Foreword

The Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s mission is to maximise opportunities for individuals and communities to realise their potential and to experience and enjoy a better quality of life, now and in the future. In particular, we are concerned with children and young people and disadvantaged people.

In line with our founder Paul Hamlyn’s values, we believe in finding better ways to do things. We try to pay particular attention to long-term and challenging issues and encourage participation by those with direct experience of these issues in shaping the work of the organisations we fund. We look for the development of work with the potential to influence practice beyond the scope of the organisation doing the work.

We know that to fulfil our mission and live these values, we need to understand the impact that the Foundation is making. The sorts of changes the Foundation seeks are too important to do otherwise and we rely on evidence of impact to help us to use the Foundation’s resources wisely.

This report is about our new approach to assessing the overall impact of our funding. Like other grant-makers, we recognise the challenges in doing so. We hope they will let us have their comments on the approach we have developed, which is work in progress, and which we offer as a contribution to the very active current debate about how to evaluate impact.

The information about the impact of our funding and activities will also become a key part of the way in which we fulfil our legal duty, as a charity, to report on the benefit that we provide to the public. As part of this, it is important that we understand and report on the benefit we deliver ourselves, as well as that of the activities we fund.

The impact reported here represents the combined results of work by very many individuals and organisations over the last few years. We are pleased to be able to acknowledge their work in this way and hope that, through the further development of our approach to understanding impact, we are showing the same commitment to outcomes and learning that we look for in our grantees. We hope that sharing this assessment of the impact of our funding will help us to develop even stronger partnerships with all those we work with.

Finally, my thanks to Jane Steele, the Foundation’s Head of Impact and Evaluation, who developed the process and the framework, and to Paul Strauss, who worked with Jane as the Research Analyst on this project.

Robert Dufton

Director