The 2024 race hate riots

Perspectives by Anj Handa, DEI and Good Governance consultant and Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers

From 30 July to 5 August 2024, race hate riots occurred in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, supposedly sparked by a mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July, in which three girls were killed.

What should have been a time for grieving was hijacked by hate. This hate was fuelled by systemic racism and by people in the public eye whose narratives have been designed to create division. They emboldened a movement of individuals who felt a collective sense of power in what they believed to be true.

In that immediate period, Muslim, Black and brown people in the UK experienced a range of emotions, such as fear, anxiety, concern and trauma. We experienced hate based on the colour of our skin from people emboldened by the rioting and from years of inflammatory narratives by politicians and the media. We were shaken. This hasn’t gone away – even though the rioters have, for now.

Our fear and trauma didn’t come from the riots as such. It’s from the people we once believed we could trust, the formerly silently seething people, and the ones that never found us ‘acceptable immigrants’, even when we were born.

As Rashid Iqbal, Chief Executive at The Winch on the Monday after the riots wrote: “This terror will have triggered or left deep psychological scars for so many people, catalyzing a collective trauma. This affects all of us…We all need to lead and double down in our endeavours to make our communities safe, inclusive and equitable for all.”

The actions of leaders within charities and funders will have an impact for years to come. As inclusive leadership consultant Srabani Sen OBE wrote in ‘The UK riots must be a turning point in how our sector fights racism’ for Third Sector magazine “What leaders do now will influence whether you deepen trust and loyalty with your employees or whether you damage it for years to come.”

Shifting power

Everything involves a power dynamic: who holds it, who keeps it. It’s baked into systems and structures. Modern-day manifestations of unhealthy, unsafe power dynamics include ableism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and in their worst forms, violence and abuse.

Many grassroots organisations that access funding have been highlighting systemic racism, injustice and hate for years, and it has not gone away. Your strategy concerns the organisations you fund, your, employees and associates, trustees and other stakeholders. As Zoe Amar of Charity Digital wrote in the Third Sector article ‘When ‘Moving On’ is a Privilege’, racially minorised groups can’t simply switch off and move on.

To varying degrees, funders are starting to discuss the issues raised by the riots. They have been looking at systemic racial injustice issues, how to tackle misinformation and hate narratives and leader burnout.  There are massive economic costs if your people do not feel safe or well. It affects how organisational purposes are delivered, turnover of key staff plus associated recruitment and training costs, knowledge drain, Board time and energy, team motivation, ‘survivor syndrome’ and more.

In a recent interview on the Third Sector podcast, I said:

“…encourage funders to think about how they can lighten reporting and particularly at times like this where organisations who are stretched don’t have to think about responding and reporting to their funders.

Offer introductions, offer other forms of support, such as wellbeing support and non-financial support. What I see is that clinical supervision is needed within the sector, but many can’t afford it. What could you support and fund there?

And also, it’s about recognising the root causes and how you can address those things within your own organisation, but also fund the organisations that are set up to tackle the root causes.”

On hearing the interview, the Association of Charitable Foundations added my call to this excellent article ‘Tackling the root causes and long-term impacts of the riots: what can foundations do?’ on how funders can tackle the root causes and long-term impacts of the race riots.

What charities and grassroots organisations ask for

In response to a LinkedIn post by Fozia Irfan MBA on what funders could do, various charity sector professionals shared their views. Here are a selection:

Anti-Racist Activist Huda Jawad said: “I would ask for funders to reflect on their “blind spot” and at times intentional erasure of religion as a deserving category or lived experience as worthy of funding and whether the European experience of faith and its power is underlying some of these assumptions. The irony that wealth amassed by the “original” philanthropists in the name of faith and then faith being used as a motivating factor to set up philanthropic institutions is not lost on those of us identifying with faith as a lived experience.”

