An update on the Roots & Routes Climate Justice Fund

Recent research shows that youth-led climate action is critically underfunded.

This fund was created to address that gap, recognising that young people, especially those from communities most affected by climate injustice, are often overlooked by traditional funding streams. 

By working together we hope to reduce the administrative burden placed on young people often applying for multiple grants from like-minded funders, having to complete multiple reports for these funders, and having to hold different relationships. Our partnership aims to reduce this burden and together we believe we can enable more impact than the sum of our parts.

For more information on the Fund, please visit this page. 

We came together as a group of funders in early 2025 to explore how we could reduce barriers to funding for youth-led climate justice work, and put much-needed resources behind it. We developed a pilot project to test our processes and funding approach, which is running until March 2026.

• 5 further grants of £19,800 to 5 infrastructure organisations that were nominated by young people from the youth-led climate justice organisations we funded in 2025. By doing this we hope to build the ecosystem that supports youth-led changemaking in climate justice.

Since our last update in April 2025, we have welcomed 6 inspirational youth-led organisations working on the climate crisis to Roots & Routes. 

We look forward to sharing more information on the individuals funded through ‘Challenge and Change’ in the coming months.

• We want to shift our power to a youth-led governance structure and embed their knowledge into our decision making. We think the best way to do this is to recruit a board of young advisors to make these decisions. We want to work with this board in service to young people doing climate justice work.
   
• In our pilot year, we didn’t want to let ‘perfect be the enemy of good’. We will work with our young advisors to learn what worked and what didn’t, so we can continuously improve our approach.

• We want to expand our funding to enable young people to make meaningful funding decisions that strongly contribute to supporting climate justice across England.
   
• We want all young people who are working on climate justice projects and activities to know where they can get funding from. Our ambition is to fund every youth-led organisation and individual working on climate justice that meets our base criteria.
   
• We want young people working on climate justice to receive support that meets their needs and sustains their changemaking. We understand that burnout is a huge problem in our sector, and the infrastructure surrounding young changemakers must be strengthened to support them.
   
• We want our peers in the funding sector to recognise that climate justice = social justice, and they can meet their own social justice goals by increasing their funding of youth-led climate justice work.

If you’re a funder interested in supporting youth-led climate justice movements we’d love to connect. Please contact Marie@blagravetrust.org for details of how you can contribute.