke about the importance of using flexible funding (particularly multi-year) to retain skilled people and smooth over gaps in project funding.

This really matters in work with communities where continuity is the backbone of good, relational practice. It also enables grantees to protect staff time for essential behind‑the‑scenes work. 

One grantee noted: 

“Unrestricted funding is great for putting the scaffolding around the work – making sure services are safe, impactful, and that staff have the support and training they need.” 

5. It enables thoughtful risk‑taking and learning 

We heard many examples of new approaches being tried because flexible funding offered room to test, reflect and adapt – e.g. piloting work with young people, refining community engagement programmes or being brave with complex, collaborative artistic projects. 

One leader summed it up simply: 

“It’s given us breathing space to try new things…and abandon what doesn’t work.” 

6. It reduces administrative burden

For some, the value of flexible funding also lies in the absence of complexity.

In this spotlight story, Lorn & Oban Healthy Options share learning on how flexible funding reduces complexity and enables them to focus on supporting people to make healthy choices together.

Not having to juggle multiple budgets and cost‑codes frees up significant time and energy for delivery, learning and collaboration. This is especially true when reporting back to the funder is straightforward and not weighed down by tight or complex requirements.

But flexible funding can’t do everything

Alongside all the positive reflections, we also noticed something important: even with flexible grants, many organisations still put themselves last. For some, it can feel uncomfortable to spend money on organisational needs when the pressure to deliver services is so intense. Consequently, internal strengthening – investment in people, systems, leadership or wellbeing – is often deprioritised.

We’ve been exploring this with some grantees through additional bursaries focused on organisational strengthening.

Read more about what we’re learning from our bursaries pilot.

Why this learning matters

These insights matter because they help us understand the real value of flexible funding – and where we can do more. Listening to organisations in their own words strengthens our commitment to open and trusting grant-making and working in ways that support the causes we care about.

This learning isn’t new, but it’s worth restating as the case for flexible, trust‑based funding becomes clearer and better evidenced. By sharing what we’re learning, and building on the experience of our peers, we hope to contribute to continuous improvement in grant‑making practice.

Photo: Argyll Hope Spot artists’ workshop.

In our recent blog about learning questions, we shared how these prompts are helping us pay attention to the change we want to contribute to. As we explored one question – What becomes possible when partners have flexible funding? – we noticed something important: flexible grants, while hugely valuable, don’t automatically lead to the organisational strengthening we hope they might enable.

Even when funding is flexible, organisations often prioritise delivery because investing internally can feel hard to justify. Grantees have described feeling uneasy about spending money on people, systems, strategies or governance when demand for their services is so high – even when this inward investment would ultimately strengthen their work.

Paired with our second learning question – Which aspects of our ways of working contribute to regenerative outcomes? – this helped us reflect on our Funder Plus offer and how we add value beyond the grant. It prompted us to ask:

• Are there ways we can support organisational strengthening more directly?
• How do we do that without adding burden or undermining trust?
• And how can we do it in a way that contributes positively to the wider ecosystem?

We wanted to explore what a small amount of money restricted for organisational strengthening could achieve, when funded partners could choose what to use it for. This led us to test a small Funder Plus bursary grants pilot with around ten grantees.

Several partners have described hesitation about using funding for inward‑facing work, even when it would ultimately strengthen their organisation. Read more in our blog, Looking under the bonnet.

What is the bursary pilot?

The bursary offers up to £5,000 of restricted funding for grantees to invest in strengthening their organisations. It’s intentionally small, relational and exploratory. Over the next six months our aim is to learn:

• what organisations choose when explicitly prompted to invest inwardly
• how our approach shapes those choices
• what value a small, focused intervention can add alongside a grant

We created a shortlist based on existing intelligence from our relationships and conversations, thinking about who could benefit from a bursary right now. The shortlist also includes a representative spread across our grant-making themes. We then had open conversations with grantees to develop the ‘ask’ together, and we approved bursaries on a rolling basis. This lighter, relational approach is consistent with our broader grant‑making and has generated useful learning in itself.

The mix of bursaries we’re supporting reflects a range of organisational needs – from improving digital communications expertise and income‑generation planning to investing in evaluation, staff development, partnership‑building and collective strategy work.

