On the 5th of July 2025 we hosted our Annual General Meeting. This was an opportunity to launch our 2025 Annual report for the fiscal year running from the 1st of February 2024 to 21st January 2025. We also had the opportunity to discuss coming plans and receive feedback from our members.

We are sharing here the overview of the report, which you can download here. You can also find here a brief summary of the AGM. 

Overview

We at Edge Fund have continued our mission of supporting radical grassroots organisations that fall out of the scope of the traditional charity and philanthropic sector. We redistributed £40K to UK and Ireland based radical grassroots campaigns aiming to achieve systemic change and fight structural forms of injustice, and continued to involve our former grantees in a participatory model to ensure that our funds went to radical organising campaigns.

We started 2024/25 year closing the work related to our 2023 funding round FR15, providing feedback to unsuccessful groups and hosting debrief sessions to orient them on how to improve their applications. We hosted a Radical Sharing Forum on April 20, where grantees of the FR15 and previous funding rounds had the opportunity to meet and discuss different perspectives on the struggle for Palestinian liberation. We had the opportunity to hear from 3 of the 5 organisations that we supported in December 2023 with our emergency fund for Palestine. Let’s Talk Palestine, Parents for Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement (UK Chapter) shared their views on aspects of the resistance of Palestinian people that are not covered even by the left-wing press.

In Autumn of 2024 we ran our Funding Round 16 to distribute a total of £40K to grassroots organisations, passing more than £600,000 distributed in the 11 years we have been funding. 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. This meant that the assessment of applications for the distribution of our funds was entirely carried out by past grantees with the coordination of our Regional Organiser and the Funding Working Group. We thus ensured that our participatory model continues to grow and be informed by the voices of our grantees-members. 

For a second year we only ran one funding round. This gave us space and time to improve both the planning and distribution of the funding, while we also strengthened our communications strategy, our internal structures and developed new initiatives for fundraising. Our Staff Working Group (SWG) continued supporting the work-planning of our regional organiser, temporary assistants and external service providers.  

Our policy in hiring staff is to take on part-time staff so they can also be activists. This also applies to Staffing Working Group members who are themselves 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.
• Influencing the philanthropic and charity sectors by our example of radical participatory grantmaking. 

Read our full report with:

Updates from the Core Group and the Staffing Working Group, our Treasurer's report, and the Regional Organiser's summary of the Funding Round 16, as well as a report on our Crowdfunding efforts and the ongoing process of our fundraising strategy.