There is a pattern that has been visible across the voluntary sector for the past couple of years. Organisations that have historically relied on corporate DEI budgets to fund their work are finding that those budgets are being cut, redirected or quietly eliminated. The language of diversity, equity and inclusion has become politically contested in ways that were not anticipated even three years ago, and the corporate response has been to step back, especially among US-based businesses operating in the UK and globally.

This is not a comfortable thing to write about and it's an umcomfortable thing to be living through if your organisation's work depends on that kind of funding. The organisations that are navigating this most effectively are the ones telling a different story about the same work, but grounded in economic contribution, social mobility, public health or community resilience rather than in the language of DEI specifically. Crucially, they have the evidence to back that story up.

Why the language matters, and why it is not the whole story

The backlash against DEI is primarily a backlash against a set of words and the political associations those words have acquired. It is not, in most cases, a backlash against the underlying realities that DEI programmes were designed to address. The structural disadvantages facing Black entrepreneurs are not a matter of political opinion. The health inequalities experienced by people from lower-income communities are not ideologically contested. The economic cost of talent going unrealised because access to education and networks is unevenly distributed is something that economists across the political spectrum acknowledge.

This matters because it means the case for this kind of work does not disappear when DEI language becomes difficult. What disappears is one particular framing of that case. An alternative framing that speaks to economic contribution, community strength, public health outcomes or unlocking productivity is available, and for many funders, including grant-making foundations that are less exposed to the corporate backlash than private sector funders, it is potentially a more persuasive framing.

The organisations that have done the hard work of building rigorous impact evidence are in a much stronger position to make this shift than those who have relied on the DEI framing without the data to support an alternative narrative. The Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship at Aston University used this kind of framing in it its Time to Change report, commissioned with NatWest, which made the case for unlocking ethnic minority entrepreneurial potential on explicitly economic grounds and recommended concrete policy and investment responses. KPMG's Black Entrepreneurs' Awards, now in its seventh year, has continued to attract corporate support through the backlash period partly because it has always been structured around business acceleration and measurable business outcomes rather than DEI compliance metrics.

What funders want to see

Grant-making foundations, public sector commissioners and a significant portion of the corporate sector (particularly UK-based businesses that are less influenced by the US political climate) are continuing to fund work in this space and in many cases are actively looking for organisations that can demonstrate quantifiable longitudinal impact.

Funders need to see evidence of change. How many people went through the programme? Where were they before they started and where are they now? What is the measurable difference between those who participated and a comparable group who did not? What has happened to the businesses, the health outcomes, the employment situations or the community connections of the people you have served over the past two, three, or five years?

These are not questions that can be answered from a spreadsheet of attendance numbers or a folder of testimonials. They require a measurement framework that has been consistently capturing the right results, for the right people over a long enough period of time to show demonstrable change.

Proving your impact

The organisations that are best placed to navigate the current funding environment are those that have been building their evidence base before the pressure arrived. They have baseline and follow-up data on their participants. They can show longitudinal change rather than just current state. They can disaggregate their data to show which groups have benefited most and how. They can point to outcomes across multiple categories simultaneously and can speak to funders from different sectors in terms those funders find compelling.

Those organisations can have a genuine conversation with a funder who is moving away from DEI language, because they can say: here is what our work achieves, here is the evidence, and here are the ways you might frame your support for it that align with your current priorities. That is a much stronger position than one in which the evidence is thin and the case rests primarily on the justice of the cause.

What to do if you are not there yet

Many organisations doing genuinely important work are not yet in a strong evidential position, for reasons that are understandable. Building a measurement framework takes time, resource and expertise that not every small or medium-sized charity has had. The urgency of service delivery has consistently outpaced the urgency of evaluation.

The immediate priority is to start building that measurement infrastructure now, even knowing that it will take time to obtain the longitudinal data that is most persuasive. Baseline surveys completed today become comparison data in six months. Six-month follow-up data becomes evidence of sustained change at twelve months. A year from now, organisations that begin this work in 2026 will be in a meaningfully stronger position than those that wait.

It is also worth doing a retrospective audit of what data already exists. Alumni contact details, registration forms, informal feedback, staff observations and financial data shared by participants can all be structured and entered into a measurement system to provide a historical evidence base. It will not be as clean as data collected intentionally for evaluation, but it's certainly better than starting from scratch; and when you've got funders who are evaluating a significant grant application, a demonstrated track record of impact (even if it's imperfect) is considerably more persuasive than a well-designed measurement framework that doesn't yet have any data in it yet.

Change is the one constant

The funding environment is not going to stabilise into a simple new normal quickly. It is going to continue to shift, in different directions, in response to political and economic pressures that are themselves unpredictable. The organisations that will navigate it most effectively over the long term are not those that have found the right language for this particular moment, but those that have built such a clear and rigorous case for the value of their work that the case can be translated into whatever language a given funder speaks.

That is what good impact measurement ultimately does. It does not lock you into a single narrative. It gives you the underlying evidence from which many different narratives can be built. In a funding environment where the narratives that worked three years ago are no longer reliable, that kind of evidence-based flexibility is not a nice-to-have. It is a significant competitive advantage.

If you want to talk through how Makerble can help you build the evidence base your organisation needs, get in touch. For more on how to design a measurement framework that serves multiple audiences, explore the School of Impact.

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