Director’s report

Supporting through change

During 2010/11, much was said and written about the Government’s Big Society. We welcome the emphasis placed on giving people greater power and influence over decisions and use of resources, which is in line with our belief in the value of participation. However, we question the specifics, the speed of change, and the lack of support to build the capacity of people in many sectors and parts of the country to take up the opportunities the Big Society may offer. This is made worse by the reduced support from central and local government to voluntary organisations which have a crucial role in helping their local communities.

For many of the organisations we work with, the effect of policy decisions during the year are clearly going to be deeply felt into the coming years and yet we can learn from the responses of charities, schools and cultural institutions to these changes. This Yearbook contains an essay by Rashid Iqbal, a Clore Social Leadership Fellow, who is researching the impact of change on organisations’ thinking. We believe this work will be of value to many in the third sector.

Our own response has been to try to increase the capacity of organisations to adapt to new realities, for example by changing the support provided in our Special Initiatives. Right Here, a joint initiative with the Mental Health Foundation, seeks to find better ways to improve the mental health and resilience of 16–25 year olds. The transfer of commissioning from primary care trusts and other changes in budget-holding mean that the four local partnerships of voluntary and statutory bodies with whom we are working need to change their plans. We have adapted the level and type of support provided to them to try to help them benefit from the new approaches, despite the cuts in local funding.

Alongside Right Here, we continue to operate nine other Special Initiatives. Each is different in character, but their common features include carefully crafted formative evaluation and plans for dissemination of the results of what does or does not work. ¹

This year, initiatives across all three of our UK programmes received funding and welcome endorsements from organisations as diverse as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Creativity Culture and Education, the Cultural Learning Partnership, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Unbound Philanthropy. We are grateful to their trustees and staff for their commitment to our work.

Measuring impact

Last year we said we would implement our plans to better understand the overall impact of our work and to capture more learning from our portfolio of 300 Open Grants. ² Whilst we have not progressed as quickly as we hoped, a key step towards this goal has been the creation of a new post focusing on research, evaluation and learning. We were delighted in April 2011 to welcome Jane Steele as our first Head of Impact and Evaluation. Jane will work closely with our grants staff to ensure that we all understand better the value of what we initiate and support, or occasionally undertake ourselves. In addition to her work at PHF, Jane remains a trustee of the Carnegie UK Trust, where she chaired the programme committee on Civil Society and Democracy.

We also welcomed to the staff Abigail Knipe and Safiya Juma, who both joined the Education and Learning team. We said goodbye to Richard King and Julia Mirkin. We wish Richard and Julia well as they take up new posts at the John Ellerman and Foyle foundations. We are also grateful to Tracy Sacks and Jo Dale, who provided maternity cover in the Education and Learning team. We have continued with our communications internships, and thank Richard Cooper and Bethan Staton for the work they did during their placements.

Staffing is a high proportion of the cost of grant-making. This year, at the suggestion of our Remuneration Committee, we undertook our first staff satisfaction survey. The overall results were positive compared to other similar organisations. But we learnt that there is more that we can do to develop our staff and to this end we have begun, alongside skills-based development, a series of informal seminars, on issues including youth participation and the social determinants of health. Within a small organisation it is difficult to provide structured career progression, but the destinations of departing staff reflect their strong professional and personal growth.

In the previous Yearbook we reported on the results of the Grantee Perception Report (GPR) and our consequent plans to increase the level of non-financial support we provide. Constraints on staff time mean that some of our plans to do this will not begin to operate until 2011/12. However, this year we have increased the level of support we give online to grantees with a new ‘Grant holders’ section on our website, which signposts other available online resources. We have continued to promote the use of grantee feedback to other foundations. Our communications manager, Dan Watson, and Travis Manzione from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, led a well-received session on the benefits of the GPR at the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) annual conference. It led directly to other UK foundations deciding to use the GPR in their work, increasing the cohort of UK users. We hope that more foundations will be stimulated to use the GPR or other robust survey tools to improve the quality and impact of their work.

Support for philanthropy

One of the Foundation’s strategic aims is to support the philanthropic sector. We mainly do this through advice and other non-financial support. This year our Finance and Resources Director Lucy Palfreyman was elected to the board of the ACF. Other colleagues regularly speak at training conferences and seminars on philanthropy and fund-raising. The new government has shown a keen interest in philanthropy, with recent policy initiatives including inheritance tax incentives for private giving, and the publication of the Giving White Paper. We were pleased to note the White Paper’s commitment to build on two recent developments in philanthropy of which PHF is a founder supporter: the Pennies Foundation and the Social Impact Bond.

The Giving Green Paper had suggested that endowed foundations might be compelled to adopt a minimum payout. We were pleased to see that this idea was not taken forward in the White Paper, as the Government accepted the arguments that pointed to evidence which shows that this might have the perverse effect of reducing spending, as well as constraining the unique advantages enjoyed by foundations, of flexibility and independence.

Trustees have decided to increase the level of our spending in future. We have set ourselves the target of spending around 4 per cent of our total net assets. After allowing for the costs of investment management, this represents a target of £22m for the 2011/12 financial year.

This Yearbook details progress over the past year in each of our four programmes, as well as setting out plans for the coming year. We welcome feedback on its content, which can be sent through an anonymous online survey via our website, www.phf.org.uk. The website is the best source for updates on all our work. Please consider signing up to our quarterly newsletters or following us on Twitter at @phf_uk.

Robert Dufton
Director