A guide to the Guardian’s 2025 charity appeal partners
Locality is the national network that brings together people to transform lives and improve the place they live,Its 2,000 members are local community organisations, often in the most disadvantaged areas, who create connections and provide vital services – from food banks to community centres, affordable housing projects to youth clubs,As Locality’s chief executive, Tony Armstrong, says: “Our work is the antidote to despair – we inspire hope and generate resilience, pride and opportunity,”Rooted in local areas, Locality members counter the extremism and toxic narratives that erode trust and pit neighbours against one another,“The only way to combat division is to connect people, building bridges in communities rather than putting up walls,” he says.
Locality, which previously partnered with the Guardian in its Cost of Living Crisis 2022 charity appeal, will use its share of this year’s donations to award grants to selected local projects and to support its work to help more community organisations tackle division and hate.According to Armstrong, “Locality has a proud record of supporting local heroes to transform lives and create hope.Strong communities are the beating heart of a fairer society.”Two Bradford schools came together in 2001 with a shared belief: that children thrive when they have opportunities to meet and learn alongside peers from different backgrounds.They wanted to create meaningful ways for young people to explore what makes them unique, all that they share, and gain the skills to connect with one another.
The result was Schools Linking, which paired schools to enable pupils from different faiths, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds to spend time together and discover what they had in common, giving children opportunities to develop curiosity, confidence and understanding through shared joyful experiences,Over the past two decades, the charity has expanded nationally through a network of locally rooted partners in 26 local authority areas, including Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Luton and Newcastle,Led by teachers and supported by galleries, theatres and outdoor centres, the aim is simple but profound: to reduce prejudice, challenge stereotyping and build meaningful connections across all forms of difference,Guardian appeal donations will help The Linking Network develop and expand its work,“We know how easy it is for any of us to slip into believing stereotypes, or to remain in our comfort zones rather than seeking out people who seem different to us and exploring what we have in common,” the charity says.
“We were founded on the principle that everyday people have power.And that by bringing together people across their differences we can find common ground and make change,” says Matthew Bolton, the chief executive and lead organiser of Citizens UK.Founded more than 30 years ago, Citizens UK has grown into Britain’s biggest “people-powered alliance” made up of 18 regional chapters.Best-known for its living wage campaign, its other projects include refugee welcome, voter registration and hundreds of local initiatives aimed at achieving change on the issues that matter locally, from housing to zebra crossings.Its share of Guardian appeal donations will be invested in a Power-Building Fund to train community leaders and organisers with the skills and confidence to harness the collective power of communities across the UK to campaign for change.
“Real change doesn’t start in Westminster; it starts in community centres, schools and places of worship.It begins when people realise they don’t have to accept the world as it is, and start imagining the world as it could be,” says Bolton.“We’re not just running campaigns; we’re building a movement rooted in dignity, relationships and hope.”This small South Yorkshire charity holds facilitated group dialogue in communities allowing people to speak openly about the impact of change, and issues that can be difficult to talk about, such as cultural differences, immigration and the communal sense of loss that came from the decline of traditional industries.These group conversations are facilitated in a way that encourages thoughtfulness and curiosity, with participants and facilitators reflecting on their attitudes to the changes being experienced.
“Empathy builds empathy” is at the heart of Who is Your Neighbour? “People being heard, being taken seriously, their experience being valued, is a basis for deepening empathy,Empathy, together with thoughtful curiosity, can help us all work out how we live together with changes we are experiencing in a time when divisive and dehumanising narratives abound and threaten communities,” it says,Who is Your Neighbour? shares what it does through training and working alongside organisations in other areas of the country,Its share of the Guardian appeal donations will help the growth of this national development, enabling more of these conversations to happen in more places,Hope Unlimited is a grant-giving charity supporting projects that challenge hate, promote mutual understanding and strengthen community relationships.
It champions the work of hyper-local, grassroots organisations and initiatives whose expertise and success come from being created by and for the communities in which they are embedded.There are huge gaps in existing funding schemes, meaning many of these small-scale, grassroots organisations are unable to access funding in a way that actually benefits their communities.Hope Unlimited wants to change this.“We recognise and support the importance of these organisations as being on the frontline of the fight against hateful and divisive narratives breaking down community fabric,” it says.“By funding what the community identifies as a priority, with flexibility to adapt to changing needs, we can support these brilliant initiatives to continue their work on their own terms.
Its share of Guardian appeal donations will fund local organisations and initiatives that bring people together, address community grievances, boost resilience to hateful and divisive narratives, and above all, build hope.
Ministers urged to close £2bn tax loophole in car finance scandal
Ministers are being urged to close a loophole that will allow UK banks and specialist lenders to avoid paying £2bn in tax on their payouts to motor finance scandal victims.Under the current law, any operation that is not a bank can deduct compensation payments from their profits before calculating their corporation tax, reducing their bill.UK banks have been blocked from claiming this relief since 2015, but it has now emerged that those due to pay redress as part of the pending £11bn car loan compensation scheme can exploit it because their motor finance arms are considered “non-bank entities”.The Guardian has learned this includes the operations of big high street names including Barclays and Santander UK, and Lloyds Banking Group, which is the UK’s biggest provider of car loans through its Black Horse division.Specialist lenders in the scandal, which include the lending arms of car manufacturers such as Honda and Ford, also fall outside this taxation rule
Cloudflare admits ‘we have let the Internet down again’ after outage hits major web services – as it happened
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
Australia v England: Ashes second Test, day four – live
We are about to get started. The Queensland sun is shining bright and hard today, it’s the hottest of the days yet, at least by my internal thermometer. Hmm, sounds uncomfortable. Let’s cricket.“As I reach the end of another working week, I am once again reminded of the cruelty of cricketing disappointment
Il Etait Temps shows his time is now with stunning display in Tingle Creek
A group of racegoers in high pre-Christmas spirits were singing: “We love you, Jonbon, we do,” on the path across the track, but the punters had not one, but two new favourites to celebrate by the end of Saturday afternoon as the odds-on shots Il Etait Temps and Lulamba delivered impressive victories in the card’s two Grade One events.Both horses are now close to the top of the betting for their respective targets at next year’s Cheltenham festival, and Jonbon’s supporters can at least reflect that his bid to become only the second three-time winner of the Tingle Creek in its 56-year history was derailed by an exceptional rival.A posse of top-class two-milers attacking the long line of fences on Sandown’s back straight is one of the great spectacles in jumping, and the three market leaders in Saturday’s race – Jonbon, Il Etait Temps and Dan Skelton’s L’Eau Du Sud, who had beaten Jonbon by 18 lengths at Cheltenham last time – were foot-perfect throughout.As Jonbon led them out of the back and towards the Pond fence, however, Il Etait Temps was clearly travelling best and when Paul Townend sent him to the front after jumping the second-last, the race was in effect over.Willie Mullins, Il Etait Temps’ trainer, had started the day without a single winner to his name in Britain this season, but the £100,000 first prize here was a reminder that Dan Skelton’s big lead in the title race could yet come under threat when Mullins’s huge team arrives for the spring festivals at Cheltenham and Aintree
UK first-time buyers in best position to snap up property in a decade, data shows
Skipton in Yorkshire named happiest place to live in Great Britain
‘Tough market conditions’ hit UK half-year retail sales at Frasers Group
Dryrobe wins trademark case against rival waterproof changing coat D-Robe
Budget uncertainty triggers plunge in UK construction activity; Trustpilot shares slump after short-seller claims – as it happened
Rachel Reeves will not be investigated over pre-budget briefing, FCA says