Confused? Please don’t be! Anything new always raises questions. We’ve done our best to answer them here or please reach out and contact us.
No, One World Together is a non-profit social enterprise.
There are lots of problems with the charity sector when it comes to strengthening communities. In fact, that’s why we came to exist in the first place – to fix these. For us, protecting our vision and values fiercely meant that we decided charitable status was not the right solution – it would push us into looking and acting in certain, flawed, ways.
But as a registered Community Interest Company that places radical transparency at its heart, you can rest assured that every penny stays within our community and that we’ll inform you each year on how it is spent.
For individuals or organisations wanting to make a bigger gift aid- and/or tax-deductible gift, we’re delighted to say that we have partnered with The Movements Trust. They provide members with fiscal sponsorship, which means you can make charitable donations to us at One World Together through them, with no cost to yourself or to us. Like us they exist to fix gaps and problems in the funding system – so they do this at no cost. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss this option at enquiries@oneworldtogether.org.uk.
Your money is precious and deserves to be spent well.
By reaching communities directly rather than being intermediated through large charities, you know more of your pound goes to the cause you intended. The only money that you give to the solidarity fund that doesn’t reach them, is the cost of the transaction fee (we’ve researched every possibility and we can’t avoid these!).
Trust-based funding does not mean putting your money at risk. At One World Together we do the due diligence before bringing on a new partner. We pick amazing organisations with strong track records and build respectful partnerships that allow us to understand their operations and their annual accounts. This also ensures we can find out whether there are other forms of beneficial support that we can enable through additional funds brought in through membership.
Through our Community Space you’ll be able to build a relationship with each one and learn from them about the challenges they face and how our innovative funding helps them to tackle these. We don’t think it will be long before you realise the power of this form of giving.
As you can see from Our Partners page, One World Together supports a range of brilliant partners.
You cannot choose which of our partners your money goes to. Your support is pooled into our Solidarity Fund and distributed across our partners on a long-term and unrestricted basis. Keeping things simple keeps our costs down, but this also reflects our community and family spirit.
We think you’ll love all our partners – they are all doing incredible things! – but if you find an organisation you really, really like? Well, we’d say reach out and support them directly – just please continue on as part of the One World Together movement so that our strength, momentum and impact continues to grow.
We don’t fund projects at One World Together, we fund organisations.
Project-based funding is at the heart of many of the problems we see in the charity and international charity sector. A range of external donors decide on the thematic priorities that communities have to work towards on, whether or not these match their own priorities at the time. Funding is provided on a short-term, project-basis and spending can only be oriented towards certain deliverables that they must report on. As conditions change, there is no flexibility to enable organisations to rise to new challenges and meet new, unaddressed needs. Often funding does not cover the organisational overheads that they need to pay staff and keep things running.
So at One World Together we’ve gone for a drastically different approach that funds organisations, rather than projects. Because it is through longer-term investments in strength and stability that organisations can design strategies and projects that work for them, can invest in the right things that ensure their sustainability, and can remain agile and move in new directions as the conditions around them change.
No, One World Together’s approach is truly global. We support community-based organisations and organisations working closely with communities here in the UK as well as in low-income countries around the world.
Communities around the world face similar problems regardless of geography. This includes poverty, inequality, limited or unaffordable services and a lack of representation and inclusion in local policy and development processes, amongst others. One World Together will support linkages among our partners so that they can learn from the similar and different challenges they experience and be inspired by the different solutions and methodologies that they try out.
In this philosophy we’ve been inspired by our own partners. Community Savers, a network of women’s savings groups in Manchester and the North-West of England, was in fact inspired by another of our partners, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, a savings-based social movement of people living in informal settlements across Kenya’s cities. Solidarity can cross the globe!
Oooh this is a good question – and a tough one! As you may or may not know, there are thousands of brilliant organisations around the world working closely with their communities. For our founding partners we have picked four organisations that we have worked closely with and know are doing brilliant work in their communities.
Given our learning objectives we’ve picked them in ‘pairs’, recognising that we may grow and learn together as part of this journey.
Two of our partners (Community Savers and Muungano wa wanavijiji) are social movements, mobilising communities and networks of communities to address the multi-dimensional challenges they face.
Two of our partners (Play it Forward and Raising Futures Kenya) are more professional organisations working for youth development. These are linked by something important – both are going through a process of shifting power and resources from their UK sister charity to become more autonomous, self-directed, and accountable to their communities locally. Our model of funding can help to support that.
As we grow we’ll be able to take on more partners to support. We don’t yet have a strategy for doing that, because we believe this should be a participatory process that includes a say for our partners and Global Citizens. So watch this space!
You are so very welcome and thank you for joining our community!
Now here’s the important bit, you have to do two things.
Have a look at our ‘How we Operate‘ for a bit more detail.
Ah, thank you, we think they are pretty fab and we wear them with pride.
We’ve partnered with Tee Mill for our merchandise, which offers an ethical and sustainable service. Your order is printed on demand onto organic fabrics in a UK factory powered by renewable energy. High quality, zero waste.
We think you’ll look fabulous in them and you can purchase them here. Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram! #OWT_UK