The Berkeley Foundation is committed to understanding the equity of our grant making. We are at the start of this journey and have embraced learning from other funders that are successfully targeting their funding to address structural inequity.
As a starting point, we have adopted the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Data Standard and use it to understand who is applying to us and who our funding is reaching. The Standard provides a framework to monitor equity considerations in grant making. By using it, we hope to identify areas for development within our own funding practice, ensuring it is fair and equitable. You can find more information about the DEI Data Standard here.
We started using the Standard in January 2024 to collect data on organisations applying to the third year of the Resilience Fund.
Key Learnings and Next Steps
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Through the 2024 Resilience Fund, 80% of grants were awarded to organisations supporting communities working with children and young people. 80% of grants also supported communities facing educational or economic disadvantage. This aligns with the fund's focus on youth homelessness, and was also reflected in the applications received.
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For organisational leadership, only 20% of grants awarded went to organisations led by people from these communities. A higher proportion of grants were awarded to organisations where the leadership shares another characteristic or lived experience not defined by the Data Standard.
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For the communities supported by the successful applicants, the largest disparity between our funding and the applications received was for those experiencing racial inequity. While they accounted for 57% of the applications, they only received 20% of our funding.
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This follows a similar trend for leadership, where people experiencing racial inequity made up the leadership of 20% of grants awarded, but 47% of applications received.
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We will continue to collect DEI data through our application process, and we plan to launch a DEI monitoring form. This will be shared with our existing charity partners, to gain a greater understanding of how equitable our funding is, and to identify gaps. This will help to inform our future approach.
Overall Success Rates in Year 3
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62% of applications were eligible for funding (48/78)
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48% of eligible applications were invited to Stage 2 (23/48)
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52% of Stage 2 applications were shortlisted (12/23)
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42% of shortlisted applicants were successful (5/12)
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10% of eligible Stage 1 applications were successful (5/48)
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Stage 2 applicants had a 22% chance of being successful
This has been a useful learning exercise for us, and we will consider how to improve success rates through future funding programmes.
For further information about the data we collected, you can read our full analysis here.