Support your partners own,
and a room where your staff learn alongside them.
Design for Social Impact Lab is a non-financial support partner for foundations and funders, offering bespoke support for your grantee portfolio and cohort places where your own team learns alongside the practitioners you fund.
START A CONVERSATIONTHREE WAYS TO WORK WITH US
Pick the one that fits your portfolio.
All three are scoped through a conversation rather than an application.
ONE
Bespoke support for your portfolio
We scope your portfolio with your team and design a support programme around your partners' actual contexts. No new intake forms, no additional reporting burden, no permanent overhead.
For foundations wanting non-financial support that is genuinely useful rather than compliance dressed in equity language.
£9,000 – £45,000 per cohort
TWO
Places for your partners and your staff
Buy places on either of our two global eight-week programmes, for grantee staff or for your own team, alongside practitioners from more than thirty countries. Foundation staff also join a dedicated funder learning group.
For foundations wanting to resource a handful of partners, or to learn alongside them.
From £500 per place
THREE
Proposals from Strength
Asset-based proposal design, run at both ends of the funding relationship at once. Your grantees stop writing need, and your staff learn to recognise and reward strength when it arrives.
For foundations who suspect their own application form is part of the problem.
£8,000 to £20,000 standalone
The sector doesn't need more capacity building. It needs different conditions.
Most non-financial support offered to grantees is still designed around the funder's needs: their reporting cycles, their evidence frameworks, their definitions of what “good” looks like.
We are not a training provider. We are part of the infrastructure your partners draw on. A cohort is the entry point rather than the product. What persists after it closes is a set of tools your partners own outright, a peer network that does not route back through any funder, and an alumni community they can return to when the next difficult design question arrives.
Partners leave able to evidence their own learning and impact, deciding what is worth knowing about their own work, gathering it in ways their communities have consented to, and translating it outward without erasing what matters. Better compliance data tends to follow, but it is not the point.
And they leave connected. Most practitioners who come to us are the only person in their organisation asking these questions. They finish as part of a working network spanning continents and organisational types.
Foundations that work with us change the relationship rather than simply upgrading their grantees' professional development. Partners come back with stronger proposals and more honest evidence. Programme staff read applications less extractively. And the work that gets funded starts to look more like what communities are actually doing, rather than a performance of need designed to satisfy a review panel.
That is what we mean by different conditions.
We have worked with practitioners from more than thirty countries, and we partner formally with the University of East London and the University of Bristol to deliver capacity mobilisation to over 100 community-based organisations. We do this work because we have sat on both sides of the funding relationship, and we know what it costs when capacity building serves the funder's reporting needs instead of the partner's actual growth.
FEEDBACK FROM OUR PARTICIPANTS TELL US WE ARE DOING SOMETHING IMPACTFUL:
9.2
Average recommendation score across cohorts
56%
Of participants gave a perfect score
30+
Countries represented in our cohorts
Participants have included practitioners from community-based organisations, social justice networks, humanitarian agencies, and academic institutions — across the UK, the Global South, and diaspora contexts.
Service One:
Bespoke Non-Financial Support for Your Grantee Portfolio
This is a tailored delivery partnership.
We work with your team to understand your portfolio, your relational commitments, and the contexts your grantees are operating in — and we design a support programme that fits.
What shifts in your grantees
BEFORE
- Programmes designed around the funder's logic
- Participation treated as consultation
- Evidence produced for compliance
- Practitioners isolated in their contexts
- Capacity built to serve the grant
AFTER
- Programmes designed around the community's own theory of change
- Participation that redistributes actual decision-making
- Evidence owned by the people who generated it
- Practitioners connected to a global peer community asking the same questions
- Capacity built to serve the mission – which sometimes challenges the grant
What this typically includes
- A scoping process that draws on information your grantees have already shared with you — no additional baseline reports, no extractive intake.
- Live facilitated sessions (online or in-person) on programme and service design, learning and evaluation, and equity-centred practice — adapted to the contexts your partners are actually working in.
- Group coaching cycles focused on application, reflection, and peer exchange.
- Optional clinic sessions for organisations needing more bespoke support.
Resistance to universalist standards of evidence — we work with local epistemologies and community-defined measures of success.
We don't treat your grantees as deficient. We don't impose our frameworks on top of theirs.
