The Rowan Trust was a small, justice‑oriented foundation created and led by people who had spent their lives in youth work, community organising and movement spaces. Our core practice was not project funding but unrestricted, trust‑based support: over time we backed most of the key social‑change NGOs in Ireland with flexible core grants so they could plan, retain staff and take risks. Alongside that long‑horizon work, we saw a clear gap: groups on the sharpest edge of injustice needed small amounts of money, very quickly, to respond to fast‑moving realities. Rapid‑response funding and cultural‑activism funds became one strand of our wider strategy to resource movements at multiple speeds.
By 2022–2023, justice‑focused organisers were dealing with escalating racism, far‑right activity, migrant injustice, youth precarity and intensified attacks on LGBTQ+ and cultural spaces. Traditional grants were too slow and administratively heavy to meet these moments. Within the Rowan Trust, we decided to treat this not as an afterthought but as a design challenge: how do we collaborate with different sectors – anti‑racism (INAR), youth (NYCI), Pride and LGBTQ+ infrastructure (Dublin Pride), and collaborative arts (Create) – to build funds that move quickly, feel dignified to access, and remain accountable? Each strand required a distinct approach, co‑designed with partners, so that funding aligned with existing relationships, knowledge and responsibilities.
The INAR‑hosted fund focused on anti‑racism and migrant‑justice responses, backing groups who needed rapid support to respond to racist incidents, disinformation or far‑right organising. The NYCI strand centred youth‑led responses, getting resources directly to young people and youth workers for local organising, safety, and creative interventions. With Dublin Pride, we co‑created a joint LGBTQ+ Rural Pride Fund that provided small, fast grants to more than 40 Pride events outside the major cities, helping local organisers cover security, accessibility and visibility costs. That fund also allowed us to greenhouse new initiatives like Queer Asian Pride and the Queer Spectrum Film Festival, giving them just enough support and safety to test ideas and build community.
With Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts, we designed a €70,000 cultural‑activism fund to reach artist‑organisers and cultural workers using murals, performance, public art and small‑scale collaborations as tools for justice. Applications were deliberately light and in plain language, so that people didn’t have to translate their work into philanthropic jargon. Decisions were turned around in days. Across all strands, we cut forms back to essentials, removed unnecessary gatekeeping, and built simple, transparent criteria. Reporting was minimal but meaningful – short reflections, conversations and basic financial accountability – because we were more interested in what people learned and what shifted than in turning community groups into data‑entry machines.
For us, each grant was the start of a relationship. We checked in with organisers, listened to what worked and what didn’t, and adjusted the funds accordingly. Over their first cycles, the rapid‑response and cultural‑activism funds supported more than 30 justice projects, over 40 local Prides and multiple new queer cultural initiatives, often reaching groups who had never received funding before. Organisers consistently described the funding as responsive rather than restrictive, relational rather than managerial. Our partners told us that the process changed how they understood responsive funding, and helped them see their own roles in the wider ecosystem more clearly.
All of this sat alongside the Trust’s broader pattern of unrestricted core funding to national NGOs and infrastructure organisations. The combination mattered: core grants helped hold the floor for long‑term advocacy and infrastructure, while rapid‑response and cultural‑activism funds allowed the ecosystem to breathe, react and experiment. For NB Social Justice Studio, which grew directly from this work, the Rowan Trust remains a deep well of learning. It showed us that every element of a funding model – turnaround time, language, who sits at the decision table, what “evidence” is required – is political. It confirmed that philanthropy can redistribute power as well as resources when it is designed with organisers, not just for them, and that funding systems can be built around the realities of frontline work without sacrificing care or accountability. Those lessons continue to shape how we now support other funders and movements to resource justice work in ways that are nimble, honest and genuinely enabling.
