From Theatre Performances to Board Games: The Government's Unlikely New Approach To Preventing Extremism & Hate Crimes
Over the last five years, the Shared Endeavour Fund has taken an unlikely approach to countering extremism, focusing City Hall budgets on hate-themed board games and theatre-based education.
The Mayor of London’s Shared Endeavour Fund (SEF) was launched in 2020 as a flagship initiative that aimed to empower communities to tackle violent extremism and a rise in hate crime offences in the capital. The Fund began as a joint venture between the Greater London Authority and Google’s philanthropic arm, with an initial £800,000 grant pot that was later bolstered by City Hall budgets alone, to roughly £875,000 per year. Since its inception, the scheme has funded over 100 community programs, worked with more than 190,000 Londoners, and provided grants of up to £100,000 for projects. According to grant documents, these projects must strengthen communities against extremism and build awareness, resilience and positive action in their local area. When diving deeper into the funding activities, the SEF has financed dozens of community projects whose connection to countering terrorism and hate is far from traditional. Utilising anything from puppet shows and cartoons to make-believe board games and role-playing workshops, the fund focuses on bankrolling projects that take an alternative approach to prevention, aimed at the younger members of society.
However, at a time when genuine security threats remain high, an inventory of the projects funded so far reveals a pattern that many would consider diverges from the traditional vision of counter-extremism. Far from high-tech surveillance or police-led street patrols, many funded activities would not look out of place at a community theatre festival. For example, a grant to the charity CRiBS funded a project teaching primary school children anti-racism through finger-puppet shows, cartoons and a giant jigsaw puzzle. Another recipient, the not-for-profit Universal Board Games, devised a bespoke board game to spark discussion about hate and common values, along with training local “games makers” to roll it out in areas seen as vulnerable to intolerance. Another case was the Arc Theatre Ensemble, which delivered an educational performance to help students feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of hate. These are not isolated examples, with many of the funded projects being equally unconventional in style. Despite describing these initiatives in official documents as innovative and ground-breaking in their attempts to tackle hate, when considered as taxpayer-funded schemes, they must also justify their efficacy through clear measurements of success and prevention.
The projects’ goals and outcomes are often vague by design, with the funding managers admitting that many outcomes are anecdotal and intangible. They are instead designed to raise awareness and foster dialogue, rather than stopping any identifiable plots, with the body overseeing this funding, crediting participants with increased emotional resilience and tolerance. Yet it is hard to pin down what that means in practice. How would a child’s tolerance score change after a performance, and how can officials measure whether a new board game reduces actual recruitment by extremists. As a consequence, City Hall’s publicity around the Shared Endeavour Fund is heavy on reach and feel-good claims, but lacking in actual project efficacy data.
The Mayor of London’s office routinely reports the number of projects awarded and people reached, making the Fund appear to be actively tackling extremism. However, these figures are almost entirely output‐based, counting workshops delivered or social-media campaign views, rather than actual changes in extremist beliefs or behaviour, making it difficult to assess the Fund’s effectiveness. This is further reinforced by press releases that emphasise the importance of raising awareness, empowering communities, and building resilience, but do not include any indicators for whether these goals have been achieved. There is a risk that this could result in a preference for media-friendly metrics rather than tracking any reduction in hate crime or radicalisation. There is a history of other UK counter-extremism grants, such as the national Prevent programme and its predecessors, historically generating a lot of activity but struggling to evidence its impact tangibly.
Furthermore, there remains a critical question of whether soft outreach can meaningfully reduce radicalisation, especially when there is virtually no way of measuring the effectiveness of these types of interventions accurately. This lack of tangible outcomes can also result in significant mission creep, with the SEF’s initial requirement to tackle violent extremism morphing into a broader remit of combating hate, intolerance or misinformation. By widening its focus in this way, the Fund risks becoming a catch-all for social cohesion projects, and further increases the difficulty of measuring whether real change is being made.
As it stands, the Fund’s proponents claim that its value lies in the intangible impact that standard policing and anti-terror measures can’t achieve. However, without providing accurate data on the results of these interventions, it will be difficult to assess the efficacy of countering extremism through unconventional means, rather than enhanced police intelligence. At a time when the threat of extremism is ever-present, any expenditure must be utilised diligently to have the best chance of addressing these very real concerns. For now, the Shared Endeavour Fund remains a taxpayer-funded experiment in soft counter-extremism, which despite its good intentions, must also demonstrate that it is more than a positive headline generator and is instead a society protector.
