Written evidence submitted by Dr Caroline Rodrigues Silva (Lecturer Organisation and People at Brunel Business School) (TVF0073)

I am a gender researcher and Lecturer in Organisations and People at Brunel Business School, Brunel University London. My academic and professional work explores the intersections of gender, organisational strategy, and public policy, with a particular focus on how institutional structures enable or constrain effective responses to violence against women and girls (VAWG).

This submission is informed by work on interpretive communities and collective responsibility in funding justice-oriented action. As argued elsewhere, an intersectional and community-based lens reveals the hidden assumptions within dominant funding logic and opens up space for plural, community-rooted responses to violence (Rodrigues Silva, Rodrigues Silva, & Zanola, 2025)

In addition, is grounded in both research and applied experience, including previous roles in the NGO sector, partnerships with Brazilian public sector actors, and the development of corporate frameworks to prevent gender-based violence. I am contributing to this Call for Evidence to advocate for funding mechanisms that are intersectional, sustainable, and truly aligned with the diverse realities of survivors and the organisations that support them.

Executive Summary

Current funding models are inequitable and inefficient, often excluding organisations most embedded in affected communities.

A new funding framework should center intersectionality and institutional maturity, ensuring tailored, fair, and effective allocation.

Proposed mechanisms include tiered funding, consortia-based coordination, multi-year support, and participatory evaluation.

Coordination remains fragmented; equitable, structured partnerships must replace informal, personality-driven collaboration.

Access barriers, especially for identity-led and small organisations, demand targeted support, simplified processes, and core funding.

Gender must be addressed as a systemic, relational issue, inclusive of masculinity, LGBTQ+ leadership, and diverse survivor pathways.

Introduction

This submission responds to three central questions in the current Call for Evidence on funding to address violence against women and girls (VAWG). It draws on my experience in public policy, organisational strategy, and cross-sector practice, including my work at a non-governmental organisation dedicated to the prevention and response to violence against women and girls, my engagement with leadership figures in the Brazilian government’s education sector, and the development of a corporate framework for gender-based violence prevention in a multinational retail group.

I offer a critical perspective on current funding models and propose a new framework grounded in two key principles: intersectionality and institutional maturity. This approach seeks to align public funding mechanisms with the complexity of the VAWG ecosystem, recognizing the diverse realities of survivors and the range of roles played by different organisations.

This submission offers specific mechanisms to implement these principles, including funding consortia, differentiated assessment tools, and long-term funding models.

1-      How should the Government prioritize funding in a VAWG strategy?

To prioritize funding effectively, the Government must go beyond linear or siloed understandings of gender and violence. An impactful strategy must be grounded in a plural, situated, and intersectional view of VAWG, one that reflects the complexity of women's and girls’ lived realities across lines of race, disability, class, migration status, sexual orientation, and more.

a. A critique of current funding logic

Current funding mechanisms tend to:

• Favor larger, generalist organisations over smaller, specialist ones.
• Rely on competitive models that replicate inequalities betIen organisations.
• Prioritise project-based over core or infrastructure funding.
• Apply uniform criteria that disregard the diversity of roles across the VAWG response ecosystem.

This logic is not only inequitable but also inefficient. It undermines the ability of the sector to build long-term, community-rooted, survivor-led responses to violence. These structural problems have been documented in multiple studies on UK funding models (Barter et al., 2018), and austerity measures have further exacerbated these gaps (McNeil, 2019).

b. A new model: intersectional and maturity-based funding

I propose that public funding be structured according to two core principles:

1. Intersectionality: Funding should recognize that the risks, impacts, and access barriers related to VAWG are shaped by multiple intersecting forms of inequality. This means:
• Targeted funds for organisations led by and for Black women, disabled women, migrant women, LGBTQ+ communities, etc.
• Funding criteria include equity indicators, such as language accessibility, outreach capacity, and inclusive hiring practices.

Evidence shows that BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) women face higher rates of violence but are less likely to access sustained support services (Siddiqui, 2018), and that immigration status can block access to life-saving services (Dudley, 2015).

