One Year On: Standing with Londoners in Action

Just over a year ago, City Bridge Foundation launched Standing with Londoners 2025–2035 — our ten-year funding policy to tackle injustice and support Londoners facing inequality. 

While Standing with Londoners marked a new chapter, it builds firmly on our long-standing commitment to London’s communities — while evolving how we work, who we work with and where our funding can have the greatest impact. More than twelve months in, the shift from ambition to action is well underway. 

The context we and London’s voluntary sector are working in has only become more challenging. Across London, need continues to rise — over a quarter of Londoners are living in poverty, despite many of them being in work. At the same time, the economic context is also having an impact, with rising costs and tightening public sector budgets placing increasing pressure on charities and community organisations. 

Alongside this, civil society is operating in a more complex environment, with increasing polarisation, heightened scrutiny, and a shrinking space for advocacy and public voice. Against this backdrop, Standing with Londoners is helping us take a more focused, intentional approach. 

Alongside managing our existing portfolio of 1,657 live grants over the past year, we’ve made significant progress in turning our new funding policy into real-world delivery. 

Our first programme, Access to Justice, launched last year, and we will make awards later this month. Programme design has been a major focus. We’ll open programmes focused on Climate & Environmental Justice and then Economic Justice this summer, and Racial Justice in the autumn. This phased approach allows us to learn from each stage and continually improve. 

We’ve worked closely with hundreds of organisations across London — through workshops, roundtables, and one-to-one conversations — to ensure our programmes reflect lived experience and the realities facing the sector. This approach – designed programmes with the people and organisations closest to the issues — is central to how we work. 

We are also contributing to wider efforts to strengthen the sector, including work on systems change and field-building, collaboration with partners across initiatives such as Propel, BBC Children in Need’s Communities for Children, and LocalMotion — and engagement with sector leaders and thinkers through events and convening. 

Alongside grant-making, we’ve continued to strengthen our social investment and enterprise support. In 2025/6 we committed £9.5m in social investment, helping organisations access the right kind of finance to grow, adapt and increase their impact. 

We’ve also backed enterprise development, including a new programme supporting 60 early-stage organisations, and targeted support for existing partners to build resilience and capacity. 

Strategic partnerships are another key area. A major example is our £500,000 investment in Citizens UK’s Living Wage work and the ​‘Make London Work for All’ initiative, supporting efforts to improve pay and conditions for thousands of Londoners. 

We know the sector is navigating uncertainty, and that moving from one funding policy to another takes time. That is why, alongside the development of our new programmes under Standing with Londoners, we’ve made £10m available through our Strategic Transition Awards. 

These one-off awards are supporting 62 organisations across London, providing stability and continuity while our new funding programmes are developed and rolled out. They focus on areas where City Bridge Foundation has been a consistent funder over many years, helping to sustain vital services during a period of change. 

As part of this wider transition, we are also being clear about what our new funding approach means in practice. Over recent years, we made significant additional funding available to help organisations respond to exceptional pressures. As planned, our annual grant-making is now returning to its long-term baseline of around £26 million a year. 

Under Standing with Londoners, our funding will be more focused, targeted and sustainable. While we are proud to have supported many organisations across London, we will not be able to continue funding every organisation we have funded in the past. Existing grants will continue until their agreed end date, but extensions beyond this are not expected under the new policy framework. 

We know this comes at a time when demand remains high and the operating environment remains challenging. We want to be open and transparent, so organisations can plan ahead. 

At the same time, we’ve been improving how we work, streamlining processes, strengthening decision-making, and making it easier for organisations to engage with us. These changes have already been recognised externally, with City Bridge Foundation achieving an A rating for good funding practice, from the Foundation Practice Rating. 

One year on, Standing with Londoners is sharpening our focus and helping us use our resources more deliberately — supporting a stronger, fairer city. 

What gives us hope is what we are seeing across London: organisations coming together, communities leading change, and new ways of working that connect immediate action with long-term transformation. By supporting this collective effort, we are not just responding to today’s challenges, we are helping to build a future that is more equitable, more inclusive, and shaped by those most affected.

Sacha Rose, City Bridge Foundation Chief Funding Director

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