John Ellerman Foundation is an independent endowed grantmaker with an aim to advance the wellbeing of people, society and the natural world. Our ambition is to achieve a positive impact through our endowment and ensure that our investment activity aligns with our charitable aims.
Our charitable aim
The Foundation’s aim is to advance the wellbeing of people, society and the natural world. The main ways in which we achieve this are by:
a) grant funding charities for work that furthers our aim, in line with our organisational strategy;
b) investing and managing our funds responsibly, using our influence as an asset owner to challenge corporate behaviour that is poorly aligned to our aim and values, whilst also generating financial returns to sustain our grantmaking activities; and
c) making social investments that generate financial returns as well as social and/or environmental impact in line with our charitable aim.
Value of our endowment
The value of our investments varies with movements in financial markets. At the end of our last financial year, 31 March 2026, the portfolio value was £154.9 million.
Our Investment Policy
Our Investment Policy informs the decisions that we take about how our endowment is invested. It sets out in full our investment aims, approach, and the principles that guide us in making investment decisions. We review our Investment Policy every year to ensure it remains an up-to-date reflection of the kind of investor we want to be. You can read our Investment Policy in full by clicking here.
Our Investment aims
Our aims are to:
- Invest in a sustainable way, i.e. to support long-term environmental and societal sustainability, with particular focus on helping address the systemic impact of the triple planetary crisis and reducing suffering for people, society and the natural world.
- Be a responsible investor, i.e. ensure that our fund managers take full account of environmental, social and governance issues in their investment activities.
- Encourage our fund managers take a systematic and effective approach to stewardship and engagement, and ask them to actively engage with underlying investee companies or sectors where specific issues are identified that we feel are misaligned with our organisational aim, values and approach.
- Work with other actors, including trusts and foundations, through avenues such as the Charities Responsible Investment Network, in pursuit of the transformation of financial systems, policy and regulation to better support long-term environmental and societal sustainability.
Exclusions policy
Investment in tobacco, thermal coal and tar sands companies is excluded across all our holdings, including indirect investment like holdings in pooled funds.
We also do not permit the investment of primary market capital into fossil fuel production and infrastructure, i.e. the purchase of new securities. We feel that providing new investment into these activities is fundamentally misaligned with our charitable aim and the Paris Agreement, which seeks to keep temperature rises well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Financial objective
The Foundation’s financial objective is to generate a total investment return sufficient to enable the charity to carry out its operations indefinitely through the maintenance of, and if possible enhancement of, the real value of the portfolio. The current financial objective is to achieve a real return of 4% per annum (calculated as a Total Return target of 4% + CPIH) in the long term. CPIH is a measure of inflation, and is defined as the Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs.
Spending rate
Each year in February, our level of proposed spending for the coming year is discussed by the Finance and Investment Committee, before being approved by the Board of Trustees in March. This year, Trustees have approved an annual total expenditure budget of 4% of the Foundation’s assets (net of investment management fees) averaged over the quarter end values of the previous three calendar years.
Social investment
In line with the Charity Commission’s CC14 guidance, we define social investment as “investing with a view to both achieving your charity’s purposes directly through the investment and making a financial return.”
In January 2025 Trustees approved our new Social Investment Policy, which you can read in full by clicking here. It outlines in detail our approach to social investing, including our aims, key investment criteria, specific parameters, investment processes and governance approach.
Our aim in developing a social investment portfolio is to achieve greater impact with our funds than could have been achieved had we invested for financial returns and given this money out as grants. We intend to work towards investing approximately 10% of our endowment (currently equivalent to c.£15m) in social investments over the coming years.
Investment advice
In 2025, we published a Request for Proposals seeking an investment consultant that was able to support us to invest our endowment responsibly, in line with the ambitions set out in our Investment Policy. For the first time, we also sought a consultant to support us with planning and building a portfolio of social investments.
Following this process, in September 2025 we appointed Gallagher to advise our team and Trustees on our investment strategy and its implementation, in line with the aims set out in our Investment Policy. Gallagher will also support us to review our asset allocation to ensure that the Foundation’s endowment continues to be invested in ways that further our charitable aim as effectively as possible.
We also appointed Triia Ltd as a social investment consultant. Their role is to advise our team and Trustees on social investments that fall outside of Gallagher’s remit, in line with the aims set out in our Social Investment Policy.
You can read more about our decision to appoint Gallagher (formerly known as Redington) and Triia Ltd (formerly known as S and One Ltd) on our blog by clicking here. We also wrote a blog about what we learnt through the process of appointing our new investment consultants, which you can read by clicking here.
Our fund managers
We currently invest the majority of our endowment with the following fund managers:
- CCLA
- Charities Property Fund
- Fulcrum Asset Management
- GMO UK Limited
- Newton Investment Management Limited
- Ruffer LLP
We expect our fund managers to take a stewardship approach to the portfolio of companies that they are invested in; this includes engagement to promote socially and environmentally responsible business practices, voting at shareholder meetings, the promotion/support of relevant motions, and seeking to drive change through systemic guardrails which protect society and the environment.
