Time to end the dominance of short-term grants

In 2022, charities told us that funders need to give more attention to the negative effects of how funding is given on charities’ ability to do their best work. By ‘getting the basics right’ in the types of grant they offer and in their application and grant-management processes, funders can make a massive difference to charities and to the people and causes they serve.

To date, over 125 funders are signed up to our Open and Trusting Grant-making community. In support of this effort and to make the case for change more widely, we have produced reports sharing the academic and practitioner evidence underpinning calls for more unrestricted funding, better reporting practices, and changes to application and assessment processes.

In this paper, we turn to the question of multi-year funding, examining:

• What the research says about the benefits such funding delivers
• The progress being made on increasing the availability of multi-year funding
• Reflections on how best to overcome some of the barriers to this.