Top Tips for Funders

1. Fund the conditions, not just the outputs

“Hold your nerve — and allow time for the work to unfold.” Leah Black, RFF

Complex collaboration needs time, care and trust. It is often slow, iterative, and relational. Funders can enable processes that take time to unfold, not just deliverables - and support the invisible labour and relational work as an essential part of the enabling conditions for complex collaboration.

• RFF funders committed flexible, long-term resourcing that enabled deep relationship-building.
• The Local Motion funders committed to deeper relationships and ten years of funding, which included a two-year development commitment to enable the local places to develop their own plans and invest in their learning and capabilities.
• POP showed how experimentation and reflection required patient rhythms and longer-term resourcing to support this.
• Lankelly Chase with its key partners in place-based work invested in relationships that go beyond funding. They experimented with principle-led infrastructure and governance - collective ways of holding money, making decisions, collaborating, and building solidarity through networks.

2. You’re more than your money

“It’s amazing what happens when you open the conversation about 'more than money' and what people with power and influence can enable and unlock.” Leah Black, RFF

Rather than sitting outside the system, consider how you can show up as a participant in the learning. This doesn’t mean overriding others’ agency, but being open, responsive and transparent. It’s about being real about what you can offer that might go beyond the financial resource you put in.

• In RFF, funders participated in co-design sessions with residents - and in the enabling Board.
• In Local Motion, they have tapped into funders networks and existing wider funder support offers to build capacity in each of the places.
• POP called for funders to “amplify patterns that already exist” rather than impose new ones.

3. Be ready to let go of the original plan

“You need to surrender into co-design with an open mind.” Kathleen Kelly

Emergent collaboration requires adaptable goals. As new people, perspectives and priorities emerge, the mission may evolve. That’s not failure - it’s how this work needs to happen. Rigid contracts and reporting systems can choke collaboration. Funders can support light and flexible infrastructure that protect relationships while leaving room for emergence.

• POP used fiscal hosting platform Open Collective to decentralise funding while minimising contractual burden.
• In RFF, the focus areas shifted through collaboration with the funders and the residents panel, to focus more on racial justice.
• Opus shifted governance decisions based on what the group could hold relationally.

4. Share power in practice, not just principle

In the RFF, funders joined the Oversight and Enabling Board and allowed residents to lead allocation decisions. The ecosystem agreement emerged through dialogue, not predefined structure.

• Local Motion brought funders directly into the collaborative process to create two-way accountability in the work, and funders offered access to their capability building programmes.
• At POP, they linked funding to belonging, not bureaucracy - they found that centring belonging before formal systems created stronger long-term outcomes.
• Sometimes less is more. Lisa Clarke described how funders can unblock things by suspending some of their system conditions, around contracting for example.

5. Resource capability, not just capacity

“The capability building is as important as the resource - it’s what makes the collaboration possible.” - Kathleen Kelly, Local Motion

People don’t just need more staff or hours - they need support to practise new kinds of work. What’s often missing is the capability (the skills, confidence and literacy) that enable groups to collaborate well. Fund coaching, peer learning, facilitation and the development of new capabilities across your ecosystem alongside providing resources for delivery.

• Local Motion invested in a learning academy and bespoke support to grow collaborative skills, confidence and network leadership, recognising that system change required a homegrown network of change makers.
• Kathleen Kelly described how coaching practice and training in Co-Resolve Deep Democracy built the emotional literacy and facilitative capability needed for partners to stay with discomfort and tension in decision making.
• Leah Black (RFF) emphasised that residents and funders alike needed support to learn new governance and systems tools, not just funding to ‘be at the table’.
• Lisa Clarke suggested that experiential learning is the key along with a sense of playfulness. Ideally, this learning space would be alongside people who have already been through the complexity and come out the other side.