The Funding Network (TFN), founded in 2002, enables individuals to join together to fund social change projects. We’ve been described as a marketplace for donors and charities, as the UK’s 1st public, open giving circle, and as the ‘Dragon’s Den' for charities! We have raised well over £2 million for over 350 diverse local, national and international projects, through TFN Groups in London, the South West, Leeds, Oxford, Johannesburg and Toronto and through Youth TFN (YTFN) in London. We are delighted that YTFN recently won Third Sector's Excellence Award for Best Fundraising.

Why we exist: Giving money is one of the few significant activities that people do alone. We work together, eat together, dance together, yet mostly give alone. It is also an activity that we often feel is both important and confusing: important because we understand the need, confusing because we don’t know where to start, what to support among the plethora of appeals. We wonder what criteria we should use to say yes or no, what kind of giving makes the biggest difference. Our giving is often reactive, seldom strategic. Rarely are we in direct touch with the organisations we support, and even more rarely are we in touch with others asking the same questions, perhaps giving to the same causes.

The Funding Network brings people together to:

act as a ‘marketplace’ to which individuals can bring projects which work towards a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable world.

provide a mutually respectful setting where those who might like to join with others in funding such projects get to meet and hear those doing the work.

promote a paradigm of social change giving: that those who have much can usefully share their wealth in creative and proactive ways, and that the process of giving can be enriching to the giver as well as to the receiver.

Those who attend talk about the privilege of actually meeting inspiring, dedicated people working for social change, about the warmth and friendliness of the atmosphere, about their amazement at what relatively small amounts of money can help achieve - and about their pleasure in helping to contribute that money.