The evidence is clear: flexible funding – unrestricted grants, multi-year commitments – enables charities to be more responsive, agile, and impactful. But despite this, our data shows that flexible funding remains the area where even Open and Trusting funders struggle most to make progress.
Why the disconnect? And what can we learn from those who’ve made the leap?
Below, we hear from both sides of the funding relationship. Mike Sawkins from The Talbot Trusts shares his foundation’s journey from risk-averse traditional funder to unrestricted grant champion – and the positive impact they’ve seen. Charline King from Rathbone explains the daily reality of working within restrictive funding frameworks, and the transformative potential of flexible support.
Their experiences offer practical insights for funders who want to progress on flexible funding but aren’t sure where to start.
Ready to take the next step? On 29 September we’re holding an online workshop focused on flexible funding. Hear directly from funders who’ve made this transition and discover practical ways to move forward on this foundational part of better funding. To request a place, email Keeva.
The funder
Mike Sawkins is the Chair of The Talbot Trusts, a foundation that has supported health-related charities in Sheffield for 70 years, distributing around £75,000 annually. He talks to IVAR about the motivation for the change, the concerns they’ve overcome – and the impact they’ve seen.
This has been nothing but positive for us as a funder.
Every time you put another bit of admin in the way of a charity, all of that costs money. Now more than ever, I think there is a real duty on us to make life easier for the charities that we fund and ultimately increase the impact for their beneficiaries.
The Talbot Trusts had never offered unrestricted funding before 2024 – what changed?
Deep down I think we’d been aware we should be offering unrestricted funding for a while. We knew it was better for our grantees. But we were perpetuating all those bad habits of making charities jump through hoops, asking people to tell us exactly what the money would be spent on.
We’re a small funder, we’ve got no employed staff, we’re all busy, and part of the problem was just actually making the time to work through that conversation properly. There was also risk aversion – a feeling that we were already funding good work and making a big change would disrupt that.
For me, the tipping point was actually an IVAR presentation where Ben [Cairns] showed really strong evidence to support unrestricted funding. What especially sold me was the evidence that it’s just as good as restricted funding at delivering funders’ priorities.
We brought it to a board discussion and within a couple of minutes we got to a totally unanimous decision that we should go ahead.
What were your concerns about making this change, and how did you work through them?
One of the key fears was that we would lose our ability to be able to evidence the specific direct impact of our money – what has it bought and what difference has that made? We’d worked hard to get better at recording and analysing our impact so to lose that specificity was difficult.
There’s no way to solve that problem: it’s an inevitable consequence of offering unrestricted funding. We just had to accept that we couldn’t sit down at the end of the year and say: our £75,000 has paid for these things. But that led to a really positive shift in mindset to say, actually let’s just celebrate everything that the charities we fund achieve and the fact that we’re part of that. Let’s not worry about credit grabbing.
How did you handle organisations whose work was broader than your own mission – so where unrestricted funding could mean supporting non-health, non-Sheffield related activities, for example?
We spent quite a while debating the best approach. Should we have two separate funding streams? Or stay as a restricted funder by default and then give people the option to justify an unrestricted ask? But we just kept reminding ourselves that the point was to be better and more supportive as a funder, and all the options we discussed would make things more complicated and time-consuming for our applicants. We decided to go wholesale with unrestricted funding rather than do anything half-heartedly.
Now, we assume that every grant will be unrestricted unless there’s a particular reason otherwise. We ask applicants a couple of really simple questions about their work and then we do whatever additional research we need to decide whether they’re fine for unrestricted funding, or whether we need to put some kind of restriction in place. And we keep those restrictions as broad as we can.
We’ve only actually restricted one grant since we made this change – a national charity where we stipulated that they needed to use our funding for work in Sheffield.
What impact have you seen?
We’ve completed one funding round so far, awarding 16 grants, 15 of which were unrestricted.
All the feedback was really positive. The time commitment is so much less for applicants and grantees. What’s more – it’s actually freed up time for us too. We’re now talking about the things we probably should have been talking about all along – rather than being caught up on how much someone’s paying for an hour of therapy or to hire a church hall or to buy sandwiches for an event. We’re making decisions based around things like governance, strategy, financial sustainability – scrutinising the really meaningful aspects that show whether these are robust, impactful organisations.
So yes, we effectively have to trust them more, but actually it’s easier to do that because we got a much better sense of who these organisations are and their ability to deliver what they say they will.
What’s your advice for funders considering this approach?
This has been nothing but positive for us as a funder.
Every time you put another bit of admin in the way of a charity, all of that costs money. Now more than ever, I think there is a real duty on us to make life easier for the charities that we fund and ultimately increase the impact for their beneficiaries.
You’ve got to take a bit of a leap in doing this and be prepared to accept a bit more risk, a bit more uncertainty and learn to be comfortable with that. You’ve got to trust in the fact that there’s really clear evidence that this is better for grant recipients and grant makers.
