We formed a coalition of players including funders, activists and movement folks to develop a process to mobilise money urgently to racialised communities who were already being excluded from the emerging funds – from state to philanthropic levels – despite being disproportionately impacted.

We originally came together as a group of people deeply concerned by how stark the consequences of Covid would be on racialised people in deepening inequalities and increasing poverty, sickness, disability and death. We were a group who convened out of necessity because we could neither trust the state or mainstream institutional bodies (which philanthropy also resources) to have our interests or lives protected, valued and dignified. We have seen this over and over again in many cases of UK history, with the most recent being Grenfell.

We had to take it into our own hands because if we didn’t we would be made vulnerable by other efforts emerging and springing up, excluding the reality of how pandemics and moments of crisis only deepen the “original epidemic” of structural racism that we have already been surviving.

Beyond accessing financial resources, over the past three years we have been building a multi layered strategy to strengthen the power of racial justice work as a multi systems approach, touching on many of the key players and sites for making social transformation. This included but is not limited to:

• Mobilising resources in a time of continued crisis and building transferable models, systems and approaches to do this and share with others
• Building greater transparency between philanthropy and movements to democratise power dynamics
• To rethink and reframe what resourcing could look like in nuanced ways beyond DEI and performative gestures
• Introducing and applying the framing of accountability and transformation to funders as a strategy for racial justice
• Strategically trying to build a powerbase amongst movement and racial justice leaders and groups from the grassroots and frontline
• Strategically creating connections between allies and other key players in a vision and strategy for resourcing racial justice more broadly and long-term
• Visioning for economic justice rooted in racial equity and justice