2. Institutional Maturity: Funding should reflect the developmental stage of each organisation, not to create hierarchies, but to ensure fairness and proportionality. Maturity levels could be based on:
• Existence of formal protocols for prevention and response.
• Depth of community engagement and survivor participation.
• Data collection practices, especially disaggregated and qualitative data.
• Partnerships with other actors in the ecosystem.

This approach supports both established organisations (through long-term funding) and emerging groups (through seed grants, mentoring, and capacity-building), helping build a stronger, more diverse field.

This allows both, established and grassroots organizations to thrive, echoing the tiered models discussed in gender funding literature (McMillan, 2007).

c. Differentiated funding by axis of intervention

Not all organisations act on all fronts. Funding should be designed around axes of action, aligned with the national 4Ps framework:

• Prevent: education, awareness, community engagement, cultural change.
• Protect: survivor services, shelters, helplines, legal support.
• Pursue: justice advocacy, perpetrator programs, and legal accompaniment.
• Prepare: organisational culture, policy advocacy, training, and data.

Organisations should be assessed and funded based on the specific axis or axes in which they operate, with no expectation of total coverage. This avoids unfair expectations of full-spectrum coverage and values specialization , something current evaluation frameworks often miss, as they prioritize numeric outputs over meaningful or survivor-defined outcomes. Recent evaluations of trauma-informed community programs in England stress the importance of relational outcomes such as trust, empowerment, and safety, which are often overlooked in standard reporting structures (Warwick-Booth & Coan, 2024).

d. Suggested instruments and mechanisms

To operationalize this model, I recommend:

• A modular self-assessment tool, where organisations indicate their axis of action and are evaluated accordingly.
• A scoring system that blends capacity, reach, and equity criteria, avoiding overemphasis on quantitative indicators alone.
• An incentive structure for partnerships across maturity levels and axes of work.
• Multi-year funding schemes with periodic evaluation but minimal reapplication burden.

This model would allow the Government to prioritize funding in a way that balances national goals with local realities, ensuring that no organisation, or group of women, is left behind.

2-      How adequate is the coordination of funding for tackling VAWG? Are there examples of good partnerships?

The current coordination of funding to address violence against women and girls (VAWG) in the UK can be considered fragmented, reactive, and uneven. While there are efforts to align national strategies, such as the introduction of the VAWG National Framework for Delivery (2023–2027), funding flows remain largely siloed, short-term, and disconnected from the realities of frontline and community-based organisations. This gap has been reaffirmed in recent analyses of the UK’s national strategy, which emphasize how limited structural coordination and a narrow focus on criminal justice marginalize diverse survivor experiences and smaller providers (Beetham et al., 2021).

a. Fragmentation and power asymmetries

One of the central problems in funding coordination is the disparity of power between organisations. Larger, more established institutions, often white-led and generalist, are positioned as natural “anchors” for funding, while smaller, specialist, and identity-led organisations are frequently relegated to subcontracted or marginal roles. This reproduces historical exclusions and undermines the very diversity that a robust VAWG response requires.

There is also limited coordination between statutory funding bodies (such as police forces, local authorities, and NHS trusts) and the third sector. Competitive application processes lead to duplication of services in some areas, and complete service voids in others, particularly in rural areas or regions with high concentrations of racialized or migrant communities.

Coordination mechanisms such as multi-agency panels and regional forums often lack decision-making power over budgets and funding priorities. Where collaboration exists, it is driven by personalities and informal relationships, rather than structural incentives or shared accountability frameworks.

b. A new model: collaborative consortia and shared governance

To address these coordination failures, I propose the establishment of funding consortia organized by region and/or axis of intervention. These consortia would bring together organisations of varying sizes, maturities, and specialisms under shared funding streams and governance principles.

Public funding mechanisms must consider not only organizational capacity but also the political position each organization occupies within structures of inequality. As discussed in Rodrigues Silva, Rodrigues Silva, and Zanola (2025), collective approaches to social responsibility reveal how agendas are shaped by power dynamics, and how interpretive communities rooted in intersectionality and decoloniality can inform more just and responsive allocation models.