Something is better than nothing – don’t sit on your hands waiting to be ready to change things wholesale. Just be constantly looking for the little things you can do. Is there a question in your application form that doesn’t need to be there? Can you take something out of your reporting requirements?
Even if it has to be small scale – if you make 50 grants a year and you make two unrestricted this year – that’s two charities that have got less paperwork to do for you. That’s two charities whose lives you’ve made easier, and it’s making a difference.
The charity
Charline King is the Head of Children and Young People Services at Rathbone, a charity providing youth and adult social care services to around 300 people a year in its South London neighbourhood. Here, she discusses the impact of restricted vs unrestricted funding on their work and why flexible, long-term support is essential for effective youth and community work.
Unrestricted funding allows you to react and respond quickly to crises. Multi-year funding allows you to plan strategically rather than constantly firefighting. Put them together and the possibilities are endless.
How much unrestricted, multi-year funding does Rathbone currently receive?
Unrestricted funding is still rare for us. Our most recent unrestricted grant was £25,000 from a local donor, which is about 10% of our annual budget of £250,000. However, there have been times when we’ve gone two years without any unrestricted funding at all.
Out of our eight current funders, only one provides multi-year funding. We’ve seen a significant decline in these types of grants in recent years. In the past, we used to get three or even five-year funding commitments. Those days feel like a lifetime ago.
How does the current funding model affect your day-to-day operations?
The bulk of my time – two to three days a week – is spent fundraising, not supporting staff or focusing on the young people we serve. I recently spent almost an entire day applying for £6,000 for a summer programme. After all that, I still had to apply again for October half term funding.
And then, if you get the money, it’s often restricted to a very narrow focus. That means we have to segment everything we do to fit different narratives. For example, if we’re running a programme, I have to apply separately for the arts, sports, music, IT, and so on. Additionally, many do not allow for the provision of overheads which prevents full cost recovery. It’s all incredibly inefficient.
What could you accomplish with multi-year, unrestricted funding?
Unrestricted funding allows you to react and respond quickly to crises. Multi-year funding allows you to plan strategically rather than constantly firefighting. Put them together and the possibilities are endless. You can be both responsive and proactive, meeting immediate needs while building long-term community change.
Multi-year funding allows you to be embedded in the community and make a long-term difference. When we had multi-year funding, I could plan properly. I was able to build a solid staff team and create really great programs where young people were leaving with life skills, increasing their resilience and getting into universities. You could see real distance travelled because you knew you could plan programs long-term.
We grew from a one-night-a-week service to four nights a week, then expanded to two sites. We could do more collaboration and partnership work with mosques, churches, and community groups.
Recently, we lost one of our young people to knife crime. During that crisis, some young people started self-harming, others began using substances – they were grieving and needed more support. But I didn’t have unrestricted funding to pivot quickly enough to meet those needs.
Ultimately, the council was able to find some emergency funding to help us. This meant we could open the youth club later so kids had somewhere to go, we brought in substance misuse support, and got counsellors for those self-harming. That’s the biggest value of unrestricted funding – you can be responsive to actual needs rather than predetermined categories.
How would you use unrestricted, multi-year funding if you were to have it?
We’re passionate about co-production, so the way we’d use unrestricted funding would be shaped by the young people we work with. They know their needs better than any funder.
I recently did a consultation with a school where young people identified their top concern is safety and feeling safe, primarily when traveling to and from school. They asked, ‘Can youth workers get on buses so we won’t get robbed?’ With flexible funding, we could respond to that – maybe put our team on local bus routes serving five schools in the area. Police officers have been removed from schools, and young people tell us they feel more unsafe. We could pivot to fill that gap.
What would you tell funders who are hesitant about unrestricted funding?
Funders worry that if they give unrestricted funding, they won’t get clear outcomes because there’s no strict narrative to follow.
But with unrestricted funding, funders get to take credit for all the outcomes, not just a segmented piece. You get more value for your money. Instead of getting credit for just the sports program or homework club, you are responsible for the basic fact we can open our doors every day – that means 35 young people who are safeguarded from harm, 35 young people at lower risk of being involved in offending and serious youth violence daily.
I can show you a staff member who came in as a young person at age 10, joined our youth management team, became a volunteer, then a paid youth worker, went to university, and just finished her degree to become a qualified teacher. She’s now 21. Without unrestricted funding, we couldn’t work with someone for 11 years like that.
Ultimately, it’s about trust. Trusting charities to know what their community needs, and trusting them to use the funds wisely. It’s not about losing oversight – it’s about shifting to a more collaborative approach. When funders give unrestricted funding, they’re not just funding a program – they’re funding the entire process. Ultimately, that’s what leads to meaningful change.
Are you a staff member or trustee of a foundation that would like to explore how to offer more flexible funding? Register your interest in our exclusive peer-learning workshop on 29 September, featuring Mike and Charline.