In our first year of grantmaking at Collective Futures, we started by providing some flexible funding to support current needs in local communities, while learning from grassroots organisations about their contexts and experiences. We wanted to better understand how we could support our partners and the early childhood sector, while putting our guiding principles into practice.
We made our first grants in early 2025, supporting seven grassroots organisations with unrestricted funding. These organisations are deeply embedded in local communities and support children and families throughout early childhood. We also supported the Baby Bank Alliance with an unrestricted grant, some of which was distributed to its network of over 200 local baby banks. Our discovery partners cover a wide geographical area and support children and families at various stages in a child’s first five years. They each support children across more than one of the Common Outcomes for children & young people (safe, healthy, happy, learning, engaged). Together, they cover all five.
Investing in high impact partners supports the immediate needs of children, their families, and communities, while also informs our strategic projects which work to drive longer-term systems change.
The first five years of children’s lives build important foundations:
Amma Birth Companions
Parents 1st
Home-Start Leeds
Loughborough Community Centre
Potential Kids
What we hoped to learn and achieve
Our first funding round was about more than just grants — it was about building relationships and learning in a supportive and reciprocal way, sharing our insights throughout with our partners. We wanted to deepen our understanding of system failures and the issues that babies, children, and families are currently facing. This grounds our advocacy and system change work in real experiences and informs our future funding.
We gathered feedback on the process and partnerships with IVAR, and the findings informed the design of our Local Ecosystems Fund.
We hoped to achieve several aims with this funding:
Practice
Put our guiding principles into practice through our grantmaking
Show who we’re listening to and how we value people’s expertise and time
Highlight the breadth of impactful, grassroots organisations in the early childhood sector
Learning
Learn from grassroots organisations and networks in a supportive and value-adding way
Understand more about the current challenges for babies, children and families and what is and isn’t working in the system
Use this insight to shape our future grantmaking and projects
Impact
Provide unrestricted funding that supports current needs in local communities
Explore opportunities to offer further support through our networks, where appropriate