Key features of this model include:

• Joint funding applications that include both large and small organisations.
• Equitable decision-making structures, including the participation of survivors and minoritized voices.
• Proportional distribution of funds, ensuring core funding reaches grassroots providers.
• Formal mechanisms for knowledge sharing, peer support, and joint monitoring.

Such models already exist in other fields, such as public health, environmental justice, and humanitarian response, and could be adapted to the VAWG ecosystem. They help address duplication, reduce administrative burdens, and build a culture of co-responsibility rather than competition.

c. An ecosystem perspective

Rather than imagining a single pipeline of services, I must understand the VAWG field as an ecosystem of interdependent actors, each with a unique role. Some organisations provide critical frontline services; others offer long-term accompaniment; some engage in education and prevention; others build policy or data infrastructure.

A coordinated funding strategy would:

• Map and recognize this diversity.
• Align funding streams with differentiated organisational functions.
• Promote complementarity over uniformity.

Coordination should also happen horizontally, between peers in the sector, and vertically, across levels of government, with regional planning that includes statutory and non-statutory actors.

d. Examples of promising partnerships

While formalized, large-scale consortia are still rare, there are examples of successful partnerships built on trust, complementary expertise, and shared goals. These include:

• Multi-agency hubs combining statutory services and third-sector support;
• Long-standing collaborations between LGBTQIA+ and feminist organisations to serve queer survivors of domestic violence.
• Informal networks of Black women-led groups that share resources and referrals despite lacking formal funding mechanisms.

The challenge is not the lack of willingness to collaborate, it is the lack of structured, well-funded, and equitable models to support and sustain such partnerships. The Government can play a catalytic role in incentivizing and institutionalizing these models through dedicated funds and co-designed governance.

3-      What are the scale and nature of the challenges for accessing funding for tackling VAWG?

The challenges of accessing funding to tackle VAWG in the UK are systemic, intersectional, and deeply rooted in structural inequalities between organisations. These disparities are not just technical or administrative, they reflect broader power dynamics that shape who is seen as “credible,” “capable” or “professional” within the funding landscape.

a. Structural barriers to access

As Patricia Hill Collins (2023) argues in Lethal Intersections, violence is not simply interpersonal but structurally produced through the convergence of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Addressing VAWG effectively thus requires a funding model that reflects this complexity, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Organisations led by and for minoritized groups, including Black and racialized women, migrant women, LGBTQ+ survivors, disabled women, and those living in poverty or rural areas, face multiple and overlapping barriers:

• Short-term and unpredictable funding cycles, prevent long-term planning, retention of staff, or sustained relationships with communities.
• Administrative and compliance burdens, disproportionately affect small or volunteer-led organisations with limited back-office capacity.
• Funding criteria that prioritize outputs over context, privileging quantitative indicators over relational, cultural, or community-based impact.
• Limited access to core funding, means organisations are forced into constant project-based grant cycles that rarely cover overhead or allow for strategic development.

In practice, this means that many of the organisations closest to survivors, those with trust, cultural competence, and grounded expertise, are the least likely to access sustained public funding.

b. The need for perennity and proportionality

To address these challenges, the Government must reconceptualize funding not as a one-off intervention, but as a long-term public infrastructure for safety and justice.

This means:

• Committing to multi-year funding cycles (3–5 years) with simplified renewal processes.
• Creating reserved funding streams for organisations led by and for structurally excluded groups.
• Offering core funding alongside project-specific grants.
• Developing support structures, such as mentoring, administrative assistance, and institutional development funds, to help emerging organisations build long-term sustainability.

Such a model moves from a logic of scarcity and competition to one of investment and ecosystem care.

c. A tiered model of funding access

I propose a tiered model of funding that aligns with the institutional maturity and axis of intervention of each organisation:

• Seed Tier: For emerging organisations, newly formed groups, or informal collectives working in under-resourced areas or with underserved populations. These funds should be low-barrier, flexible, and accompanied by technical support.
• Intermediate Tier: For organisations with formalized practices in one or more axes of the 4P model. These groups may not yet have robust infrastructure but demonstrate clear impact and community trust.
• Strategic Tier: For organisations with proven capacity, integrated approaches across multiple axes, and active roles in sectoral coordination, policy advocacy, and survivor-led innovation.