What we’re learning so far

1. Calling it a pilot helps everyone

Framing this as a pilot has helped manage expectations and given us permission to be exploratory and flexible. This isn’t a one‑off judgement about grantees’ needs. If the timing isn’t right, or they want more space to think, we can revisit the conversation later once we’ve learned more.

2. Our relational approach matters

By revisiting reports and previous conversations before reaching out, we were able to start from what organisations had already told us. This meant the conversations started from a deeper point of understanding and helped build trust. This, in turn, helped make the process feel more collaborative, honest and grounded in what organisations themselves had identified.

3. Don’t rely on assumptions

We don’t want to narrow the scope of what’s possible by assuming we know what’s needed, so we’re staying as open as possible in our conversations. We’re learning about how to offer just enough guidance to ensure that partners don’t default to expanding delivery because it’s familiar.

The conversations themselves have been a key source of learning. They’ve helped us understand organisational context more deeply and co‑develop the ‘ask’ over time. For some, proposals aligned very closely with what we anticipated. For others, the bursary is now being used for something quite different from what we initially expected.

This mix is useful: it helps us understand both where our instincts are right and where conversation reveals something different. A good example came from a conversation where we initially thought the bursary might support leadership development, but it transpired that a deeper priority was strengthening staff capacity through skills development and training.

We’ve also supported the evolution of ideas from bringing in consultants to “deliver for” into support that “works alongside” and builds internal capability where possible.

4. A rolling approval helps us stay responsive

Some organisations are ready to move quickly; others need more space to think. Approving bursaries on a rolling basis avoids unnecessary competition or deadlines, reduces burden and lets support develop at a natural pace and in a way that suits different organisational contexts.

5. A bursary can support good endings too

Another emerging insight is how the bursary could play a role at different stages of a funding relationship – including, potentially, where a small, focused piece of support could be useful as relationships shift or conclude.

A bursary could help ensure that when a relationship moves towards an ending, it does so in a way that still leaves the organisation better equipped – a regenerative transition rather than a sudden drop‑off.

Read more about third sector support for regenerative transitions in our Empowering Endings blog.

What next

This small pilot is already helping us understand how organisations articulate their needs when given space to think about their capacity – and how our ways of working can stay simple, flexible and genuinely useful.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue listening closely to the organisations involved. Capturing the learning will help us understand whether and how bursaries could fit within future versions of our Funder Plus offer- and whether some examples point more clearly to how unrestricted funding could be used instead. These nuances are exactly why a pilot approach is valuable.

We’re keen to share what we learn in ways that make a positive contribution to the wider ecosystem we’re part of. If you’d like to chat with us about the bursary pilot or compare notes, we’d be very happy to hear from you.

Email us at foundation@wgrant.com.

Photo: Sporting Memories Foundation Scotland

Understanding how change happens is an ongoing process of listening, noticing and reflecting. It unfolds in relationships, in conversations and in the decisions people make every day.

At the Foundation, we use a Theory of Change to describe how we think change happens, and the role we hope to play within it. It’s a tool to help us focus on where we add value: to the organisations we fund, the fields we work in, and to grant-making and philanthropy more widely.

And as we work with this tool, we’re trying to stay connected to the unfolding nature of change – looking for what’s emerging, not just what’s measurable. Learning questions have been a helpful companion in this.

What we mean by learning questions

A learning question is not designed to prove or validate anything. Rather than looking backwards at what has been achieved, learning questions help us learn forward. They prompt us to ask: What should we be paying attention to now, so that our work can evolve thoughtfully over time?

It’s a way of staying curious as we gather insights and try to improve our practice – a reminder to listen well and look for learning, without assuming we already know the answers. It also helps us pay closer attention to the topics that matter most right now, without getting lost in the soup of everything we could learn.

We’ve begun by exploring two learning questions that connect with our Theory of Change.

1. What becomes possible when our partners have flexible funding?

We aim to give grantees as much flexibility as possible regarding how they use the funds we give them. We often make our grants unrestricted – i.e. for general use by the charity to advance its mission. Flexible funding signals trust in organisations and offers space for stability, reflection and adaptation.

