With an endowment of approximately $50 million, the UK’s Blagrave Trust focuses on helping disadvantaged young people transition successfully into adulthood. It's not a massive foundation. It has only two (going on three) staff members and some outsourced finance and admin support. Its members typically work out of their homes when not on the road visiting with grantees (which they always call “partners”). And yet Blagrave is punching way above its weight—by combining intellectual rigor (brainpower), humility and openness with its grantees (heart), and a deep commitment to listening to the young people it aims to serve (ears).

 

Blagrave has made significant progress on the journey to high-performance funding:

  • Blagrave’s executive team and board offer multi-year grants, because they know the problems they’re addressing can’t possibly be solved in a year or two.
  • They model listening to partners and those they aspire to benefit—rather than simply supporting partners to do more listening.
  • They are willing to make significant programmatic changes in response to new insights and data from partners, beneficiaries, or other funders.
  • They pay heed, not just lip service, to Wells’s learned-the-hard-way commitment to “do no harm.”
  • They’ve moved almost entirely to flexible, general-operating support that enables partners to learn and adapt.
  • They ensure that external evaluations have real learning value for partners and are not just hoop-jumping exercises for the benefit of funders.
  • They hold themselves accountable for a long list of commitments to the organizations they fund.
  • They join with other funders rather than needing to invent and lead everything themselves.
  • They share their learnings for the benefit of others in their field.
  • They amplify the voices of their partners and the young people they serve.

 

And funders of any size would be wise to take a look.

Read the full article by The Blagrave Trust on Leap Ambassadors Community