In 2023, the Co-op Foundation funded 13 organisations that work with young people as part of the first round of its Future Communities Fund. The funding was designed to be participatory, unrestricted, long-term, trusting, accessible and supportive, and to facilitate cooperation. As this represented a significant change in how the Foundation funds, it committed to a programme of evaluation and learning, and commissioned IVAR to work as their learning partner.
Following semi-structured interviews held in early 2025, this report aims to understand whether and how multi-year unrestricted funding made a difference to the 13 organisations funded by the Co-op Foundation through round one of its Future Communities Fund. It also considers the Open and Trusting funding behaviours required of the Foundation, so that the benefits of multi-year unrestricted funding can be realised.
This is the second publication to emerge from the programme, following the first, which explored how funders assess the impact of unrestricted grants. Click here to view the report.
