What we plan to achieve
Involving communities in our funding
We want to directly involve communities in how we work and give out funding. We’ll dedicate at least 5% of our £500 million funding for England each year to You Decide.
Before launching the broader programme we want to work with partners from spring 2025 to spring 2026 in a development stage.
This could lead to communities being involved in decisions about what and who we fund. But it could also lead to other great ways of involving communities that we’ve not considered yet. We want to find out what works best for people.
You Decide is one of 3 partnership approaches we opened in January 2025. The others are:
Read about these in our vision for funding in England.
You Decide development phase webinar
Watch our You Decide Development Phase Webinar on YouTube yo find out more. The video also includes a transcript.
Development stage: what partners will do
We have £2 million of funding for this development stage of You Decide. Partners will distribute most of this funding to communities for us. They’ll test out ways to involve communities in decisions about who and what to fund.
We’ll work with the partners as a group to share knowledge, enthusiasm and experience. And come up with something better than if any of us did this on our own.
Partners’ roles will include:
- collaborating with us and other partners
- bringing together a mix of people and community organisations. We’ll listen to how they want to get involved with our decision making. Particularly those from communities who experience poverty, disadvantage and discrimination.
- building community empowerment through the process. And involving communities in a way that builds their skills, resources and ability to work together.
- sharing their experience of community decision making. And using it to develop and test different processes to involve communities in our decision making.
- testing ways to involve communities in decision making
- giving out funding to communities
We expect partners to follow our safeguarding expectations. And our approach to equity, diversity and inclusion.
Why we’re doing this
We want to do more than give out money
We want to support and involve the communities we fund in other ways too. We’ve committed to this in our strategy.
We want to explore equity-based support for civil society organisations to achieve our missions.
We’ve set out to achieve 4 community-led missions. We’ll support communities to:
- come together
- be environmentally sustainable
- help children and young people thrive
- enable people to live healthier lives
We know we’re not the experts
We think people know what’s best for them. So we want to give them a bigger say in how our funding is used in their communities.
It’s also why we need the experience and skills of a mix of partners to work with us in this development stage. We think this will create a bigger and longer-term impact from our funding.