Long Read: Assessing Funding Portfolios against Agroecological Principles

Bonnie Hewson - December 2025

How much do funders know about how their portfolios of work contribute to a better agroecological future for the UK?

Farming and food systems practices are at the heart of many of the problems and solutions we are grappling with around in the UK and globally, around nutrition and health, environmental degradation, pollution and emissions – these systems are also intricately tied up with social and economic systems that are extractive, undemocratic and unfair. Our work acknowledges that to achieve better food and farming systems that value the wellbeing of all living things, and the knowledge and participation of producers and communities, we need to nourish the capacity to collaborate together to create alternatives that are built on socially, economically and environmentally regenerative principles. This holistic approach is encapsulated well in agroecological principles.

However, when we talk about supporting a shift to agroecology in the UK with other funders it is often hard to illustrate how all our different strategies can contribute towards the necessary change. This is why we are so excited to be able to share the results of our mapping of our own pooled-fund grants against the agroecological principles using the Agroecology Coalitions’ Finance Assessment Tool.

How the tool works

This is a tool for funders and investors to use to evaluate projects they fund by rating their contribution to the 13 principles of agroecology. It gives red flags if any principles are actively contravened so funders can see if work might be damaging to an agroecological direction of travel.

Each of the principles can also be rated on a scale, or marked as non-applicable – but four are considered always-applicable: co-creation of knowledge, social values and diets, fairness, and participation. This ensures that an overall project’s score is reduced for projects which do not address these important agroecological principles. These principles are considered essential to ensure that transformational levels of change are achieved within the food system. (More on the development of the methodology of the tool can be read about here)

After scoring an organisation can view each project’s score, or a Summary of the Principles for all or any of their portfolios of work, compared to that of other Institution’s initiatives as a whole.

Farming the future’s portfolios score well as all the work we funded is focused on agroecological change, whereas some organisations only allocate some of their granting in this space.

How this tool can help us reflect on our work

Further visualisations are being developed by the team behind the tool, but in the meantime, we have exported the data and mapped average scores for each of our grant portfolios on radar charts. Below is our initial analysis of what we have observed from this. We intend to continue to map our portfolios in this way to help us reflect on where our resources are flowing in the system.

This analysis is not intended to undermine any of the decisions that our Ambassadors make in our participatory grantmaking circle but to provide a tool for reflection and discussion. It provides a jumping off point to unpack the type of applications we attract, the criteria we use to make decisions and the strengths and weaknesses we have as a funder. It is also a valuable way of visualising the areas we tend to focus on in our work and what approaches we have taken that have stretched our portfolio in new directions.

Four reflections

 1.        All our work sits squarely in the transformational levels (4 and 5) of systems change

All our portfolios are strongest on co-creation of knowledge, participation, fairness, connectivity and social values. This is because we emphasise HOW people work (through collaboration) and support building connections within the system to bring about change together for a more fair and values driven future. Conversely our portfolios don’t emphasise work on the principles of agroecology that support on-farm changes for lower input more nature friendly, soil building practices. This isn’t because we don’t think they are important, but we don't fund individual organisations, places or farms and we receive far fewer collaborative proposals focusing on these types of outcomes.

 2.       Our work in 2020 shows that Covid challenged us to fund differently

As many funders did in 2020 we had a regular grants round and Emergency Funding round. Our emergency funding shows that participation was deprioritised in favour of uplifting fairness for producers and communities and connection between these two groups – in a departure from our normal approach we funded more projects with a place-based focus on securing local food supplies.

3.      Our 2024 funding rounds allowed us to extend our work more intentionally into areas of social values

In 2024 we funded collaboration through both smaller development grants and larger grants for more mature work. But we also trialled a simple nomination approach to direct £10k grants towards organisations, groups or other non-constituted entities who were in the early stages of their work and needed flexible support to develop their systems, approach, theory of change or access external capacity building support such as financial, fundraising, leadership or other training needs.

We focused on work from organisations we hadn’t previously funded, falling into these categories:

• Ensuring access to healthy, nutritious, and/or culturally appropriate food

• Amplifying diverse voices within the food & farming movement

• Fair and healthy working conditions for growers, producers & food workers

• Increasing community ownership & control and/or ensuring access to: land, water, seeds, tenure, financial capital

We were also looking for organisations led by or which have a majority of organisers who are members of marginalised communities e.g. BPOC, LBGTQIA+, women.

In this way we were able to broaden our pool of funded partners and support historically underfunded areas of work on social values. It is also notable that our collaboration round in this year also rated highest on fairness compared to any other year too.

4.      Our funding of collaboration is improving in terms of the depth of alignment with transformational principles of agroecology

Just taking our annual funding of collaboration work (so excluding our New Growth and Covid funding, and our field building partnerships, which we haven’t assessed yet) we can see that year on year the degree to which funded collaborations align with the principles of knowledge co-creation, fairness social diets and connectivity has generally increased. Our most recently funded 2025 collaborations seemed stronger, as a portfolio,  than previous years on participation and connectivity, but were less focused on issues of fairness and social values, although these still featured.

How this tool could help funders collaborate more strategically

This tool could provide, if other UK funders used it to asses their grants, a useful way of juxtaposing different strategies and portfolios, to better inform strategic efforts to plug gaps in support for an better future for UK farming and food systems.

The tool gives clear guidance and good technical support and offers the potential for simple visual outputs that could provide useful comparison between funders. There is an intention with the Agroecology Coalition to encourage others to take up use of this tool from 2026 (rather than everyone undertaking the arduous backfilling of previous portfolios) – would your funding organisation consider using it to assess your portfolio and thereby contribute to a larger dataset to show where funding is going into agroecological practices?

Find out more about how you can use the tool here.