(3 minute read)
Published: 27 October 2026
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director of John Ellerman Foundation
We are pleased to be able to share our latest Annual Report and Financial Accounts for the 12 months to 31 March 2026, which can be accessed by clicking here.
This year’s Annual Report and Accounts relates to both our strategy for 2022 to 2025, which we brought to a successful close, and the launch of our strategy for 2025 to 2030 in June 2025. Our new strategy recognises that in order to navigate the risks and opportunities of this age of significant disruption and interconnected global threats affecting people, society and the natural world, we need to be as clear as we can about the issues that we feel we are well placed to address, and the role that we can play.
Our Annual Report and Accounts seeks to bring to life the ways in which we deliver our aim to advancing wellbeing for people, society and the natural world by taking a total assets approach. This means using all of our assets, which are our investing, our grantmaking and our wider operations. A total assets approach is also about working in transparent, accountable and effective ways too, and it means working with others so that we can be more than the sum of our parts.
Our investing
As a long-term and engaged investor, we focus our efforts on investing sustainably and working with others in pursuit of our ambitions for the transformation of financial systems, policy and regulation, and institutions to better support long term environmental and societal sustainability. We are proud of the progress we are making in relation to both our responsible investing and our social investing. Key highlights for us in 2025/26 include:
- Our publicly available Investment Policy and Social Investment Policy continue to evolve and guide all our investing work.
- We are active participants in and collaborators with initiatives like the Endowments Investing Challenge, the Charities Responsible Investment Network, the Social Impact Investors Group, the Environmental Impact Investors Group, Net Zero Investor, the Institutional Investors Circle (set up by the European Pension Fund Investment Forum), the Association of Charitable Foundations, and Access Foundation’s social investment network.
- We made significant progress on the decision we took in 2024/25 to exclude any investment in new primary market capital for fossil fuel production and infrastructure – meaning, for example, we will not buy new shares issued by oil and gas companies. Since then, we have been working to implement this change with the fund managers that we invest our endowment with, including Fulcrum Asset Management.
- We are pleased to share that the Foundation and Fulcrum Asset Management have successfully engaged with three underlying funds that have total current assets of circa £215m to no longer provide new primary market capital for fossil fuel production and infrastructure. It has been very satisfying to discover that, despite our small size, we have been able to use our voice as an asset owner to influence the investment approach taken by fund managers with combined assets much larger than ours. We hope our progress will inspire other asset owners to play a similar role in attempting to mitigate the climate emergency through the use of their endowments.
- We led a public and transparent process to appoint new investment consultants. Our new investment consultants are Gallagher and Tricia Ltd. Gallagher (formerly known as Redington) have been appointed as investment consultant for our portfolio of financial investments, as well as providing us with reporting on the performance of our total endowment. In future, we also expect the team at Gallagher to support us with building our social investment portfolio by sourcing opportunities to invest in impact funds and conducting due diligence on our behalf. Triia Ltd are an additional new social investment consultant. Together our consultants will support us to develop our new social investment portfolio by sourcing and conducting due diligence on high-impact social investment opportunities, including funds and direct investments in charities and social enterprises. We have, as a result of these changes already made our second social investment, into Eka Ventures Fund II, which backs pre-seed and seed stage consumer tech companies across health, wellbeing, and sustainability.
Our grantmaking
As a grantmaker, all our grantmaking is for funding charitable organisations that at their core are committed to ensuring the rights of people, society and the natural world for current and future generations. This means supporting organisations that demonstrate that intrinsic to their approach they are changemaking organisations that understand their role within existing and/or new systems and have a clear strategy for how and why they intend to make change. The organisations we fund need to show they are committed to advancing justice too, through the active involvement of individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues. In 2025/26, we were particularly pleased to have been able to achieve the following through our grantmaking:
- As we transitioned to our new funding guidelines, we were closed for one week only to any new applications.
- To support the transition to our new funding guidelines, we spoke with 678 prospective applicants between 25 June 2025 and 22 September 2025 (with a total of 998 people who signed up), via weekly question and answer sessions, and we added an online video presentation to our website explaining our funding guidelines and strategy.
- We improved the Foundation’s full pre-application support offer to include monthly online question and answer sessions from October 2025 onwards. This means that if you want pre-application support from us now, this can be accessed through these monthly online sessions, and as one-to-one support over email, phone or video, and through our website material (including the online video presentation).
- We made our first set of grants under our new strategy in November 2025 – five months after the strategy was launched. Four of the grants made under our new strategy are included as case studies in our Annual Report and Accounts.
- We launched the third round of the UK Overseas territories Fund in March 2026, and you can find out more about the grants we made in May 2026 by clicking here.
Our impact
Taking a total assets approach also means understanding and sharing the impact of our work and the difference we are trying to make. It also means that we use some of our time to try and have a wider influence beyond our organisation. We published the Impact Framework for our new strategy in October 2025. Our Impact Framework recognises that all of our decisions and actions as a Foundation have consequence – not just our grants – and so we are working hard to understand our impact holistically across our investments, grantmaking and operations.
Other highlights
Our other highlights in the year relate to our staffing and governance. With our staffing, we began the shift to outsourced finance support, which meant that Lauren Williamson was promoted from Executive Assistant to our Operations and Governance Manager in February 2026. We also commissioned a Governance review conducted by Bateleur and Partners, and have been working on implementing the findings from that Review since October 2025.
Some final reflections on 2025/26
Moving to a new strategy, especially one that signals change, can be tricky. We were pleased though that the analysis, insights and feedback from our last strategy, alongside our ongoing discussions with those we work with, including through strategy engagement sessions held in December 2024 and January 2025 with grant-holders, fellow funders and investors, and associated organisations, meant that we have designed a strategy that allows us to have the most impact we can within our finite funds. We are confident that our strategy for 2025 to 2030 retains and evolves the best elements of our work as a charitable investor and grantmaker, whilst also trying to meet the moment and respond to this age of significant disruption and interconnected global threats affecting people, society and the natural world.
We received very positive feedback from those we work with on our new strategy in terms of our strategy design process, the content of our strategy and our funding guidelines, and our external communications. The feedback related to how our approach is influencing and shaping strategy discussions in other organisations, and that our approach feels necessary and truly responsive to the context as it is, and that we are taking approaches across our grantmaking, investing and operations that will lead to impact. The transparency and quality of our communications and engagement was an area of positive feedback too.
Nevertheless, we know it was a tough year for the applicants and grant-holders we work with and we know that the context in which they are delivering their work is becoming increasingly contested. We hope that through our total assets approach to our work we can help to make a meaningful difference and support the vital work of changemaking organisations in our sector.