With 2025 drawing to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on what’s been a significant year for the London Marathon Foundation. It’s been a year of growth, learning, and deepening our commitment to inspiring activity in London and across the UK.
We awarded £10 million to inspire activity – our highest annual funding total since before the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to our grantees, this funding is already helping more communities take part in sport and physical activity.
This year also saw the launch of Get Active Scotland – our first Fund solely to support Scottish communities. It’s one of the largest funds in Scotland aimed at making physical activity more accessible, inclusive, and part of daily life for everyone, and we’re proud to be collaborating with sportscotland, High Life Highland and Glasgow Life to make this happen.
But it’s more than funding – it’s about using sport and physical activity as a force for good. Earlier this year, we launched our first Group Impact Report with our events company (London Marathon Events), highlighting how our funding, initiatives and events are creating a positive physical, social and environmental impact, and helping more communities experience the wide-ranging benefits of being active all year round.
As our funding has grown, so too has our team. We’ve welcomed new members to our Funding and Impact Teams, strengthening our capacity and expertise to support grantees, and measure the collective difference their work is making. Our funding also created three new roles within LME’s Children and Young People Team, and we’re now supporting schools across England to deliver The Daily Mile. Together, we also created a new team charter to guide how we work as a growing charity. It’s already helping us stay aligned, communicate openly and remain focused on our mission – and will undoubtedly support us throughout the next year and beyond.
I’m very grateful to the fantastic team we have in place – for their energy, enthusiasm and thoughtful approach across our work. I also want to thank our dedicated Trustees, particularly those who sit on our Grants Committee, for their advice, challenge and support
Learnings
With growth comes more opportunity for development. Throughout the year, we ask grantees for feedback to understand areas where we could be doing better. Thanks to their open and honest insights, next year, we’re aiming to:
- Provide clearer guidance on data collection: a third of organisations surveyed told us they’d like more support on this. With our expanded Impact Team, we’re ready to provide clearer, more inclusive guidance.
- Simplify payment processes: we’re committed to making our payment processes even more flexible and straightforward.
- Build trust around delays: while 70% of organisations surveyed felt confident reporting project delays, we want this to be 100%. Delays are a normal part of delivery, and we’ll continue to build open, trusting relationships so every grantee feels comfortable sharing challenges.
- Visit more projects: It’s the best part of our work, and we’ll prioritise being relational by visiting more grantees.
Looking ahead to 2026
While we’ve achieved a lot this year, we know there’s so much more to be done.
More than half of children in England aren’t meeting the Chief Medical Officers’ guidelines of 60 minutes of physical activity every day. Inequalities in activity levels between more and less affluent groups are widening. Disabled people remain almost twice as likely to be physically inactive.
Next year is set to be one of the biggest years yet for the Foundation. With a larger team in place, clear mission and commitment to addressing inequalities in physical activity, we can inspire activity for even more people – helping to create healthier, happier, and more active communities across the UK.