(8 minute read)
Published: 2 June 2025
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director
We are very excited to share our new strategy for 2025 to 2030, which can be read in full by clicking here.
The process of designing a strategy in this age interconnected global threats affecting people, society and the natural world, has been clarifying. It’s been difficult too, especially as we began to realise the kinds of changes we needed to consider and ultimately make as an organisation.
The key headlines
We know that people have lots of calls on their time, and this blog is on the longer side, and so here are the key headlines of what’s coming next for us in our strategy for 2025 to 2030.
- There’s a lot that won’t change. This includes being a small team, committed to our existing aim to advance wellbeing for people, society and the natural world, and our values. We will continue showing the impact of and learning from our work, working with others, the delivery of our Investment Policy and Social Investment Policy, and being a modern and effective grantmaker supporting our applicants and grant-holders. We’ll also continue to offer multi-year core costs funding.
- However, our approach to grantmaking will change. We will focus our grantmaking on supporting changemaking organisations with a clear understanding of their role within existing and/or new systems and a clear strategy on how they intend to make change, that are committed to advancing justice through the active involvement of individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues they tackle.
- We will no longer restrict applicants to fit into our previous three funding categories of Arts, Social Action and the Environment. Instead, we are narrowing our focus and trying to avoid setting up arbitrary restrictions through funding categories.
- We are also no longer committing to a dedicated Museums and Galleries Fund.
- We wish to retain a leadership role in encouraging environmental funders and others to support environmental work in the UK Overseas Territories. We hope to launch future rounds of the UKOTs Fund from 2025/26 onwards and are actively fundraising for this at the moment.
The detail behind the headlines
Our hope for our next strategy has been to retain and learn from the best of what we do as a Foundation. However, it is also a commitment to bold transitions, and this means that we will advance our aim by focussing our strategy on work that acts on the following in just and equitable ways:
- Tackling the triple planetary crisis by mitigating and adapting to climate impacts, reducing pollution and protecting and restoring nature.
- Building greater trust and connection, reducing polarisation within society and increasing the levels of participation and influence in the political process (which is sometimes referred to as political equality).
- Promoting the development and adoption of economic models and systems that support people and planet and reduce wealth inequalities.
- Advancing equity and justice for marginalised communities impacted by the issues above.
What we are keeping
We work hard to be a modern and effective grantmaking charity that takes a total assets approach to our work. That means we use our investing, grantmaking and wider operations to deliver our strategy.
We believe in working with others in collaborative ways – including our grant-holders, applicants, other funders and grantmakers, investors, policy and decision makers, the media, our staff and our Trustees – in ways that ensure we are transparent and accountable, and enhance our own experience and knowledge. Our collaborative efforts involve things like our work on diversity, equity and inclusion, our grantmaking, our investing and sharing our impact and learning (including what is and is not working well for us and why).
We have re-committed to our aim to advance wellbeing for people, society and the natural world. Over the last three years we have become much clearer on what wellbeing means to us in relation to people, society and the natural world. For people we see it as the idea of having a good life and living ‘well’, with a recognition that equity, agency and justice are all foundational to wellbeing.
For society, we see wellbeing as committing to more sustainable ways of living in order to achieve social equity, deep democracy and ecological sustainability. It’s a society where individuals and communities can come together to make change happen and secure a flourishing future.
Wellbeing for the natural world means a thriving planet, and this means that through protection, restoration and sustainable use we achieve an equitable and healthy interdependence between people and planet.
Our desire to be a small team and Board that is led by our five values of being flexible, responsive, discerning, connected and applying the personal touch has also been retained in this strategy. We think this is the basis from which we can continue to offer high quality support to our applicants and our grant-holders. We’ll also still be offering multi-year core costs funding.
We have been encouraged by the progress we have been making in relation to the management of our endowment. Our Investment Policy and Social Investment Policies are available on our website by clicking here, and they are reviewed and updated annually. We want to use our endowment to invest in ways that take fully into account the Foundation’s charitable aim, financial and reputational risks. We actively engage with our fund managers to try and invest in ways that are environmentally and socially responsible, as well as using our influence as an asset owner to improve policies and practices in the investment industry more widely, wherever possible. Social investing relates to investing with a view to achieving our charitable aim directly through the investment’s positive social and/or environmental impact, as well as making a financial return.
What’s changing
The main changes we are making relate to our grantmaking – primarily the decision to no longer restrict applicants to fit into our previous funding categories of Arts, Social Action and Environment, and to no longer commit to a dedicated Museums and Galleries Fund.
