Annual Report 2023-24 & AGM

2023-24 Annual Report

July 21, 2025

On the 3rd of August 2024 we hosted our Annual General Meeting where we presented Edge Fund's annual report for the fiscal year running from the 1st of February 2023 to 21st January 2024. This was also an opportunity to discuss coming plans and receive feedback from our members. During the online meeting, we had the opportunity to reflect on past initiatives such as the emergency fund for Palestine and our Radical Sharing Forum dedicated to Palestinian liberation

We are sharing here the overview of the report, which you can download here.

Overview

In 2023-2024 Edge Fund continued with its mission of redistributing funds to UK and Ireland based radical grassroots campaigns aiming to achieve systemic change and fight structural forms of injustice.

We started the year hosting a Radical Sharing Forum with the grantees of our 2022 Funding Round. It was an opportunity to learn from each other’s organising.

In Autumn of 2023 we ran our Funding Round 15 to distribute a total of £597,000 in the 10 years we have been funding. This year we continued strengthening our internal structures to consolidate our position as an organisation that embraces radical political values at its core, as was initially intended when we were founded twelve years ago.

In the earlier part of the year to the end of January 2024 Edge Fund paused funding in order to strengthen the structure of the organisation. We did this primarily through establishing a Staff Working Group (SWG) that supports the work of the two Regional Organisers in a clearer and more consistent way than what we were able to do in the past, still aiming to maintain a non-hierarchical approach in our own structures and working methods. See below for more details.

Alongside that, we have increased our membership engagement in different Working Groups, particularly the Funding Working Group, which brings together diverse members to discuss and make decisions on how funds are distributed in each funding round. With the support of this group, we ran our funding round number 15 from October to December 2023, results are reported below. With a renewed Funding Working Group we are now in the process of preparing for our Funding Round 16 with the participation of grantees from our previous funding rounds.

In funding Round 15 we also allocated a special budget to support UK-based groups led by Palestinian people organising in solidarity with Palestine and against the genocidal practices ongoing in Gaza.

To ensure the future of Edge Fund we have plans to employ a third staff member to carry out fundraising and to maintain our financial records.

Our policy in hiring staff is to take on part-time staff so they can also be activists. This applies to Staffing Working Group members who are grassroots organisers and are now also being compensated on an hourly basis for their work at the SWG (see report below).

Other than making grants to small grassroots organisations, the Edge Fund has wider roles to play, including:

Showing how grantmaking decisions can be made by grant-recipients, ie. those fighting injustices on their own behalf, and encouraging others to follow our example.
Growing a community of grassroots organisers to make our grantmaking decisions
Nurturing a community of grassroots organisers to share experiences and learn from each other, especially through our “Radical Sharing Forum”.
Providing information to grassroots organisations and movements on where to apply for grants other than from ourselves, primarily through our website resources page.
Connecting with other funders and participatory grant-makers to consolidate a community of radical funders. Our Member Power Group supports this effort.
Influencing the philanthropic and charity sectors by our example of radical participatory grantmaking.