We want to understand this more deeply. For example:

• What kinds of possibilities does flexible funding create?
• How does it support organisations to stay mission-focused?
• Where does it contribute to internal resilience (wellbeing, planning, leadership, infrastructure, etc) – and where does it not?

This learning question helps us listen for subtleties – not just whether flexible funding makes a difference, but how it works, for whom, and in what circumstances.

2. Which aspects of our ways of working contribute to regenerative outcomes (including good endings)?

Regenerative thinking is an evolving idea for us. It involves building relationships that are nourishing, reciprocal and consciously working in ways that help create the conditions for people, organisations, fields and the wider ecosystem to thrive. This question helps us pay attention to the parts of our approach that feel genuinely supportive and the parts where we might unintentionally create pressure, complexity or distance.

For example, it prompts us to notice moments where endings or transitions (e.g. when we end a funding relationship with a charity) are handled in a way that leaves relationships not only intact, but strengthened, and to identify where our ways of working might enable deeper or more lasting benefits. This is only one aspect of what it means to work regeneratively, but it’s a helpful area for us to explore.

Using learning questions in our work

We gather insights in many places: conversations with grantees, informal team reflections, peer discussions, grantee feedback and more. Often, something is said or observed that makes us think: that feels important.

Keeping our learning questions in mind in these moments and reflecting on insights in regular team meetings or discussions with our giving groups helps us notice how the change we hope to contribute to shows up in practice – and where, or why, it doesn’t.

A clear example is emerging as we develop our funder plus offer (support we provide beyond the grant). As we talk with grantees and learn alongside our peers, we’ve been noticing how often organisations use funding for direct delivery, and how hard it is to prioritise investing in strengthening the organisation itself.

Even with flexible grants for core costs, many organisations still put themselves last – understandably, when demands for their services are increasing. This means internal strengthening, particularly investment in people, systems or leadership, can fall to the bottom of the list.

Several partners have described hesitation about using funding for inward‑facing work, even when it would ultimately strengthen their organisation and their contribution to the communities they serve. Read more in our ‘Looking under the bonnet’ blog.

By using our learning questions in our day-to-day work, we’ve been able to surface this pattern more clearly. Flexible funding is very important – but it isn’t a panacea for organisational resilience. It has helped us see that strengthening organisations may require complementary, restricted funding, and that how we offer that support matters as much as what we offer.

These insights are shaping the development of our funder plus offer. We’ve begun testing a small bursary pilot with some grantees, to explore whether a dedicated, light‑touch grant for organisational strengthening can support resilience in ways that feel regenerative and practical. We’ll share more about this in a future blog.

Learning together

Learning questions don’t lead to neat conclusions. For us, they are helping to hold open core areas of our Theory of Change and notice what’s unfolding within them.

We’d love to hear from others who are using, or interested in using, learning questions in their work – please get in touch via LinkedIn or email us if you’d like to chat.

Email us at foundation@wgrant.com.

The end or closure of something – an organisation, a programme, a grant – is not often something that is welcomed in our sector. Much like death, it can be taboo and full of fear and grief; something to be avoided above all. 
 
Endings often do not feel empowering at the time. Many come with stress, pain, and grief – especially when they’re unexpected or unavoidable. For those involved, the impact can be profound, and sometimes it’s only with hindsight that we see what space an ending created for something new.

But what if more endings could be anticipated, supported and held in a way that made them positive – empowering even? Allowing the old to end in a well-managed, deliberate way, capturing the learning and making space for new shoots to emerge.   

Building a network around endings

This is the vision of the Empowering Endings network, a group of people working in third sector support roles across Scotland who want to help charities and voluntary groups to have good endings of all kinds and to challenge the narrative that endings are bad or shameful. 

The Decelerator offers free information, tools and hands-on support for better endings.

The network emerged from conversations between the Decelerator, a free UK-wide support service for civil society organisations who are considering endings, and the folk behind Community Enterprise’s emergency support for the third sector in Scotland. 

With a small amount of support from the William Grant Foundation, a network of up to 40 people largely from local Third Sector Interfaces have met throughout 2025, to share what they’re doing and learning around supporting good endings.

