Update on grantmaking practices at the Walcot Foundation

At the end of 2023, the Walcot Foundation governor trustees signed off our strategy - the first one in the organisation’s 350 year history. The first three sections relate directly to our grant-making activities and should be of most interest to you if you’re reading this... 

Over the past few months, we’ve been working on our business plan. This will help us put into practice what we want to achieve in, with and alongside, the community. Each of those three sections (primarily related to grant-making) has a number of activities that we think will move us towards realising our aims.
  
The grant-making world, and wider philanthropy, has been pushed into a reckoning with itself and there are questions that need to be answered, such as around how we generate income. But there are also lots of lingering tensions - what roles should we play?  Are we replicating or enhancing harms caused by the system our wealth is built on? What’s the appropriate balance between short-term need and future visioning? Are our processes and practices reflective of the world we want to see?

Giving time and space to discuss some of these issues, has meant adjusting how we see ourselves as part of Lambeth’s ecosystem and changing the patterns of behaviours, mindsets and practices that we are engaged in while making sure that we are able to continue delivering the good work we have been providing as per standard. We were going to let you all know further details about these changes once they had been confirmed and business plans were signed off - but perfection is the enemy of progress and so we decided to update you all now.  

The "How we’ll do this” parts of the strategy are the new or formalised pieces we’ll be working on the coming years.  We think this will help shift us from solely a funder to a more active and appropriate actor in supporting the local ecosystem to thrive, and, by extension, work towards living our mission.
  
The most immediate change that some of you have spoken to us about is the reduction of open grants rounds from three to two per year. Historically, the only way an organisation could get funded by Walcot was through an open grant round. We will not stop having open grants rounds, and the vast majority of funding will still happen through this approach. However, since the introduction of our first thematic cohort programme (BounceBack) in 2021, we acknowledged that we needed the flexibility to be able to work with people on different terms.

Every way of making grants privileges some people and disadvantages others so as a way of creating a different kind of space to redistribute some of our resources, we have reduced the number of open grants rounds to two per year and adjusted the amount of money in those “pots”.  However, we wish to be clear that the grant budget for the 24/25 financial year will still increase from the previous year.  

What those different spaces look and feel like we’re not sure yet but we hope that we can work together to help create a more equal society in Lambeth and beyond. 

We’ll also be sharing our first Approach to Change - an adapted and hopefully more appropriate Model/Theory of Change - in the near future which we hope will indicate some of our thinking as we continue on this journey.  

The Walcot Foundation Grants team