From the ground up: shaping the Centre for Place-Based Giving

Before strategy and before systems, place is personal. Reflections from Common Ground, our national convening for place-based giving.

Before strategy and before systems, place is personal. That was the premise of Common Ground, our national convening for place-based giving last week. Practitioners, funders, policymakers, residents and businesses came from across the UK to explore one question: what does it take to create lasting change in communities, and are we funding it?

The answer that emerged was consistent enough to be striking. Not because anyone had agreed on a script, but because the evidence, the lived experience and the practical reality all pointed in the same direction.

Reciprocity, not charity

The most useful reframe of the day came early. Is giving an act of generosity, or is it a social obligation? The difference matters more than it might first appear. Generosity is discretionary. It can be withdrawn. It positions the giver as benefactor and the recipient as grateful. Obligation is structural. It holds systems together.

Societies built on reciprocal obligation are more resilient and more capable of collective action than those built on the transaction of charity. This has real implications for funders. If place-based giving is solidarity rather than generosity, funders are not being asked to be kind — they are being asked to fulfil an obligation that keeps the wider system alive.

You could hear that idea running through the whole day. In the story of West Silvertown Foundation in East London, which started with a summer youth programme in 2008 and expanded over 17 years to co-found a secondary school, host a GP surgery, set up a SEND programme and take over a neighbouring community centre. In the description of a hyper-local initiative in Wigan, operating on no-strings funding and small participatory pots. And in the voices of residents in Barking and Dagenham, describing what it felt like to move from being people things happened to, to people who shaped what happened.

The infrastructure gap

If the argument for place-based giving is so compelling, why does it remain underfunded and structurally unsupported in so many parts of the country? The answer is partly numerical. According to NCVO's 2024 UK Civil Society Almanac, organisations with an income under £100,000 — the community-level groups most directly connected to people and place — hold just 3% of the sector's total income.

The problem extends beyond the voluntary sector too. Across England and Wales, an estimated £9 billion in Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy funding sits unspent in local authority accounts. This is money generated by development in communities, legally designated to benefit those communities, that in some cases has sat unspent for more than five years.

The missing piece is not money alone. It is infrastructure — the connective tissue that allows communities to act collectively on the issues they care about most, to convene across difference, build shared narrative, and connect local energy to wider systemic reach. There are around 100 organisations doing this work across the UK right now, and almost none of them have funding that matches the scale of what they are trying to do.

Change happens at the speed of trust

A five-year programme that spends its first three years building relationships is not underperforming. It is being honest about what the work requires. A giving scheme that takes eight years to establish is not inefficient. It is doing the slow work that creates something durable. The metrics most commonly used to assess impact — beneficiary numbers, outputs delivered, money spent — are often measuring the wrong things at the wrong pace.

The most powerful evidence at Common Ground did not come in the form of data. It came in the form of stories. A resident association on a regenerated Lewisham estate that transformed community safety by giving young people a stake in where they lived. A participatory grant-making process in Barking and Dagenham where residents who joined as curious observers ended up co-designing a £2 million investment fund. A domestic abuse programme where funders held their nerve through three years of quiet relationship-building before a coalition of statutory agencies, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience began producing the strategic change they had been working toward.

The moment

Place-based giving is not a new idea. Communities have always pooled resources, looked out for each other, and invested in shared infrastructure. What's new is the degree of alignment that now exists across sectors around this approach. Government is orienting policy toward place-based and community-led delivery. The National Lottery Community Fund has committed £1 billion over 10 years with an equity lens, alongside a dedicated Community Power Fund. Major developers are integrating place-based approaches into how they plan, build and manage neighbourhoods.

At the same time, the political context is making this work more urgent. The rise of polarising political narratives, the demonisation of marginalised communities, and the erosion of civic space are real threats. Belonging, safety and material security are among the strongest counters to political polarisation. Place-based giving, at its best, delivers all three.

This is the moment we have been building toward. The knowledge exists. The practice exists. The energy, as Common Ground demonstrated, clearly exists. We are establishing a national Centre for Place-Based Giving, designed to synthesise learning, build the evidence base, connect established schemes with those just starting out, and make the case for this model in the spaces where policy and investment decisions are made.

Common Ground was the beginning of that work. Now we want to hear from you — tell us your ideas and help shape the Centre for Place-Based Giving.