Field building

Since the start of the year, we have started using the phrase ‘field building’ more and more at UK Community Foundations.

When we talk about field building in our context, we are describing the conditions that help community foundations thrive over time.  Shared practices, strong relationships, growing confidence across the network, and clear standards that guide how we work.  The underlying infrastructure that enables the work to happen, even when much of it sits out of view.

Community foundations do not operate in isolation, they are part of a wider ecosystem shaped by place, trust, power, money and community resilience.  The issues we are working on are systemic, with shared roots that run across places and priorities.  We may approach them from different vantage points, but no single organisation or sub sector can shift them alone.  The transformative change we are aiming for depends on working together.

That is why collaboration matters so much.  It is one of the strongest levers we have, whether within the network or alongside partners and institutions across the wider field.

Across the UK, community foundations are doing extraordinary work, strengthening local places, mobilising resources and building the social infrastructure that helps communities thrive.  UKCF has always played a role in connecting, supporting and championing this, but as the movement grows in confidence, ambition and impact, the way we describe our role – and the way we frame our priorities - needs to keep pace.

We have renamed our Membership and Learning team to the Field Building team.

The previous name captured parts of the work, but not the whole.  Much of what we do sits between organisations, strengthening the collective field rather than serving individual organisations in isolation.

Field building gives us a clearer way to talk about that, reflecting a bigger ambition.  Not just supporting individual members, but strengthening a connected, confident and resilient community foundation field across the UK and beyond.

At its heart, field building is about strengthening the ecosystem through shared learning, collaboration and collective capacity.  It is about creating space for people to come together and build trust, making sure knowledge is shared, offering support where it is needed and finding ways to join up effort and resources so that we are not all working in isolation.  Over time, that is what allows the field to thrive.

Our role in this is twofold.

We support our members to collaborate well by convening, sharing learning, strengthening shared standards and helping good practice travel.  We also play a direct role as a field builder in the wider sense - collaborating with others, building relationships, shaping narratives and helping create the conditions in which place based philanthropy can do its best work.

This move brings us into closer alignment with the international movement of community foundations.  Organisations such as the European Community Foundation Initiative and Community Foundations of Canada use the language of field building to describe their work in strengthening shared infrastructure, knowledge, leadership and collaboration across networks.  Adopting this language helps us connect more clearly to that global body of work and to a shared understanding that this is about the system as a whole.

For us, this is not just a change in language.

It is a clearer way of naming the work we are here to do and the role we want to play in building the conditions in which community foundations, and the communities around them, can flourish.