Geraldine Blake

London Funders

Geraldine is Director of Collaboration at London Funders. Over the last year she has been responsible for designing the process of the London Community Response - an unprecedented funder collaboration which is on course to have distributed over £55m to civil society organisations in every London borough since March 2020. Geraldine also coordinates the Trust for London's Citizenship and Integration Initiative, working closely with the GLA on shared goals on social integration. Previously, Geraldine was Chief Executive of Community Links, a social action charity working alongside local people to tackle inequality in east London and founded and ran a social enterprise, GAP Research, which supported residents in highly diverse communities to undertake their own research and work with public agencies to improve services and design effective solutions to long standing problems.

10:35 - 11:30

Monday 10 May

Analysing grant data to shape funder responses to crisis at London Funders

The London Community Response is a collaboration of 67 funders. By May 2021 they will have completed five waves of Covid funding, from crisis response to renewal, and distributed around £55m to community organisations in London. London Funders used the data from this to interrogate who the funding is reaching, in particular whether it supported smaller, ‘led-by’ organisations. Working alongside funders and equity partners, they developed tools to monitor and understand how well they were achieving this throughout. The data was used to shape how the London Community Response is designed and delivered. London Funders hope this will inspire change to wider funder approaches.