Our Approach
Founded in late 2022, we our continually soliciting feedback from our partners to refine our approach. We are proud members of a community of flexible funders, committed to open and trusting grant making, coordinated by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research (IVAR).
Once you have reviewed our principles and priorities, you are welcome to contact us with a very brief description of how your work aligns. We will set up an introductory call if there is appetite to find out more. All expressions of interest are considered, but due to limited resource and high demand, we are unable to respond in every instance.
Grantmaking Principles
Don’t waste time: we carefully select the causes we support and are proactive in identifying potential partners. We have short initial conversations with prospects, only inviting those with a reasonably high chance of success to enter our straightforward application process.
Ask relevant questions: all of our processes, particularly applications and reporting, are centred around co-creation. We recognise ‘relevant’ is relative - and give our prospects and partners space to make their funding case fully. In traditional grant making processes there is risk of assessing the quality of writing, rather than the efficacy of the solution, so we typically offer a smaller one-off grants prior to forming a larger multi-year commitment.
Accept risk: we accept that things will sometimes go differently than planned, or may not work at all. Where something doesn’t work as expected, we see it as a valid outcome providing we take learnings from it that can be built into future practice. We are primarily interested in funding overheads, especially salaries; an approach which gives the partner agency to modify strategic priorities without needing to seek approval from us.
Act with urgency: the board meets regularly to consider potential partnerships, and all dates/deadlines are communicated at the start of the application process. Our constitution requires funding decisions are made in trustee meetings, but in exceptional circumstances, decisions can be reached in between meetings.
Be open: we publish all of our funding partnerships in our accounts, and aim to further publish in appropriate forums within the public domain. We aim to be radically transparent - making it clear where our money comes from, where it goes, and what we learned from spending it.
Enable flexibility: we are a relational funder who trusts our partners to know how to deploy funding better than we do. We recognise ‘doing good’ isn’t easy and by giving the partner complete control over how they deploy a grant achieves far stronger outcomes than were we to try and heavily restrict our funding.
Communicate with purpose: communicating what worked and what didn’t is central to our strategy - and we have a sophisticated internal platform where core messages can be shared and disseminated to the Foundation, amongst partners, within GSR, and publicly.
Be proportionate: our primary driver is to enable increased scale in organisations, so from a reporting point of view we are most interested in what this looks like (in terms of additional funds raised, additional people served, new markets entered etc.). We do not impose arbitrary reporting frameworks, instead building something bespoke that is both useful and relevant for each partner.
Funding Priorities
We recognise that our vision is broad, and our current focus is distilling this into a meaningful strategy and partner portfolio. A reality in grant making is that the number of viable projects will always exceed the available funding, but to date the Foundation’s portfolio displays strength against one (or some) of these parameters:
A strong understanding of specific barriers to participation in the tech world.
Projects that use tech in an innovative way for a population that would typically be excluded.
Blockchain, or other frontier tech, deployed on an established social problem.
Organisations with a good understanding of where and how an investment towards their overheads would enable them to serve more people.
Partners where steps are taken to ensure participation is equitable and equal - ideally with solutions created/co-created with the populations they serve.
Partners committed to learning and working with the GSR Foundation as a collaborative partner.
Partners that are financially viable with a strong track record and/or a convicinging theory of change.
Within these parameters, the trustees have agreed to take a broad view with regards geography and cause area.
We have prepared a comprehensive document for interested parties which you can access here, and will be updated shortly.
The number of applications that The GSR Foundation can support is, by necessity, limited to the amount of funds available for distribution in line with the general reserves policy. The Board of Trustees will set aside an annual budget for grant giving which will be reviewed at least annually to ensure appropriate allocation. The GSR Foundation trustees reserve the right to amend these priorities at any time.