Erel Onojobi, Programme Director at Runnymede Trust for Power to Prosper, a 3-year funded project focussed on toxic debt and poverty said “Please help us to get round the table! There is a strange power dynamic to funder listening. They seem to ‘listen’ and interpret what disempowered communities are saying whilst avoiding a real power shift or engaging with black and brown people are gaining power and reaching equality. I don’t think it is by accident that the sector doesn’t sustain us very well. I think they need to be pushed on who they feel comfortable listening to.”

Charity CEO Sinem Cakir said “The sector needs a major strategic communications campaign – across issues and across agencies – this can’t be resourced by grassroots organisations and people with lived experience carrying the burden over and over again (migrant charities, VAWG organisation, DEI organisers etc). Funders need to step in to back narratives driven by fact-led messaging and deliver this campaign systematically through and alongside trusted brands.”

Funder responses

There have been some calls for No Interest Loans for those most financially excluded. A new report on Fair4All Finance’s No Interest Loan Scheme (NILS) pilot provides evidence that this type of scheme helps people in financially vulnerable circumstances. It has the potential to help many more.

The Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) said many of its members have contributed top-up funding to extend this support to more groups. For example, prompted by its grantee partners, the Civic Power Fund set up an Emergency Action Fund to respond to the urgent needs of existing grantees and partner referrals within 24 to 48 hours. It made 80 unrestricted grants of £1,000 to groups across the UK.

The Civic Power Fund found that urgent needs ranged from:

• providing wellbeing support to traumatised staff and communities
• venue safety – e.g. installing CCTV; repairing broken glass
• personal safety
• emergency training around community organising and protest rights
• and keeping spaces open longer so people have somewhere safe to go

How funders could do more

Over the last few years, a few funders have worked towards continued structural change. They have sought to include and amplify the voices of those not always reflected in their decision-making. My long-standing client Smallwood Trust has done this by centring women living in poverty. It has also removed some barriers to funding for the organisations that support them, by supporting frontline groups; providing multi-year grants, unrestricted funding; and providing cash for emergencies. It has also allocated long-term funding for organisations and partnerships already doing this work.

Subscribed to the IVAR Principles for grantmakers, Smallwood Trust has made its reporting requirements light-touch for its funded organisations and continues to make adjustments in line with grant partner needs. It has not experienced a negative impact on the quality of services delivered by its grant partners as a result of light-touch reporting.

Suggested anti-racist funding interventions

Funders could:

• Continue to learn about and address structural racism and implement solutions in an agile way.
• Invest in community healing and wellbeing, centring the most affected people and supporting the organisations and collaborations already doing this work.
• Publicly track spending and set ambitious targets for anti-racist action through their strategies.
• Further explore the impact of Islamophobia, such as the challenges facing grant partners led by and/or supporting people of the Muslim faith and how funding and other interventions can best support them.
• Deepen understanding of how the hostile immigration system affects asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant people and the organisations that support them. They could raise awareness within the wider sector.
• Offer funding to tackle little-known but monumental challenges as they arise, such as the eVisa deadline by the end of 2024 and the removal of links to free legal support from OSIC, the Office of the Immigration Commissioner.
• Acknowledge the North-South divide in gendered poverty and health inequalities, which go hand in hand. See this excellent report Woman of the North: Inequality, health and work’ by Health Equity North and Manchester University for the detail.
• They should also acknowledge that when speaking about class, the default is not white working class. Black and brown working class communities experience deep levels of inequality.

Anti-racism – a caution

Funding more diverse groups doesn’t mean you’re an anti-racist funder. By their very nature, funders will struggle to become anti-racist. The colonial, patriarchal, Victorian principles upon which charity in the UK are based uphold systemic racism. Diversity just invites more people and organisations to participate in them. Anti-racism is about dismantling racist structures every day, in ways big and small. Listen to this excellent Third Sector podcast interview with Colette Phillips.

Further Reading

In her powerful article, ‘The third sector doesn’t have a language issue, it has a racism issue’, Shaan Sangha explores racism within the sector.

Martha Ramirez on philanthropy in America covers the goals and strategies of the new funding collaborative, the impact on community building and reducing polarization and examples of funded initiatives promoting unity.