Who this is for: Foundations operating with trust-based values who want to offer non-financial support that is genuinely useful — not compliance-adjacent capacity building dressed up in equity language.
How a partnership works
Conversation, not an application
One call. We map your portfolio context and your grantees' needs.
We work with what you already have
No new intake forms. We draw on existing grantee information you hold.
Co-designed, not off-the-shelf
We build the support around your partners' contexts – not a pre-packaged syllabus.
Delivery — live, adaptive, light-touch for you
Facilitated sessions, group coaching, peer exchange. We run it; you stay connected.
Learning stays with your partners, not with us
Close-out shared back to you. Grantees leave with something they own.
No new contracts to manage. No additional reporting burden. No added overhead for your team.
Service Two:
Open Programmes for Grantee Partners
Two global cohort programmes, open to your grantee partners.
Each targets a different practice gap. Both run live, applied to participants' real work, and co-facilitated throughout.
Who Designs: participatory programme design and proposals that shift power
Eight weeks · next cohort Q2 2027 · cohorts of 15 to 20
For grantee staff who hold design and proposal power, heads of programmes, partnerships and proposal leads, MEL leads and fundraising teams, but who have had little space to interrogate the political assumptions baked into how that work is done. Participants start from the impact they want to have, work on their real programmes, proposals and budgets throughout, and every session is co-facilitated with lived-experience and movement practitioners.
What you will notice in your partners afterwards: they ask different questions in programme meetings. They push back, thoughtfully, on logframes and theory of change templates that do not fit their context. They write proposals that are more grounded, more specific, and harder to dismiss, with budgets that name what the work really needs. And they come to reporting conversations as genuine thought partners rather than compliance performers.
Who Counts: participatory MEL and research
Eight weeks · next intake Q3 2027 · participants from 30+ countries
For the people who hold monitoring, evaluation and learning in community-rooted organisations, and whose existing MERL practice feels extractive or misaligned with their values. Participants work through the whole programme cycle, mapping each person's journey with their organisation and rebuilding the documents and questions they use to gather and collate information so that it is participatory rather than extractive, from why conventional evidence frameworks were never built for community-led organisations through to co-analysis and community data governance. Live sessions are paired with one-to-one and group coaching. Eligible UK participants can progress to a UKRI-funded postgraduate pathway at the University of East London.
What you will notice in your partners afterwards: they bring you evidence that is more honest, more specific and more useful, because it was generated by people with a stake in understanding it rather than just reporting it. They challenge evaluation frameworks that flatten their work, and they arrive carrying the voices of their communities rather than proxy indicators.
FOR YOUR OWN TEAM
Learn alongside the people you fund
Foundation staff can take places on either eight-week cohort, learning in the same room as practitioners from more than thirty countries. Between sessions they also meet as a small funder learning group, a space set up for honesty rather than performance, where they turn each week’s tools on their own grantmaking.
YOUR PARTNER JOURNEY
Walk your process from first contact to close-out as a partner lives it, and map where it extends care and where it quietly organises harm.
WHERE BIAS ENTERS
Trace eligibility rules, application questions and assessment criteria to see who they favour, who they screen out, and who never applies at all.
THE LANGUAGE YOU FUND IN
Audit your calls, strategy and report templates, asking whether each phrase locates the problem in people or in the structures around them.
WHAT YOU ASK PARTNERS TO PROVE
Test each reporting ask against one question, who can do what they couldn’t before, and decide what to keep, cut or hand back.
Staff places can be booked on their own or as part of a portfolio partnership.
ASK ABOUT STAFF PLACESWhat your partners actually receive
Beyond the shift in practice, here is the concrete inventory. This is the part that goes in your board paper.
EXPERT FACULTY
Every session is co-facilitated. Your partners learn from Black feminist researchers, decolonial practitioners, community organisers, evaluators and movement practitioners, many of whom have been on the receiving end of the systems under examination. Not one trainer with one perspective.
A GLOBAL COHORT
Fifteen to twenty people from INGOs, community-based organisations, foundations and policy teams, across more than thirty countries. Your partners stop being the only person in their organisation asking these questions, which is often the thing that changes most.
