Tudor’s reactive grant making focuses solely on work within the UK, but we do also work proactively in sub-Saharan Africa. Tudor has, for some time, been running a targeted grants programme supporting ecological agriculture in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda. This programme is led by our Agroecology Group – a special interest group made up of trustees and staff. The focus is on strengthening sustainable agriculture networks and resourcing centres of good practice and farmer-to-farmer learning. This group is assisted by a consultant based in Zimbabwe.

As part of this programme 25 partners based in Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe receive long term core operational and running costs support, alongside some capacity building support and funding for exchange visits. Tudor then also provides funding and support for collaborative and strategic projects that emerge from the work of local groups on the ground and further the agroecology movement.

We do not accept unsolicited applications from groups working in sub-Saharan Africa.

For some years Tudor, along with a number of other trusts and foundations, has found grant making within the older people’s sector challenging. We’ve been asking whether there is a need to develop more direct ways of promoting the interests of older people in sectors including housing, social care, poverty and mental health. How can older people’s voices be heard and valued? And perhaps most importantly, how can older people themselves be encouraged to have the confidence to speak out about their experiences and bring about change and improvement.

In an attempt to find answers to these questions and suggest a way forward we have worked with Jane Scobie, a Clore Older People’s Fellow and an expert in the field of older people and activism. Jane’s report Age Activism: Strengthening the skills, confidence and community of older change-makers is intended to help us and others to think through how we might encourage and support activism in later life.

LocalMotion is building a social, economic and environmental justice movement by communities, for communities. We aim to tackle the root causes of issues in six places across England and Wales.

Our movement is about bringing people, organisations and institutions together, so that communities in six places can benefit from joined up thinking, pooled resources and long-term collaboration and planning with six established funders in the UK.

LocalMotion was created in response to funding squeezes and the increasing demand on charities and local grassroots organisations to plug the gap; people and communities who traditionally have little power, minimal resources and are often working in silo from one another.

Our movement seeks to understand local strengths in the places where we live and work. We aim to challenge typical power structures and hierarchies that become barriers to a community’s progress and hold us back.

With the clear vision, determination and commitment of the people behind LocalMotion, the imagination to see things differently and the will to rethink current processes and systems, it is our collective hope that lasting positive change can come about.

Local Motion is supported by six funders. We are keen to understand how to be more effective collectively in supporting issues facing communities across the UK and how this might change practice.

The six funders involved are:

• City Bridge Trust www.citybridgetrust.org.uk
• Esmée Fairbairn Foundation www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk
• Lankelly Chase lankellychase.org.uk
• Lloyds Bank Foundation www.lloydsbankfoundation.org.uk
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation www.phf.org.uk
• Tudor Trust tudortrust.org.uk

In December 2020, ten months into the pandemic, Tudor offered over 600 grant holders a grant of £2,000 to spend on staff, trustee and volunteer wellbeing. This was designed as a direct response to what Tudor was hearing from our grant holders, and aimed to be a simple and quick way of acknowledging the pressure that keeping things going, and caring for others, placed on the people we work with over the first year of the pandemic.

In September 2021 we surveyed all those who accepted the grant. The results are shared in this report by our learning partner IVAR.