Insights from the sector

At the latest session, (in the bleakest of Christmas quizzes!) we discussed the inevitability of endings, learning that 54% of Scottish charities are using their reserves unsustainably, up from 40% from autumn 2024 (Third Sector tracker).  

But we also talked about financial difficulties often being a symptom of a deeper organisational conflicts that can go unaddressed. David Rock’s SCARF model of psychological security was mentioned as a way to remember what we as humans need to feel safe in times when honest conversations and difficult decisions are needed.

Looking at the Decelerator’s endings archetypes, we reflected that civil society people can sometimes tend towards the ‘rescuer’ mode, focused valiantly on protecting others and providing (short-term) fixes. But this isn’t the only role that we need.  

There aren’t often ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers in difficult times, but we agreed that potential endings are best dealt with early and with clarity and openness. Many of the network members reflected that organisations often approach support services only once it’s far too late to have options, and certainly to have any more expansive conversations about legacy. 

Hopefully talking more about endings as normal – maybe even beneficial – can help to remove some of the shame that can cling to them. Case studies from the Decelerator, for example on Year Here’s intentional ending, make for thought-provoking reading.  

Towards a regenerative approach

At the William Grant Foundation, we are thinking about our role in this too. What does a good end to a grant funding relationship look and feel like? How can we help necessary transitions to be done with intention and care? Should we consider funding orderly endings, even? 

Nature shows us that there are always cycles of growth and decay. 

Nick has spoken recently about our aim to help create a more regenerative future for our civil society ecosystem in Scotland. As part of this, we want to support and promote good endings where they’re needed, so that last season’s foliage is composted into rich fertiliser for what’s needed next.

If you’re interested in the Empowering Endings network, check out this page on the Decelerator’s website where you can download a Supporting Better Endings and Transitions toolkit and request to join the network. 

“The process from proposal submission to grant award felt slightly unclear at points.” 

This was one of the pieces of feedback we recently received from our funded partners, and we thought it was worth addressing directly. 

I’ve been applying for funding in Scotland for 25 years, working across areas like community health, culture, youth, and capital development, in both urban and rural settings. I’ve likely applied to nearly every funder available to Scottish charities and social enterprises – which gives me a valuable perspective in my current role as Partnerships and Learning Manager here at the William Grant Foundation. 

This feedback from a grantee really resonated with me. Working at the Foundation has given me a clear understanding of how our process works, but I’ll be honest – it might not always be so clear to those engaging with us for the first time, especially if you’re more familiar with open funding programmes with set dates for deadlines and decisions. 

Identifying and inviting potential partners

Firstly, it’s important to note that we are an invitation-only funder, using our networks and research to identify potential partners. Every funding relationship begins with a conversation and we spend time getting to know an organisation before deciding if we will invite a proposal for funding. This approach might be different from some funders, but we believe it helps us to make more informed decisions and have more time to focus on partnerships that are aligned with our interests and approach.  

This recent article by IG Advisors, In defense of no unsolicited applications, makes thoughtful points about this approach to grant-making. I identified with their reflections that a proactive approach can help funders build deeper, more meaningful relationships with grantees and ensure that they are adding the most value with their funding. For us, it also helps focus our time and energy where they can have the greatest impact, rather than thinly spreading resources responding to a wide range of requests.  

Responding to unsolicited enquiries

That said, we do welcome hearing from anyone whose work aligns with our interests – especially if it helps us learn or introduces us to promising or effective initiatives we might not otherwise come across.

Every enquiry that comes into our inbox is carefully reviewed. If there’s clear alignment with our interests, we may explore it further to learn more and we do sometimes invite funding proposals from organisations that contact us like this, though this is the exception rather than the norm. Sometimes, budget constraints or our existing pipeline of opportunities mean we can’t take an opportunity forward at that time, even if it’s a good fit.  

Here is an illustration of how that breaks down. 

Exploring new funding opportunities

Decisions about most of our grants are made by one of four ‘giving groups’ – you can read more about our structure and governance here.

Each group is responsible for one of our key themes and they all operate a little differently, with varying structures and meeting schedules. The groups meet approximately quarterly, and three of them also have subgroups on specific focus areas that meet in between. Their work is an ongoing mix of exploring new opportunities, making decisions on grant awards, learning from our existing partners, reflection and strategy development. So, for us, grant-making is a rolling process that doesn’t operate to fixed deadlines or timescales.  

