The Funding Network works by holding Funding Days several times a year in a central London location (currently a bright and airy room at the Royal Institute for British Architects near London's Oxford Circus), at which those who attend can hear ten presentations, ranging across a wide range of issues, and from a mixture of UK and overseas organisations. All projects are sponsored by a member (members pledge to give a minimum of £1,000 a year through TFN), and go through a selection committee also run by the members, which assigns the ten slots available on the day. To keep it administratively simple and to keep us responsive to our members we don't accept unsolicited applications.

The morning consists of five brief (15 minutes including questions) presentations from the charities themselves followed by lunch at which the attendees get a chance to continue discussions with the presenters and with each other. In the afternoon, five TFN members get eight minutes each including questions to present another five projects; the idea is to keep it interesting by having different sorts of presentations - and because we didn't feel we could ask a charity to come a long way just to speak for eight minutes!

Then comes the unusual part, a pledging session where the audience call out their pledges for the presenting organisations, which get written up on flipcharts. Some participants support one project, some none, some all ten, and the pledges have ranged from £100 to £10,000 over the day; the great advantage is that by the end of the session we know exactly what we've raised, and people often adjust their pledges to make sure an organization they've found particularly interesting gets the funding it needs (participants can also hand in written pledges if they prefer). The pledges are made to TFN which then collects Gift Aid where applicable and pays out a single cheque to each charity; the Trustees of TFN have of course to make the final decisions about grants. We have been delighted with the response; each of our first three Funding Days raised over £50,000 for the presenters. Those who attended seemed to enjoy the chance to hear about a number of carefully selected projects, the buzz of the pledging, and the satisfaction of having been part of raising significant sums, and the charities enjoyed it because they enjoyed having a face to face meeting with a large number of potential (and actual!) donors and (something we hadn't thought of) were able to learn what colleagues in other fields were doing.

Those who have attended have ranged from individuals completely new to charitable giving to trustees scouting for their trusts; many of our participants come by word of mouth from those who've already attended, and we've had articles published about us in both the Financial Times and Resurgence (a good range - we must be doing something interesting!) from which new participants have come. The projects supported have also ranged widely, from a women's micro-credit project in Zambia, to a domestic violence project in Islington, North London, to policy work on transport.

We think that TFN might be especially interesting for trustees and staff from charitable trusts, and we would welcome you at a Funding Day (our next one is schedules for Saturday March 1, 2003, and we are hoping to test a weekday Funding Evening later in the spring); we are happy for people to check out the model. There is no obligation to give at any meeting; those who wish to become members will of course be very welcome. Participants can pledge without becoming a member, but we ask those who wish to sponsor a project to join. Because TFN does both the presentations and pledging in a single day (though all attendees will have received a two-page summary of each project before the Funding Day), it would be helpful if representatives of charitable trusts can get permission to make commitments on the day. If this proves to be difficult, we are happy to discuss a different system for trusts, but it would mean sacrificing some of the immediacy of the current model.

As the founder and Chair of another charitable trust, Prairie Trust, I personally find TFN a wonderful way of getting away from paper-based applications and actually getting to hear those who do the hard work of social change on the ground, and I hope that other trustees who might come in their own right, or as representatives of charitable trusts, would find this a stimulating aspect of how we work. We hope to see you at a Funding Day.

More information about how TFN works and the projects which have been supported is available from www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk.. Both Frederick Mulder and Kate Thick, TFN's Project Director, would be happy to answer any questions - tel: 020 7586 1442 or email: info@thefundingnetwork.org.uk.