Reflections on a year and a bit

It took a year and a bit from getting cracking on the idea, but towards the end of 2025 we made the final payment of the first phase of Sheff Redistro. It seems like a good time to put some thoughts about the project out into the world.

The obvious place to start would be some numbers. We have put £16,665 through the project into the hands of working class organisers, in the form of 11 groups working at the grassroots for social change. Grants ranged from a couple of hundred to a few thousand pounds and successful applications talked about healing spaces, public health kit, cash solidarity funds, educational projects, and childcare spaces, among other things. We have a very brief and open application form, no reporting conditions and no desire to helicopter over groups observing what they’re up to. That said, we look forward to seeing what folks get up to with the extra resources we’ve funnelled their way, just in a comradely way rather than a conditional funder-y way.

That last transfer being months after the application deadline highlighted a couple of things about our project. Firstly, we’re just very small and don’t have much in the way of support structures to make things run to a schedule. Second, we are flexible enough to support groups that are still in the process of formalising their existence and haven’t finalised how they can receive money at the time they apply (that was why the payment was delayed). We’re proudly different from other sources of funding in that way. Our one hard and fast condition is working class leadership, and beyond that, if we value what you’re trying to do we will try to support you. Other funding projects that try and be accessible often retain some formal element that is actually quite a big barrier (i.e. having a bank account in your group’s name or a constitution with named officers) but we have consciously done away with (we think!) all of those. That said, if there was anything about our project or process that could be more accessible, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line by email or on socials and we can arrange a chat.

Obviously there are things we hope to do better next time. Glaringly, the applications we got were overwhelmingly from groups that are very much within the founders’ networks in Sheffield, and very few from elsewhere. Given our positionality and history in relation to the Sheffield left, this meant a geographical cluster to the south of the city, and a tilt in favour of identity-based groups. We know that one thing contributing to that was our promo being almost entirely online. Those social media algorithms did help us get the word out, but they are famously echo chambers! We did some outreach but not in a concerted or systematic way, and did not prioritise physical materials to leave with people or in spaces that might have reached further. We’ve got 2,000 flyers on order to remedy that for next time.

We also have seen a perhaps justifiable scepticism from people when we talked about our project. Groups we’d like to support, who are pushed for time, and have heard about simple accessible funding pots before that turned out to be out of their reach, and haven’t heard about the project before, and don’t know anything about the people involved, take everything we say with a pinch of salt. So investing time and hope in thinking about what to spend money on and filling out our form seems like a gamble that is stacked against you. On the other side of the equation people who have capital to redistribute are often reluctant to actually let go of their money. They are having to betray the interests of capital, their class, and perhaps themselves, and they are generally speaking not ready to. Stripped of the familiar frame of philanthropy, and without even a recognisable “mutual aid” angle for material needs, transferring resources to comrades with less capital becomes a fraught process to be talked through and worried over at length. Sheff Redistro itself offers neither the space to shepherd people through this process nor, until now, the record of successful redistribution to allow people to trust us with the money in the way that they might trust traditional philanthropic ventures. Hopefully our record will now go some way to alleviating the latter. And to remedy the former we hope conversations across our movements continue, both formally and informally. Certainly, we need to convince more people to give us money. Our redistribution so far has seen over 95% of the money raised come from just 6 individuals, which we need to change if the project is going to be sustainable. Encouragingly, we are already seeing significant donations before we’ve even started pushing to raise funds for the next round. 

One of the advantages of the way the project is organised currently is that we can make decisions relatively quickly and easily, and even combine it with childcare responsibilities. But only being two people that are likely to agree on most things, while it has served us well so far, isn’t a long term solution. We have work to do on recruiting and integrating new people from all class backgrounds, while solidifying the political direction of Sheff Redistro and being mindful of power accumulating in the right places and not inadvertently consolidating control with middle class activists.

Overall we are very pleased to have got the first round of redistribution in Sheffield done and are looking forward to the next phase. We’ve got improvements in our outreach and promo lined up, tweaks to the way our process is communicated, and hopefully some extra admin help and more involvement of working class organisers in decision making lined up. We’re keen to hear from anyone who wants to get involved or just wants to offer feedback or ideas for us to consider. Get in touch by email at sheffredistro@gmail.com or find us on socials @sheffredistro.