Here’s a simplified outline of how it works when we’re considering a new funding opportunity: 

Being clear and responsive

Our typical process does involve a few rounds of information gathering and review, so can take up to a few months to proceed from initial investigations to a decision – occasionally longer. However, we also try to make it proportionate and recognise that sometimes acting with urgency is necessary if a grant is to be of most benefit to the recipient. Not having a rigidly prescribed process means we can tailor it to expedite this, if necessary. 

Throughout, we aim to operate in an open and trusting way (you can read more about what this means to us here). This means we aim to keep prospective partners informed about next steps and likely timeframes. 

Valuing feedback

We hope this gives you a clearer understanding of our grant-making process. Feedback is crucial to us, as it helps us improve how we work and communicate. The comment at the start of this blog came via one of the anonymous surveys we ask our funded partners to complete at different points during our relationship. But we welcome comments and suggestions from anyone who engages with us – whether we can fund you or not. Feel free to get in touch at foundation@wgrant.com.  

Having spent thousands of hours completing funding applications, my feeling is that this approach is one that better respects people’s time.  It has been a pleasure to be part of a Foundation that is genuinely interested in learning more about its areas of interest and how it can best contribute to meaningful change.   

Jane has over 25 years’ experience in community development, social enterprise and funding in Scotland, and works as a freelance consultant and mentor to charities and community organisations. She’s currently working with the Foundation as Partnerships and Learning Manager, leading on our Scottish Culture and Heritage and Health and Social Causes themes whilst Rowan Boase is on maternity leave.  

Navigating the wealth of available support and resources for the third sector can sometimes feel overwhelming. That’s why we’ve compiled a short list of practical tools and links on our website directing our funded partners to free guidance and support we think is particularly useful.  

What you’ll find on our website 

The useful links on our ‘Guidance and resources’ page covers a variety of topics, including: 

• Digital skills support – Helping organisations build capacity and confidence in using digital tools effectively. 
• Finding funding – Signposting organisations to grants and funding opportunities that align with their needs. 
• Growing climate confidence – Resources for organisations looking to understand and respond to the climate and nature crises. 

These are just a few areas we focus on, and we are always looking to develop the list.  

The right support at the right time 

Recently, we’ve added a link to the Crisis Recovery service operated by Community Enterprise (on behalf of a range of support organisations and sector networks).

This is a quick-response service that aims to offer tailored guidance and support to third sector organisations facing serious challenges. Alongside The Robertson Trust, we’ve also provided some funding to help this service respond to rising demand.

Initiatives like this demonstrate how funders and support bodies can work together to strengthen the wider sector. Data and intelligence from such services offer funders a rich source of insight and learning about the sector’s needs, too. 

Free support from Inspiring Scotland’s Specialist Volunteer Network 

We are also pleased to connect organisations to other funders who offer free resources and expertise.

A fantastic example is Inspiring Scotland’s Specialist Volunteer Network (SVN). This initiative connects third sector organisations with experienced professionals who can provide pro bono support in areas like business planning, HR, marketing, legal advice, and more. 

Accessing tailored, expert support at no cost can make a huge difference, whether you’re a small charity looking to refine your strategy or a social enterprise needing guidance on governance. By tapping into this network, organisations can strengthen their operations, enhance their impact, and build resilience for the future. 

Help us highlight what’s available 

Sharing knowledge and co-investing in effective resources is just one of the ways funders can support third sector organisations to thrive.

Whether it’s signposting to digital skills training, funding opportunities, or expert volunteer support, we want to help organisations find the guidance they need, when they need it. 

Explore the useful links here: https://www.williamgrantfoundation.org.uk/guidance-and-resources/.

Please let us know if there are additional tools we could be highlighting – email us at foundation@wgrant.com.

2025 marks my fifteenth year in grant-making. Fifteen years is long enough to see patterns emerge: practices get stuck, ideas are revisited, and sometimes a concept is dusted off, rebranded and presented as something entirely new and groundbreaking. Every so often though, a genuine shift happens – something that feels like progress. For me, the move towards funders providing more unrestricted funding is one of those shifts.

