At WFET, we believe that meaningful change rarely happens in isolation. The challenges we care about are complex and often rooted in systems that no single organisation, or funder, can shift alone. If collaboration is, therefore, essential to change, then funding itself can play an active role in supporting it. That’s why, alongside our grant-making, we’ve been intentionally curating joint funding groups around the work we support.
These groups bring together a small number of funders with a shared interest in an issue. However, they are more than coordinated funding pots. They build on that alignment by creating active spaces for collaboration, shared inquiry and collective learning. They are a deliberate way of bringing funding into closer connection, making it more adaptive and system-focussed, while creating spaces for shared thinking, challenge and collaboration. They are proving to be as valuable as the funding itself.
For the organisations we fund, one immediate benefit is a more diverse and resilient income base. Instead of relying on a single source of funding, they are supported collectively.
Yet this approach is about more than spreading financial risk. It creates a deeper sense of shared investment. When multiple funders come together behind a piece of work, it signals confidence and belief. It gives organisations the stability to think longer-term and the freedom to focus less on securing their next grant and more on delivering and evolving their work. In this way, joint funding strengthens the conditions that support collaborative, system-oriented work.
Every funder brings something different. This may be insight from other programmes, access to networks, professional experience and differing ways of thinking shaped by their own priorities. When these perspectives come together, grantees can benefit from a broader and more dynamic support system. This isn’t formal advice handed down; it emerges through conversation. Ideas are tested, assumptions explored and opportunities surfaced in real time. It creates a richer environment where work can adapt and strengthen as it grows, supporting organisations to respond to complexity with greater confidence and flexibility.
Joint funding also broadens and deepens the nature of the conversation. Different funders will inevitably view the same challenge through different lenses such as health, housing, family support or community resilience.
Bringing those perspectives together creates a more complete picture of the system. It allows everyone involved to move beyond single-issue thinking and build a collective, connected understanding of how different parts of the system interact.
For the organisations doing the work, this leads to deeper, more useful discussions that open up new possibilities and connections. This reflects the broader shift in our thinking: that meaningful progress is often supported by bringing perspectives together and strengthening shared understanding across a system.
One of the most practical shifts is also one of the most meaningful. By aligning reporting and coming together in joint meetings, we reduce duplication and create space for more honest, reflective conversations.
Instead of producing multiple reports for different funders, organisations can focus on sharing what is really happening, what’s working, what’s challenging and what’s changing. These conversations become a space for collective learning.
Funders and those receiving the funds sit alongside each other, exploring the work as it unfolds, rather than assessing it from a distance. It changes the tone entirely from transaction to partnership. In doing so, funding relationships more closely reflect the collaborative, trust-based dynamics that support the change in complex systems.
We have seen this approach come to life through our work on families living in Temporary Accommodation which started with our funding to Shared Health Foundation.
As part of an intentional, joint funding focus, WFET has supported Shared Health Foundation’s work with families living in temporary accommodation, an area where housing, health and financial insecurity intersect. Through a joint funding relationship with four other funders, the work has been able to grow and evolve. It has not remained static or confined to a single intervention, instead, it has become a platform for deeper inquiry and collaboration.
A joint funding approach has allowed the group to fund and formally connect Professor Katherine Brickell’s research at King’s College London, which explores the links between debt and life in temporary accommodation. By bringing this academic perspective into the conversation, the group has been able to better understand the structural challenges families face and to think differently about what effective support could look like.
From there, new possibilities are emerging. One area now being explored is bringing a further organisation into the partnership, one which is working to understand the role of cash transfers for families in temporary accommodation, not as a short-term fix, but as part of a wider approach to helping families stabilise their situation and move back onto the housing register.
This is how the work builds. Not through a single, fixed programme but through a collective effort that evolves over time.
Different funders step forward at different points, engaging with elements of the work that align with their own priorities, whether that sits within health, housing or family support. Together, this creates something more cohesive than any one strand could achieve alone.
For the organisations at the centre of the work, this brings both flexibility and confidence. There is space to develop and adapt the work and a sense of continuity in the support surrounding it. What emerges is not just coordinated funding but a shared process of inquiry, learning and adaption, strengthening the conditions that support progress over time.
“Joint funding is not new but when it is intentionally shaped as part of a wider approach to supporting collaboration and shared inquiry, where relationships are built, perspectives are shared and ideas are allowed to develop, it becomes something far more powerful.” – Felicity Mallam, Director of Wates Family Enterprise Trust
For WFET, this is a core part of how we approach systems change. It’s not just about what is funded, but how people come together around it.
We firmly believe that change doesn’t happen in neat, linear ways. It happens through connection, through conversations that spark new thinking, through partnerships that evolve over time and through a shared willingness to work differently.
When that happens, the impact can extend far beyond the funding itself, contributing to how problems are understood, how organisations work together and how change develops across a system over time.
When funders come together around shared purpose, their impact can extend far beyond financial support, creating space for collaboration, shared learning and more connected system change.
Read more about Why we are investing in collaboration