Each tier would have tailored application processes, reporting requirements, and evaluation criteria, aligned to the scale, function, and context of the organisation. This reduces bureaucratic inequality and values diverse forms of expertise and care.

d. Rethinking evaluation and impact

Another major challenge is the narrow definition of “impact” used in most funding programs. Many grant frameworks continue to rely on numeric outputs (e.g., number of sessions delivered, victims reached), with limited space for qualitative, relational, or survivor-defined outcomes.

I suggest adopting participatory evaluation models, where:

• Survivors and frontline workers co-define what success looks like.
• Indicators include measures of trust, safety, empowerment, and cultural relevance.
• Data collection is ethical, anonymized, and disaggregated across race, gender identity, migration status, etc.

Such a shift improves data quality and fosters accountability to those most affected.

e. Gender is not neutral, and not exclusive to women

Current funding and policy frameworks often implicitly treat “gender” as a women-only category, reinforcing binary and victim-centric approaches. While it is essential to center women and girls, especially those most affected by systemic violence, this must be done without erasing the fact that men also have gender and that gender norms, masculinity, and power are central to both the cause and the solution of VAWG.

To transform the landscape, funding mechanisms must:

• Support organisations working with men and boys to deconstruct violent masculinities, prevent abuse, and foster care-based forms of relationship and accountability.
• Recognize that all population groups matter across all axes, men must be involved in prevention; LGBTQ+ groups in justice work; and migrants in data governance.
• Avoid siloing certain groups into specific phases (e.g., only involving LGBTQ+ organisations in protection but not in prevention or policy).

Conclusion

This submission has explored how funding strategies for tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG) can become more equitable, effective, and sustainable (Collins, 2023). It responded to the three central questions posed by the Call for Evidence by examining how prioritization, coordination, and access to funding intersect, and how structural inequalities shape all three.

Taken together, the recommendations in this submission offer a coherent framework: one that centers intersectionality, supports organisations according to their institutional maturity, enables collaborative governance, and redefines what counts as meaningful impact. These are not isolated solutions but interdependent principles designed to reorient public funding toward justice, care, and long-term transformation.

They also align with, and aim to operationalize, the aspirations outlined in the VAWG National Framework for Delivery (2023–2027). While the framework articulates a bold vision, it currently lacks clear mechanisms to ensure equity in implementation, particularly regarding who gets funded, how decisions are made, and what outcomes are valued.

If adopted, the proposals in this submission would:

• Strengthen trust with underserved communities by resourcing identity-led and survivor-led organisations;
• Increase the retention and wellbeing of frontline workers through more stable and proportional funding;
• Enhance the long-term impact, diversity, and resilience of the UK’s VAWG ecosystem.

Addressing violence against women and girls demands programmatic responses and structural shifts. Funding, when designed with care and equity at its core, can be one of the most powerful tools to support such transformation

References

Barter, C., Bracewell, K., & Stanley, N. (2018). Scoping study: Violence against women and girls services.

Beetham, G., Turley, L., & Shah, R. (2021). An intersectional feminist response to the UK Government’s strategy on violence against women and girls.

Collins, P. H. (2023). Lethal Intersections: Race, Class, Gender, and the Politics of Violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dudley, R. (2015). Domestic abuse and women with no recourse to public funds: Where human rights do not reach.

McMillan, L. (2007). Funding feminist movement organisations working around violence against women.

McNeil, J. (2019). Are we all in this together? Exploring the impact of austerity on access to justice for women experiencing domestic abuse. Journal of Law and Society, 46(3), 437–456.

Rodrigues Silva, C., Rodrigues Silva, L., & Zanola, F. (2025). Collective social responsibility: Revealing agendas in intersectional and decolonial interpretive communities. Culture and Organization, 1–20.

Siddiqui, H. (2018). Counting the cost: BME women and gender‐based violence in the UK. Imkaan.

Warwick-Booth, L., & Coan, S. (2024). Trauma-informed mental health support: Qualitative evaluation findings from one voluntary and community sector programme for women experiencing DVA. Journal of Gender-Based Violence.

April 2025