Near Neighbours

Near Neighbours champions social integration and cohesion in religiously and ethnically diverse communities, fostering friendships, trust, and cooperation across faith and cultural divides through grassroots partnerships. Core values of inclusivity, mutual respect, community empowerment, and responsive collaboration drive their grantmaking, rooted in a philosophy that neighbourhood-level personal relationships and joint social action transform isolation, reduce prejudice, and build resilient localities. They prioritize faith-inspired leadership, intergroup bridge-building, and empowering local voices to address tensions and shared challenges via participatory, relationship-focused interventions.

They fund community-led initiatives advancing interfaith dialogue, intercultural understanding, and cooperation in pluralistic neighbourhoods, including youth mental health training and peer support groups for young people facing anxiety or isolation, domestic abuse recovery programs and advocacy for women and families escaping violence or forced marriage, anti-trafficking and exploitation support for vulnerable ethnic minorities, intergenerational arts projects and creative activities building confidence and connections, sports and outdoor activities promoting inclusion for youth at risk of exclusion, environmental campaigns and community gardening tackling local isolation and sustainability, cultural events and befriending schemes reducing prejudice, mental health counselling and therapeutic workshops addressing community tensions, and crisis response like pandemic outreach strengthening social bonds. Interventions emphasize preventative social interaction, trauma-informed peer support, holistic community development, and evidence-based trust-building to create collaborative problem-solving and lasting cohesion among diverse groups including children, young people aged 16-25, women, carers, and marginalised residents in high-diversity areas.

They exclude core funding, unrestricted support, capital projects, or initiatives lacking cross-faith or cross-ethnic relationship-building. Distinctive for prioritizing grassroots faith-based and voluntary groups in multi-ethnic urban neighbourhoods with pronounced diversity tensions, they seek organisations embodying lived experience leadership, intergroup collaboration over single-community focus, and dual emphasis on social action alongside interaction to empower local resilience against extremism, division, and emerging needs like youth unemployment or family crises.