We feel that many of the challenges facing people, society and the natural world are systemic, which means that we want to fund work that will reform or replace those systems. This is also part of the reason we have decided to no longer use our previous funding categories of Arts, Social Action and the Environment. We have also seen increasingly in the last few years that these areas are interconnected, and that our previous approach created unhelpful boundaries and limited our ability to fund ambitious work in pursuit of our organisational aim. We also felt that this approach meant organisations sometimes said what they thought we wanted to hear, rather than what they actually wanted or needed to say and share with us.
Our new approach is to focus our grantmaking on supporting changemaking organisations. We want to partner with those that have a clear understanding of their role within existing and/or new systems and a clear strategy on how they intend to make change, and are committed to advancing justice through the active involvement of individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues they tackle. If you want to learn more about our new funding approach, then you can do so by clicking here on our website.
During our last strategy period, we were able to support a range of approaches to campaigning across our Social Action and Environment funding categories, and to a smaller extent within our Arts category too. In a rapidly changing funding landscape and operating context, we have seen the ways in which supporting campaigning work adds value and supports civil society to respond to the biggest challenges and opportunities experienced by people, society and the natural world. We have also realised more fully that many of our peers are uncomfortable with supporting campaigning work, and we have been keen to advocate for the importance of independent funders supporting this kind of work.
Over the last few years, we have seen a significant increase in application numbers too, with application numbers doubling over a five year period to over 500 in 2024/25. We do not have the budget to fund this many applications and it means that our success rates are decreasing significantly. We hope our new approach will mean that that there is greater clarity on what we should fund that is in service of our strategy. We hope this approach will narrow our focus and avoid setting up arbitrary restrictions through funding categories.
We remain committed to our leadership role in encouraging environmental funders and others to support environmental work in the UK Overseas Territories. We are keen to continue the UKOTs Fund, and are actively fundraising for this at the moment. We hope to launch future rounds from 2025/26 onwards.
Closing our Museums and Galleries Fund
We also took the very difficult decision to no longer commit to a dedicated Museums and Galleries Fund.
Our Museums and Galleries Fund ran from 2014 to 2025. In that time we offered multi-year core funding to support curatorial work and were praised for our trust-based approach that was not overly prescriptive. We wanted our funding to help strengthen museums and galleries in the UK, celebrating the unique assets that our regions possess and their benefit to us nationally. We are proud of the positives we were able to support, like breathing new life into collections; being able to test and embed new ways of curating and collections management (including through more participatory, community-focused and inclusive approaches); and providing invaluable early career experience and training for the individuals in these posts.
However, this is a sector facing chronic under-investment and continued losses of funds from the Government and public. Over the 11 years the Fund has been active, we have awarded circa £6.3m via 70 grants to about 50 different organisations. This is the equivalent to about £570k a year, which is very small considering the overall size of the museums and galleries sector, and we are concerned that this has not been able to make a significant impact in relation to the levels of funding cuts and other challenges faced by museums and galleries. We published a 10 year review of the Fund in October 2024, and it showed that the overall success rate of the Fund is merely 11%, meaning that each year nearly 90% of applicants receive disappointing news and even those that receive funding are doing so in a context where our funding plays an extremely minor role in the organisation’s overall funding patchwork. We also know that a lot of time is being invested by applicants and grant-holders to apply and report on their grants, and we as an organisation are spending a lot of our capacity in delivering a separate grantmaking programme that comprises circa 10% of our annual grantmaking budget. We therefore feel that the Fund cannot provide anywhere near the kind of impact we hope to achieve from 2025 onwards.
This was a very difficult decision. However, we do think that museums and galleries could apply to us through our new funding approach, if their work supports the ambitions outlined in our funding guidelines.
How will we monitor what’s working and what isn’t working in this strategy?
To develop this strategy, we used the learning from our last strategy and ongoing discussions with those we work with, including in strategy engagement sessions held in December 2024 and January 2025 with grant-holders, fellow funders and investors, and associated organisations. The team and Board have sought to determine how, with our limited funds, we can have the most impact.
We will develop a public facing Impact Framework that aligns with this strategy, which will be shared later in the year. This will build on our approach to learning and impact from our strategy for 2022 to 2025, which included an Impact Framework and sharing of the ways in which we were making progress (or not) through our blog, our Annual Report and Accounts, published reports, externally commissioned perception audits, and other assessment tools like the DEI Data Standard and the Foundation Practice Rating.
We hope that when we look back on this strategy in 2030, that we will see the ways in which the decisions we have taken, including the very difficult ones, have allowed us to support real progress on the issues that we care about.
We are keen to hear your thoughts and feedback on our strategy for 2025 to 2030. The main way you can do this is by contacting me directly on Sufina@ellerman.org.uk.