Celebrating our impact: The Catalyst network’s 2024/25 highlights

3^rd July 2025

Joe Roberson

Quick links

2024/25 was a turning point for Catalyst. Becoming an independent Community Interest Company let us put justice at the heart of our work. Our achievements this year belong to the whole network—a community of partners, practitioners, and organisations who share knowledge, co-create solutions, and drive change together.

This article shares highlights from our 2025 impact report on what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned, and where we’re heading next.

“It is difficult to describe Catalyst. It is a group of people, a community of practice, a working culture and set of behaviours and values. It is also a network of organisations who are trying to move in a particular direction.”
(Executive Co-Director, Hannah Turner-Uaandja; Catalyst Impact and Learning Report 2025)

What we delivered together

This year, Catalyst and our network partners worked across projects that put justice, inclusion, and care into practice:

Justice-led innovation and funding

We co-created new models for liberatory technology with justice-led groups, always centring lived experience and participatory funding. Camden Giving led a tech-enabled participatory grant process, awarding £100,000 to four youth-focused groups. Chayn brought together 24 survivors from nine countries to shape feminist AI. Multitudes used emergent design to explore infrastructures for community tech. We funded three more ‘sparks’ projects and published an Afrofuturist-inspired zine, inviting more people into the conversation.

Wellbeing and inclusion

We launched the Wellbeing Fund in direct response to community needs following the racist and Islamophobic riots, offering £1,940 in flexible bursaries to seven network members. This practical support focused on mental health and emotional wellbeing, reflecting our broader commitment to collective care and accessible, stigma-free help. Positive feedback led us to extend the fund to March 2025, recognising its essential role in sustaining leadership and participation.

Network member Zoe Amar brought together activity leads and partners for a DEI Action Learning Set. These sessions helped embed inclusive practices and build a stronger foundation for equity across the network.

Ray Cooper led Agencies for Good DEIJ research, paying underrepresented co-researchers and running events focused on youth, queer, and disability justice. Across three online events, nine contributors shared expertise and approximately 50 people joined the conversation.

Guides, research, and open knowledge

Dawn Kofie published five in-depth, practical Shared Digital Guides that highlight community-led digital inclusion and power-shifting. These guides saw high engagement, averaging 203 unique visitors and 269 views each, with a click-through rate of 9.4%.

Zoe Amar and Nissa Ramsay led the Charity Digital Skills Report, collecting a record 635 responses with strong representation from Black, disabled, young, and older people – setting a new standard for inclusive digital research and providing new insights into DEIJ in sector digital.

Through the Open IP Initiative, CAST supported youth-led digital innovation by making tools and resources openly accessible. Three youth-sector innovation incubators brought together charities, agencies, and young people to co-create new solutions.

Sector convening and practical support

The Catalyst core team convened the Funders’ Forum twice, bringing together funders and grassroots groups to surface barriers and experiment with more equitable, transparent funding relationships. Funders rated the Forum 4 out of 5 stars for usefulness and network-building.

We sponsored two network members to take part in a 12-week Bold Type Inclusive Communication course, helping them bring new skills and insights back to the network.

The Next Steps Fund provided transition funding for 11 legacy initiatives, supporting their sustainability and reflection.

To honour everyone’s contributions to all projects, we made over £30,000 in reciprocity payments in addition to our grants.

Evaluation and learning

Catalyst evaluators inFocus developed new guidance on decolonisation in evaluation, creating a supplementary toolkit and adding two new sections to our guide. Since launch, the guide has seen 54 PDF downloads and 13 unique online views. Fifty-three participants joined a related webinar, and 11 new collaborators came on board to refine the resource further.

Dawn Kofie and Joe Roberson produced 32 new tech justice resources and news items, reaching thousands of readers and helping to spread practical knowledge across the sector.

Making a difference: stories from the network

Our biggest impact came when we put lived experience at the centre. The Tech Justice Roadtrip made this clear:

“It was essential that it be grounded in the thoughts and experiences of survivors… to be granted the time and the resources to do this… that was really transformative for us as an organisation.”
— Eva Blum-Dumontet, Chayn

Camden Giving’s participatory funding tool awarded £100,000 to youth-focused groups, shaped by young people’s input:

“One of them made a comment… just being surprised we had actually built it the way they had specified… that stuck with me. We were not just talking to them for the sake of it.”
— Yasmin Farah, Camden Giving

Both the DEI Action Learning Set and the Wellbeing Fund provided practical, stigma-free support:

“The fund made it possible to hold things together during a challenging time. Access to this kind of support should not be exceptional, but part of how organisations care for people.”
— Wellbeing Fund recipient

The Agencies for Good DEIJ research revealed a gap between inclusive values and lived experience, prompting immediate action through events and new guidance:

“Important that engaging youth is not just a box-ticking exercise! Co-designing rather than just consulting young people. Not just employing people with uni experience.”
— Event participant

How we worked differently

This year, we experimented with new approaches to governance, care, and evaluation:

We integrated sociocracy into our structures, using consent-based decision-making and shared funding pots, with guidance from Abi Handley and Kayleigh Walsh.
We piloted new approaches to evaluation that centre community knowledge and move beyond traditional, extractive metrics. inFocus led a workshop on decolonising evaluation, where practitioners shared experiences and co-created a practical workbook. By putting lived experience and community knowledge at the heart of our evidence, we’re redefining what counts as impact.
We developed a new storytelling handbook, brand identity, and tone of voice guide, all through collaborative processes. Our digital channels – website, newsletter, LinkedIn – continue to grow.

What was hard and what we learned

Measuring systems change is tough. Traditional evaluation frameworks do not always capture the shifts in power, trust, and ways of working that are central to our mission. Much of our progress is relational and emergent, so we are learning to value stories, case studies, and participatory methods as evidence.

Working in an emergent, justice-led way brings challenges. Sometimes, our evolving identity led to confusion or slower progress, but it also laid the groundwork for more equitable ways of working. Becoming an independent CIC was a major milestone, but it brought challenges. The transition took much of the directors’ time and energy, and activity leads delivered funded work while our structure shifted around them. Some welcomed the new model, while others felt unsure about their roles. Despite these growing pains, we kept the quality of activities high, and people appreciated the team’s transparency and support.

Building inclusion into our work required deep thought and commitment. Many partners said Catalyst projects took more headspace than others, because moving from good intentions to real action needs honest discussion and learning (and often a good deal of unlearning too). Some worried about being seen as ‘ticking a box’, but the drive to embed power-shifting, community engagement, and ethical tech led to more genuinely equitable practices. Putting inclusive principles into action takes bravery, care and constant attention, and needs ongoing exploration and more resources in the future.

Looking ahead

We have entered a period of deceleration and discovery. We will focus on deep listening and power-sharing, refining our direction through field engagement. Our next steps include building more direct relationships with grassroots communities, championing tech justice more vocally, and investing in consistent, strategic communications. We remain committed to learning, adapting, and sharing our journey openly as we work towards just digital futures.

Attribution

The network’s impact was made possible by many individuals and partners, each contributing to the work described here. For a full list of contributors and their projects, see the full Catalyst Impact Report 2024/25.

You can also view a summary of the report.