Opportunities

One of the key things is trying to work out where we can make the most impact – as a relatively small organisation – from the many activities that we could be doing. And that list of possible things changes a lot. Part of that is also about what partnerships we can develop as we know we can’t do it alone. It’s also about holding our nerve on what matters and what’s important. And thinking about the legacy that we’re leaving.

Systems are interconnected so we’re always looking for those connections and the bigger picture. It’s about the inter-relationships and the feedback loop – we put a lot of energy into understanding what we’re learning from our activity and feeding that back in. We don’t assume we know the answers – we think about the right questions and then about how we can work to answer them. 

That’s a constant thing we have to balance. We have a portfolio, and we work with investment managers that are aligned with our mission. The collaborative investing project we’re working on now is part of that. Holding a portfolio with a manager who has some values aligned with ours ensures we don’t waste time monitoring inappropriate stock picks, and we can work with them to understand return performance. We put less emphasis on pure short-term return and more on long-term value creation and mission alignment. And when we make social investments, we make that trade-off up front. 

The time commitment probably does even out at about one day per month. We have quarterly Board meetings. Committee meetings are usually online. There are additional things you can get involved in if you want to and there are some training and networking opportunities. As a new Trustee there is a bit more time involved to get up to speed.

We take a theory of change approach and set out how we think change happens. We work with a learning partner, and we look more at things more qualitatively than quantitatively, though for some areas of work we might use specific metrics (eg for engagement). We know that transformation is often generational and long-term and we take an action-enquiry type approach. We iterate and learn as we go. Sometimes we try something to see how well it works – we don’t always know what the answer will be when we start, and that’s important to us.

We’re fairly small so we work in partnership on pretty much every level. The collaborative investing project is where we work with other foundations with aligned missions and we’re saying that we believe our investments can make a difference and we will put part of our endowment into a new fund as will our partners. 

So many things! I like the questions that help us explore what we’re here for and what we’re contributing, and when we challenge ourselves around where we’re making a difference – what it means for the Foundation and what we want to achieve now and in the future. And the unique relationship between the staff team and Trustees. I’m proud of how collegiately we work with Trustees as a staff team. Part of that is a weekly “reflections” email where we share things of interest and Trustees respond. 

We have Trustee indemnity insurance and we’re audited every year. Charity law protects Trustees as long as you’re carrying out your activity in the correct way. Trustee responsibilities are set out by the Charity Commission. 

The balance has shifted over time. When we first started, Trustees took part in grant assessments and worked with the staff team closely. Now, we have a Programme Advisory Group to look at grant applications before meetings, so now staff present a portfolio of grants to Trustees and highlight where things need debate and conversations (e.g. because of a higher risk profile, innovative approach, etc) or trustees say which they’d like to discuss. We try to keep a big section of the agenda focused on strategic items (e.g. at our upcoming September meeting, governance and strategic items include thinking about oversight of equity and diversity in the Foundation, the future of the Foundation etc). Each meeting is different and we also have an annual away day to explore the things on our mind that need deeper exploration with staff and Trustees. 

We have our Board of Trustees and also an Investment Committee. It’s important to say that we’re a long-term investor – we try to be mindful that we’re not looking at quarterly shifts and we won’t change our investments based on short–term fluctuations in the market. Over the years we’ve moved much more from fixed income to holding equities. We have people who manage our money, and we hold them to account in terms of risk and return. We’re not a finance–first holder of capital: we’ll be bold with our investment and take more risk the closer the investment is to our mission and goals. The Board has a mix of skills – some are very familiar with investment decisions and others bring other experience. Together we make a really strong team to balance the social mission driven decisions and capital return and risk decisions. The other consideration is whether there is anyone else who could fund something. 

We’re looking for people who’re willing and able to put the time, energy and diligence into some of our governance structures. We have a great Board and most of our Trustees are of working age, which is unusual. We want a range of backgrounds and capacity for engaging. For the Resources Committee we do need to bolster skills on the organisational management side and want people who are really interested in our management of the resources that enable the Foundation to function. Investing skills are also welcome as that is half of our strategy. Communications experience would also be helpful. We’re looking for new Trustees who have an affinity with our mission and a strategic mindset to look at how we could do things differently and help us look at the picture in full. In recent years, experience of activism and experience “on the ground” has been really useful. 

We have a policy so that investments reflect our overall mission. As part of this, we have a list of exclusions that we recently revisited. On the last occasion we consulted Trustees as well as a range of stakeholders about what we exclude and that led to some interesting feedback and input. We’re also looking at an investment approach that is more participatory – e.g. the Endowments Investing Challenge 2026, where we’re challenging investment service providers to create a portfolio that meets the needs of future generations first. We’re working with a panel of young adults to ensure their voices are heard. 

We will soon say goodbye to Trustees with civil service and policy experience, organisational development skills, and experience on the social investment side. These would be useful skills for a new Trustee to bring but we don’t look for like-for-like when recruiting. 

We’re pushing ourselves to become more disability friendly, including upcoming sensory awareness training as a staff team. Recruitment is also a people project that we seek input from Trustees on. 

Being able to report more impact achievements from grants would be great – knowing how much they contribute to the bigger change, particularly for our shifting public perceptions grants programme. We would also like to see more people and organisations brought along with what we’re trying to achieve so it has a life of its own without us. 

It’s not necessary to have specific economic skills, although that could be a valuable addition to the Board. 

We benchmark ourselves against good trusteeship via the Charity Commission. And every year we look at Trustee powers and make sure they reflect how Trustees go about their work. An annual independent audit looks at our financial position and the governance of that, as well as at our policies and how we go about what we do. 

We do. Sometimes they’re risky but they can have the most impact. An example is that we invested in Equileap to help them get started. They look at data on gender in FTSE100 (and other) companies, looking at the type of policies those companies have to support women’s progression. Equileap created a gender equality index and they sell the data to the investment world for those who want to do gender led investing. It’s very successful – gender led investing has increased and lots of organisations use the Equileap data. 

We start with assessing whether the grantholder has achieved what they said they wanted to – that’s an iterative process built into the grant agreement. We also do grant programme evaluations – looking at the the programme stream rather than grant by grant and looking at how close we got to achieving our aims as a whole. That’s about us as an organisation as well as the individual grants. 

There’s a balance to this and Trustees created more governance so we could make sure the balance was right. This included establishing committees to look at specific issues. In Trustee meetings there is always a strategy section. So Trustees do have time on grants but also a lot of governance discussion around the investments. 

And what guardrails are there to ensure this ambition is not lost?

Because we’re small we’re aware that we’re sitting amongst other organisations who might operate in a similar way to us and we’re sensitive to good and bad practice. Key to this is also that Trustees hold the mission and that is part of how we guardrail it.