A NETWORK THAT OUTLASTS THE GRANT
Alumni stay connected to each other long after the cohort closes, across organisations and continents. These are peer relationships your partners own, not relationships that route back through you.
COACHING, NOT JUST TEACHING
A one-to-one session with Jess, a critical friend alongside them through the programme, group coaching cycles focused on application rather than content, and optional clinics for organisations needing more bespoke support.
TOOLS THEY KEEP
The Harm and Care Map, the Structural Power Map, the non-reformist reform test, the Language Audit, and a data governance one-pager including a community veto. Plus an open-access library of guides and videos, free under a Creative Commons licence, for anyone in their organisation.
A ROUTE INTO ACCREDITED STUDY
For eligible UK-based participants, a pathway into the University of East London's Social Justice MRes, with fully or partially funded postgraduate research study through UKRI. Very few capacity offers can put a funded masters in front of a community practitioner.
Service Three:
Proposals from Strength: Asset-Based Proposal Design
Most grant writing courses teach people to write better needs statements. Proposals from Strength teaches people to stop writing them.
Designed for foundations investing in grassroots and community-led partners, Proposals from Strength is a dual-track training that works at both ends of the funding relationship, equipping grantees to propose from a place of strength, and equipping foundation staff to receive and reward what they find.
What changes
GRANTEE TRACK
- Proposals written from community assets, not community deficits
From: performing need → To: articulating power - Stronger funded proposals with values-aligned funders
From: generic applications → To: targeted, grounded pitches - Confidence to hold their own theory of change
From: funder-shaped narratives → To: community-led framing - Reduced time and harm in the proposal process
From: exhausting deficit writing → To: generative documentation
FOUNDATION STAFF TRACK
- Ability to read and champion asset-based proposals
From: deficit-trained review → To: strength-literate assessment - Capacity to spot and name deficit framing in applications
From: unconscious extraction → To: critical grantmaking lens - Shift in criteria and application design
From: compliance questions → To: asset-inviting prompts - Partnership posture with grantees, not gatekeeping
From: funder as judge → To: funder as co-investor
Shared system-level outcome
A funding relationship where the proposal tells the truth — about assets, about power, about what change actually looks like
Grantmaking infrastructure that rewards proximity and community knowledge, not just grant-writing fluency
A foundation portfolio that reflects its values — not just its application form
HOW WE WORK WITH YOUR STAFF
Alongside your team, not instead of it
Your programme staff hold relationships, context and judgement that no external partner can replace. What we add is a space outside the funding relationship, where partners can be candid about what your requirements cost them, alongside a faculty that brings perspectives from across justice areas and a cohort that connects your partners to each other rather than only to you. Your team stays at the centre, and the learning flows back to them.
Why Work With Us
We are a practice built by people who have worked inside the sector's contradictions for over fifteen years, as humanitarian aid workers, community-based organisation founders and leaders, classroom teachers, PhD researchers, community organisers, and grant recipients, and who have sat on both sides of the funding relationship.
That proximity matters. We know what it feels like to write a proposal that sanitises your politics to get the grant. We know what it costs a community-led organisation to perform impact for an audience that was never really listening. And we know that most capacity-building is designed to make that performance more polished, not less necessary.
What we bring
Insider knowledge, not outside expertise. Dr. Jessica Oddy-Atuona holds a PhD exploring inequities in youth programming and aid systems, and has worked in more than fifteen countries across UK community programming and humanitarian response. Every session is co-facilitated by Black feminist researchers, decolonial practitioners, evaluators and community organisers, people who have been inside the systems your grantees are navigating rather than only studying them.
Rigour you can account for. We work in partnership with the University of East London and the University of Bristol, funded by UKRI, and our frameworks have been tested with hundreds of practitioners across more than thirty countries, with links to accredited postgraduate research pathways.
Honesty as part of the agreement. If a programme design isn't serving your partners we will say so, and if your reporting requirements are part of what is exhausting them we will name that too, because honest partnership is what we commit to when we work with you.
Start a conversationPartnership investment
All partnerships are scoped through an initial conversation — contact us to discuss what fits your portfolio.
Ready to explore a partnership?
Tell us a little about your foundation and what your partners are carrying, and we’ll find thirty minutes to talk it through. We don’t do sales calls, we do conversations.
Prefer email? [email protected]