Barking and Dagenham Giving

Barking and Dagenham Giving is a place-based funder dedicated to tackling deprivation, inequality, and limited opportunity in one of England's most diverse and disadvantaged urban boroughs by empowering residents as co-creators of solutions through participatory grant-making and investment. Core values of collaboration, inclusivity, sustainability, transparency, and local leadership drive their ethos, rejecting top-down charity models in favor of resident-led decision-making via community steering groups. They believe lasting change arises from building social capital, agency, and resilience, supporting grassroots organizations with capacity building, coaching, peer-learning, and equity-free social investments that prioritize community voice, connection, and long-term endowment stewardship.

They fund broad community-led initiatives fostering economic inclusion, participation, and engagement, including youth services like after-school clubs, mentoring, and employability training for young people aged 16-25 facing barriers to education and employment; arts and culture programs delivering creative arts, therapeutic activities, and outdoor pursuits to combat social isolation among children, families, and elderly residents; neighbourhood support schemes addressing poverty, food insecurity, and family crisis through food banks, drop-in centres, peer support groups, and befriending; local enterprise development offering business training and startup support for social enterprises tackling youth unemployment and carer support; grassroots resilience programs including mutual aid, community kitchens, and holistic wellbeing services for refugees, ethnic minorities, and isolated individuals; and community infrastructure strengthening social cohesion via sports, advocacy, and early intervention for mental health, addiction recovery, and domestic abuse support, always emphasizing preventative, trauma-informed, person-centred approaches rooted in lived experience.

Exclusions encompass political advocacy, religious proselytising, or activities outside the borough benefiting non-local communities; they avoid duplicative services lacking resident priorities or measurable local impact. Distinctive for pioneering 100% community-led grant-making and impact investment in housing enterprises, they prioritize grassroots voluntary groups and social enterprises with lived experience leadership serving diverse, deprived urban residents—families in crisis, care leavers, disabled people, carers, and ethnic minority youth—favoring innovation in participatory models that dismantle systemic barriers through authentic local empowerment.