Director's report

Reflections on joining

It is interesting, at any time, to join an organisation that you think you know well, and very exciting to arrive at a key moment in its development. My previous connection with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation had often been as a joint funder and sometimes as a more active partner, and I had always been attracted by the values that I could see embedded here, and by the professionalism and commitment of the team.

What I have learnt on joining is that there is a great deal of excellent work taking place, and that there is huge potential for us to achieve more and have greater impact. As any incoming chief is inclined to do, I spent my first hundred days reflecting with staff and trustees first, and then with those that we fund as well as other partners and peers, on the strengths and opportunities for change that they could see. I am enormously grateful to everyone for their generosity of spirit in giving me time and space to really get to know the Foundation and what we do.

I hope that our new strategy will help us to deliver more for the organisations and people we work with. Finalising that strategy has been the dominant theme of my time at the Foundation to date, but it has been fascinating and inspiring to learn about the varied work the Foundation supports as well.

It is very hard to single out a few highlights in these first few busy months.

The meetings with people working in the social justice field, especially in the areas of marginalised young people and migration that we have focused on, have been particularly valuable in bringing me up to speed. I will continue to be ‘on the road’ this year, but even in a few short months, I have met people from across the country who are doing some extraordinary work. Whether it is empowering young people with leadership potential, supporting ex-offenders or promoting the importance of citizenship registration, our funds are helping to create the conditions which can have a profound and positive impact on people’s lives, and this will remain the golden thread that links all of our activity.

And the thinking about that work resonated as I undertook my first visit to India to meet our team there. A week was hardly long enough to get a flavour of our work, and I look forward to the return visit of the team to London in September, when we can continue my induction. One area the team emphasised was the Lost Childhoods work.¹ For someone new to the country, the scale of the issue can feel a little overwhelming. It was heartening to be shown the impact that working together and learning as a cohort with shared goals was having in making a difference to the communities we saw.

Another example of shared goals is ArtWorks, a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Special Initiative which has spent the last four years exploring how policy makers, artists, funders, employers, commissioners and training providers can build on our rich tradition of participatory arts. It was enlightening to join the steering group as they met to consider how best to synthesise the learning of this work, and the resulting celebratory event and call to action – which is described in more detail later² – leaves a powerful legacy, as does the subsequent grants we made to a number of organisations in light of this activity.

Musical Futures legacy

As we start to think about our new strategy, legacy has been very much in our minds, especially with regards to Musical Futures. It started in 2003 and was designed – with our founder, Paul Hamlyn, and his fellow trustee Claus Moser’s passion at its heart – to find new and imaginative ways of engaging young people in meaningful and sustainable music activities. This year we agreed a grant to support, over three years, its transition into an independent and self-sustaining organisation.

We will be taking a particular interest in education and learning through the arts in the next few years and we will draw on what we have learned through our work with Musical Futures, our other music education initiative Musical Bridges, and our previous funding of arts education across the country.

Shaping our new strategy

Staff at the Foundation have worked very hard for a long time on developing and shaping the Foundation’s new strategy. I am very appreciative of everything they have done in the last year. They have simultaneously been required to look forward and manage the resulting change that inevitably brings, and to maintain the existing and (in the case of this year) heavy workload of applications through our Open Grants schemes. Having set a deadline for applications before the closure of the programmes, we received a large influx of applications. Trustees responded by making extra money available to support more organisations in the second half of the year, with the result that we have made a record number of grants during 2014/15.

Our Special Initiatives have also continued apace. We published our emerging learning from Our Museum, which generated interest among funding bodies in all parts of the UK; the group of five performing arts venues supported with a Paul Hamlyn Club award have continued to build up their audience development and community engagement work; and we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our PHF Awards for Artists. Our Right Here initiative, supporting young people’s mental health in partnership with the Mental Health Foundation, drew to a close, publishing and disseminating a suite of resources to help various professionals to work better in support of young people’s mental health. Learning Away, our education initiative focused on residential learning experiences, completed its schools-based work during the year but continues to share a wide range of resources for teachers, including through its website.

In all our work we benefit from the additional expertise that our advisors and consultants bring. A number are ending their tenure; each is referenced in the appropriate programme report. Some of our colleagues have also moved on during the year, including two grants assistants, Samantha Smallcombe and Juliet Valdinger, who we wish the best for their future careers. We welcomed Bhakti Mistry as a grants assistant and Caroline Mason as assistant to the chair and director.

Our new strategy, which we will publish in June, is the culmination of a lengthy process of reflection, review and learning. It is firmly rooted in the values of Paul Hamlyn and builds on the Foundation’s strengths. For grantees and applicants, working with PHF is going to feel different, with new funds, revised application and assessment processes, and a greater variety of interactions between us and those that we fund, through the life of a grant.

This development means that this is the last time we will reflect on our past activity in this format. We intend to place considerable emphasis on learning from the work that we fund, and with a focus on those grants that we can learn most from. We will be sharing more, through a new website and more digital communications, and by bringing people together to share their experience and intelligence. I am looking forward to this new way of working and to continuing the challenging, inspiring and mind-expanding conversations of these first few months in the future.

Moira Sinclair
Director