Sport Funders Alliance wants to improve safeguarding in S4D

Funders can have a significant impact on safeguarding. At their best, they can provide support and expertise to help grantees improve their safeguarding approaches. At their worst, they can require grantees to jump through bureaucratic hoops that don’t make a difference to the wellbeing of children taking part in their activities. 

The Funder Safeguarding Collaborative (FSC) exists to try and address this. The FSC is a network of more than 100 philanthropic organisations, which collectively manage grants of over $8 billion each year.  

FSC members want to drive action that creates safer organisational cultures and practices, to keep people safe from harm. The FSC understands that funders can play an important role in promoting safe practice and supporting efforts to prevent harm among the organisations they fund. 

In 2025, Accountable Now and the FSC carried out research into the safeguarding practices of grant-making organisations. Altogether 87 grant-makers, 285 grantee partners and 55 sector professionals contributed to the study, which combined a literature review, surveys, key informant interviews and focus groups. 
 
The report of the findings looks at the ways in which funders are approaching safeguarding, which of the different practices they adopt are effective, and the resource implications of supporting safer practice. 
 
The research identified three interconnected findings across all aspects of the grant cycle: 

1. Having clarity and alignment among funders helps reduce confusion and administrative burden on grantee partners. 
2. Safeguarding cannot be one-size-fits-all: flexibility is required, with a strong emphasis on context. 
3. Trust and the relationship between funder and grantee partner play an important role in promoting positive safeguarding practices. 

FSC and Accountable Now are building on these findings, working alongside a core group of colleagues from funding institutions, nonprofits, survivor-led organisations, and safeguarding consultants/ professionals on a project to co-create a set of safeguarding good practice standards for funders. 
 
These new standards, to be shared later this year, will help funders align and set new benchmarks for the sector, based on evidence about what is effective.  

So what about funders of sport and S4D?  

In late 2025, the International Safeguards for Children in Sport brought together a number of funders who provide grants to sport and sport for development (S4D) programmes, to explore whether there was interest to work together and build greater alignment.  

There was real appetite to do this, and given the opportunity presented by the FSC and Accountable Now good practice project, the time-bound 'Sport Funders Alliance' was created.  

This Alliance is providing support to Common Goal, as they represent the views and perspectives of the sport funder community in the FSC and Accountable Now project. The aim is to make sure that the FSC standards meet the needs of the sport and S4D sector.  

By aligning the sport funder sector with the wider funding ecosystem, we hope to break down silos, create economies of scale when it comes to safeguarding, and - most importantly - create a funding landscape where grantees experience aligned funder requirements and practice that makes their participants safer. 

Ultimately we want funders to invest in and promote practice that makes a difference – and to align around what this is – so that grantees who meet the requirements of one funder meet the requirements of all, and so that funders can pool resources to offer training and support on safeguarding – based on an evidence-based understanding of what makes sport safer.  

We invite funders of sport or S4D, and any others interested in learning more to please contact us.