Unrestricted funding is a no-strings donation, for general use by a charity to advance its mission. At the William Grant Foundation, we give this funding whenever we can. Read more about our flexible funding.

This is the kind of practice that you know in your gut is better. It builds trust, it gives funded partners the flexibility they need, and it shifts the focus to what really matters: the work itself. I like to think enthusiasm is infectious, but I know gut feelings are not enough to carry a movement.

For unrestricted funding to stick, we need to prove its value. We need to keep finding meaningful ways to demonstrate that value – ways that resonate not only within our own circles but also with those who fear that de-restricting grants undermines accountability for impact. And we need to develop our understanding of how it works – alongside the other tools in our funder’s toolbox – to support our own learning.

Diving into the human experience

Thankfully, insights and resources shared by organisations like IVAR are helping people to explore how we can learn from and evaluate the difference that unrestricted funding makes. This involves moving away from wordsmithing, stepping out of the spreadsheet and diving into the human experience. Unrestricted funding invites us to think differently about impact – not as a tidy and flashy report of outputs, but as a richer story of transformation, with all its ups and downs.

As I sit here, patiently awaiting the first signs of Spring, it strikes me that unrestricted funding is a bit like tending to the roots of a tree. When you offer unrestricted funding, you’re often supporting the vital systems that allow a whole tree to thrive. The thing about tending to the roots is that a lot of the action happens underground and out of sight. Development isn’t always obvious and evaluating the impact requires you to look for different signs of progress beyond counting the fruit: healthier leaves, a sturdier trunk, a tree that can weather the storms.

Exploring unrestricted funding

We hope that unrestricted funding helps partners nurture deep, healthy roots. In particular, we hope that it:

• Enables leaders to focus on creativity, investing in their teams and addressing the real challenges in communities.
• Gives breathing room to plan, experiment, and even fail without fear of losing funding.
• Encourages funded partners to tell us honest, important stories, even though they are harder to quantify.
• Shifts power dynamics in a way that pairs trust and flexibility with accountability and learning.

We want to wrestle with questions such as:

• What new possibilities does unrestricted funding unlock for an organisation’s staff and community?
• What does it take for an organisation to be empowered to maximise the potential of unrestricted funding?
• How do smaller and larger unrestricted grants make a difference?
• How does it strengthen the golden (but often invisible) threads that keep the sector together?
• Has it ever changed the trajectory of a third sector leader’s life?

Let’s learn out loud together

Unrestricted funding isn’t about letting go of learning. It is about learning differently and spending more time listening to the messy, magical stories of change happening in the real world. As part of my work at the William Grant Foundation, I will be exploring the impact of our use of unrestricted funding, and I’m just embarking on that journey now. I’ll be speaking with our funded partners and stakeholders to understand if and how it is making a difference, and what we can learn to improve our practice.

I also want to connect with others who are working on this – what questions are you asking to truly capture the value of unrestricted funding, and what insights are emerging? What’s the right balance between storytelling and accountability? If you would like to join an informal conversation on Tuesday 18 February (11:00-12:00 on Zoom), I would love to hear from you.

Join an informal conversation on ‘Unrestricted funding, unlimited learning’ – email foundation@wgrant.com to request the Zoom link.

Photo above: Saheliya

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Hosted by Foundation CEO, Nick Addington, we speak to Ross McCulloch of Third Sector Lab about the open working programme he runs for charities and to Leah Black of EVOC about her experience of working in the open as she develops a new Regenerative Futures Fund for Edinburgh.

Nick is also joined by other members of the Foundation team to discuss our own commitment to start ‘learning out loud’.

Shownotes

Third Sector Lab’s website is where you can find out more about the programmes they run, including the Open Working and Re-use programme and The Curve – a series of free digital training webinars and online resources for third sector organisations, which is supported by the William Grant Foundation alongside other funders.

You can read Leah’s blog posts about the development of the Regenerative Futures Fund here, including that initial blog that kick-started it all. More about the Regenerative Futures Fund can be found here on EVOC’s website.

Giles Turnbull: The Agile Comms Handbook is an inspiring and short read for anyone wanting to get started with working in the open.

