Partnerships that connect places
The forces shaping communities, from climate change and displacement to technology and economic pressure, arrive in different places at different times. What one place delivers and learns today can strengthen another tomorrow. We build long-term partnerships across neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations, so that funders, policymakers and communities can act together to create change that lasts.
London in conversation with the world
London is one of the world's most significant philanthropic centres. It brings together public bodies, independent foundations, corporate and family funders, community investors and place-based giving networks serving a population of over 10 million people. That density and diversity is a resource for the wider world, not just a local asset.
London's diversity is one of its greatest assets. As a city home to communities with roots in every region of the world, London is a natural bridge between UK philanthropy and funding ecosystems globally. The knowledge, relationships and cultural fluency present across the city mean that our international connections are not built from scratch. In many ways, they are already here.
And we have built our roots here over decades. But in November 2025, our membership voted to remove the geographic restriction, reflecting what was already true in practice: our networks, learning and relationships extend well beyond the capital, and in many ways always have.
Cities like Singapore, Nairobi, Amsterdam and New York face questions that funders here know well. How do you build trust between philanthropic capital and communities over the long term? How do you pool resources across a fragmented funding landscape? How do you connect local knowledge to national and international policy?
We seek to engage those conversations directly, carrying our experience into a wide range of networks and bringing the expertise that we find back into our work.
“We carry London's experience into global networks and bring global thinking back into the work happening here.”
Through bodies like AVPN, the WINGS network and peer infrastructure organisations across Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, we help insight and practice travel across borders.
More about the Collaboration Circle
Networks across the whole country
The UK's funding landscape is not evenly distributed. Philanthropic capital and funder infrastructure concentrate in ways that sometimes leaves other regional networks with resource challenges relative to the communities they serve. Our role is not to export or import any one model, but to support the conditions for stronger funder networks everywhere.
Across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, funder collaboratives and regional networks are doing vital work. They connect grants to long-term strategy, bring local knowledge to regional investment decisions and create the conditions for sustained civic funding in places where it's needed most. We work alongside these networks as a partner, bringing data, learning and convening capacity to those relationships and sharing and exchanging collective insight across national conversations about funding practice and policy.
Our place-based work adds a further dimension.
From local giving schemes in London to emerging models in Greater Manchester, the East Midlands, Yorkshire and the coastal communities of the Southwest, we are building a picture of how community-led funding infrastructure develops in different places and what funders at every level can do to support it. This picture informs our advocacy, our learning programmes and our partnerships with local, regional and national government.
“We work alongside regional and national networks as a partner, generously bringing what we know, whilst listening, sharing and exchanging what we see and hear.”
Connecting across borders
Some of the most important funding questions of the next decade are place-specific in their detail but universal in their shape. How does a city or place respond when climate displacement accelerates faster than its housing system can absorb? How do rural economies build philanthropic infrastructure from scratch? How do communities in post-industrial regions develop the civic institutions with sustained investment? These questions are being worked on across the UK and across the world, often in isolation.
Part of our job is to break that isolation. We want to build the partnerships and peer networks through which funders, policymakers and civil society organisations in different places can share what they know, test what they are trying and learn from what has worked, as well as where some models and ideas have failed to scale. That knowledge does not only travel from capital cities outward. Some of the most important practice in the UK is developing in towns, in coastal communities and in regions that national bodies rarely reach.
Internationally, we see important value in connecting with philanthropy infrastructure bodies working on the same questions in very different contexts, from established European and American foundations to the rapidly developing civil society infrastructure of Africa and across Asia. The learning flows in all directions. The generosity and rigour of community philanthropy in parts of the world with far fewer resources than the UK has much to teach funders operating in London, Belfast, Edinburgh or Cardiff about what trust-based investment really looks like.
How we work with existing networks
The networks and partnerships shaping change across the UK and internationally deserve powerful support. That is what we offer: connection, shared learning, data infrastructure, and convening capacity designed to amplify what they do and strengthen their independence.
That means long-term relationships over single interventions. It means showing up as a partner in rooms where decisions are being made, not as a national body arriving to set the agenda. And crucially, we do not arrive as strangers. Through 360Giving, we are already embedded in the data infrastructure that hundreds of funders across the UK rely on and trust. That foundation matters. It means building on relationships that already exist across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions, deepening them through listening, shared learning, and honest accounting of what has and has not worked.
The challenges communities face, from the uneven impacts of economic change to the compounding pressures of climate and displacement, are too large and too complex for any single funder, network or nation to address alone. Partnerships that connect places are not a nice addition to the funding system. They are the architecture through which change at scale becomes possible.
