What proximity as a funder means to me
24 September 2026
Our Director Dami Makinde on what she’s learnt from our grant partners about privilege, honesty and responsibility.
Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time visiting the migration organisations across the UK that Justice Together funds. Different organisations, in different places, doing different things within an increasingly difficult immigration and advice landscape.
These visits have made me increasingly conscious of the privilege I hold as a funder. We are invited into our grant partner organisations and people generously give us their time. They explain their work and, when enough trust exists, share honestly what is difficult.
Then we leave and the organisations we have visited continue to hold the cases, relationships, uncertainty and responsibility that we have spent only a few hours hearing about. I have been struck by just how much our grant partners are holding.
What pressure on organisations means in practice
One conversation about trauma-aware legal practice stayed with me. We talked about people navigating the immigration and asylum system while carrying significant trauma; the risks of someone dissociating during a remote asylum appointment; safeguarding; and the importance of mental health first aid, therapeutic debriefs and wellbeing support for staff. It made me think about something we do not talk about enough: when we fund a project involving caseworkers, what exactly are we funding?
We might calculate a salary or the number of people supported. But those numbers don’t capture what it means to sit with someone as they share some of the most difficult experiences of their life. They don’t capture what an adviser might carry home, or the cumulative effect of doing this work for years.
An organisation can balance its budget and still have exhausted people. It can meet its targets and still be stretched beyond what is reasonable. It can deliver everything a funder asks for and still not be sustainable.
I knew before these visits that the advice sector was under immense pressure: limited capacity, increasing demand and increasingly complex cases. What I have now is a greater understanding of what those pressures actually mean in practice.
When advice disappears, need does not disappear with it. The pressure simply moves: to another caseworker, another organisation, or ultimately to an individual trying to navigate an extraordinarily complex system alone. Although I have long understood the advice sector as an ecosystem – spanning frontline services, strategic litigation, research, campaigning, community organising and lived-experience leadership – these visits have reinforced how dependent those different parts are on one another, and how easily pressure in one part is felt across the rest.
When funders cause instability
They have also made me think more deeply about power. However relational we want Justice Together to be, I cannot visit an organisation and pretend that money is irrelevant to the relationship. That does not make genuine relationships impossible, but it does give us a responsibility to think carefully about the conditions we create around honesty.
Can an organisation tell us our process is burdensome? Can they say their community’s needs have changed? Can they tell us they are struggling without worrying that vulnerability will be interpreted as weakness? Can they disagree with us – and what happens when they do?
It is easy for a funder to describe itself as relational. It is much harder to know whether organisations on the other side of that relationship experience us that way. I have been thinking particularly about the uncertainty created by the transition between one grant ending and another beginning.
From a funder’s desk, these can look like administrative matters, but organisations experience those decisions differently. “Can we tell someone their job is secure? Can we continue this service? Can we plan beyond the next twelve months?”
If one of Justice Together’s ambitions is a sustainable advice sector, sustainability cannot simply mean organisations becoming better at surviving instability. We also have to ask how funding practices themselves might contribute to that instability.
How funders can listen effectively
These visits have also reinforced how much knowledge already exists within this community, built through representing people and repeatedly seeing the same systemic failures, and through lived experience. It has made me think about language funders sometimes use about ‘giving people a voice’. People already have voices. The question is whether what we hear when we listen affects how we fund, what we ask of organisations, whose expertise shapes our decisions and what we are willing to change.
I started visiting organisations because I wanted to stay closer to the work. I now understand that proximity isn’t about being able to say that I visited a certain number of organisations, or even about returning home inspired. It is about responsibility.
That is what I want to carry with me from these visits. Not simply a better understanding of the work, but a greater responsibility to stay close enough to it that what we hear can genuinely shape what we do.