At JRRT, we make grants to a wide range of organisations striving to achieve aims that reflect the liberal and Quaker heritage of our founder, Joseph Rowntree. Our current grant-making priorities are political and democratic reform. We support campaigns that seek to bring about significant changes in the political system, making it more accountable, democratic and transparent and to rebalance power for the well-being of society.
In line with these aims, we make our own commitment to transparency in publishing details of the campaigns and organisations that we support through our grant making. Details of all of the grants that JRRT has awarded since 2015 are available on the grants awarded section of our website. You can read case studies about some of our grantees or sign up to receive our e-newsletter to be kept informed of our grant making and the impacts being achieved by our grantees.
Furthermore, we have joined more than 100 funders in publishing our grants’ data in a standardised open-source format as part of the 360Giving initiative. 360Giving is a not-for-profit organisation that supports UK grant makers to publish information on who, where and what they fund.
Details of more than 300,000 grants totalling more than £8 billion are shared via 360Giving’s website and can be interrogated using their free analytic tools, including the flagship GrantNav database platform and the 360Insights visualisation tool. Using standard identifiers for funders and for grantees, and providing consistent information in fields such as grant amount, duration, and grant description, results in a vast and easily comparable dataset. 360Giving describes its vision as supporting “UK grant making to be more informed, effective and strategic”. It wants to facilitate a shift “from sharing data to using it” that boosts the impact of grant giving and enables funders to find coherencies between themselves and others.
GrantNav enables grant makers to search easily for other funders that are supporting similar organisations, projects and causes, increasing opportunities for collaboration and added value in grant making. 360Insights produces visual illustrations of datasets, enabling often complex data to be compared, described and shared.
Our intentions in making our JRRT data publically accessible to the 360Giving standard are therefore:
· to aid collaboration between grant makers, enabling decision making and learning across the sector to be more informed;
· to demonstrate clearly to researchers and commentators where our grant funding is being allocated, to whom and for what purposes; and
· to enable potential grantees to see who and what we have funded in the past, and where our current strategy is focusing our funding, in order to help them make an informed decision about whether to apply to JRRT
Our grants data are updated quarterly after each of our larger funding rounds. The most recent spreadsheet of data is downloadable here or visit 360Giving’s GrantNav database to interrogate our data alongside that of other funders.
By Nicky Milsted, the Administrator at JRRT.