You might have noticed a green badge at the bottom of this website. If you haven’t then do take a look. It indicates our commitment (alongside many other trusts and foundations) to work towards being an open and trusting grant-maker as part of a campaign run by IVAR, the Institute for Voluntary Action Research.

The aim is to encourage funders to make grants in a way that demonstrates confidence in and respect for the organisations they fund and makes life easier for them in the face of the many challenges they currently face.

I am not going to go into detail about our participation in the campaign – there’s a page on this website that shares our open and trusting commitments, actions and plans.

Instead I want to use this space to draw some attention to the importance we place on this as an integral part of the William Grant Foundation’s approach and development, and to:

• help you understand a bit more about what drives us as a funder
• share our open-ness to learn more about how we can improve and do better
• maybe even encourage other funders share more of their own open and trusting journeys

With significant and often increasing scrutiny of charities, often related to less (and therefore more competitive) resources and higher expectations; it is important that funders hold a mirror up to themselves, too, including seeking the views of those they support and acting on what they find. 

Reflections of a former fundraiser

I’m not from a funding background. With over 20 years spent working in the third sector and in support of community and voluntary organisations, I come from more of a fund-seeking background.

In most of my previous roles fundraising was for me (like many others) a task built into, or onto, my job. Helping smaller voluntary organisations to apply for funding to enable them to resource their activities and working on continuation or project fundraising for my own organisation.

Back then, would I have recognised any of the 8 open and trusting principles in my dealing with funders?

Don’t waste time

Ask relevant questions

Accept risk

Act with urgency

Be open

Enable flexibility

Communicate with purpose

Be proportionate

I feel I may have reacted fairly sceptically had these ideas came onto my radar… that’s not to say that my past experience with funders has always been difficult or negative. However I recognise now my tacit acceptance of the power imbalance, of the amount of work to tailor the application to each funders’ requirements, and of the sometimes difficult balance of managing funders’ reporting expectations vs getting on and delivering the work.

I probably moaned and grumped to colleagues, and we’d have shared our collective pain points.

Would I have had an idea to feed these feelings and thoughts back (constructively) to a funder? No, probably not. I don’t remember a route to do so, and I wasn’t going to raise my organisation’s head above the parapet. 

At one time I do clearly remember a funder staff member who flipped a switch and created a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. They said: ‘it’s our job to give money away – if we don’t then we are not doing our job’. It was a significant revelation at the time – looking back understanding this shifted the dynamic in my head a little. And so here I think it is important to acknowledge that funders have been thinking about and making progress on how they can do things better for a lot longer that I have been in this space.

Reflections from a funder perspective

When I started with the Foundation, I very much had the above statement in mind – but very quickly this understanding jumped forward in a big way with the addition of one small word:

“It’s our job to give money away well – if we don’t then we are not doing our job”

I know this is true because three months after joining the Foundation in 2018 I wrote a short piece for our Management Committee to share some of my early reflections – I had not looked at it again until writing this, but this is what I wrote:

I am still excited by the way! The open and trusting journey and community is one that has, and continues to, turn up the dimmer switch for me on that early, pre-Foundation, lightbulb moment.  Not only does it help us to continue to develop our learning about how to be a better funder and partner to the organisations we support, it also allows us to contribute our own experience of this to a wider group of funders in the hope we can add value more widely (here’s an example).

IVAR’s leadership and facilitation of this collective approach – where we can scratch our heads, learn and share in a safe space is hugely valuable. Have we cracked it? Absolutely not – the improvement journey is not one with an end – and here at the Foundation we do like a cycle.

We call this our strategy for effectiveness cycle.

Going forward

We are making changes – you can read more about some of these in our main Open and Trusting webpage that we will update as we go. Changes include our Feedback Project introduced in 2021, which offers a way for our grant-holders to tell us what they think and to rate our performance (More to come on this in another post).

But back to my original question is it time for funders to start holding themselves to account more critically? It’s not time to start – it is time to keep going and to ensure that we continue to provide easy ways for those we support to tell us what they think and to make this feel less risky to do.

The open and trusting initiative will help us to continue this and we hope our commitments demonstrate we are genuine in our effort to listen, learn and improve.