Family foundations gave a record £1.63bn last year, says report led by Cathy Pharoah of Cass Business School
Should voluntary and therefore ultimately unreliable giving replace entitlement. It seems we are increasingly dependent on the former as the latter cannot be funded. All the more justification in my eyes for us working in localities to do more on our collective account not relying on charity per se. This article tells us:
Giving by the UK’s 100 largest family foundations reached a record high of £1.63bn last year, despite a 35 per cent drop in donations to them, a new report shows.
The Family Foundation Giving Trends survey, which is in its sixth year and is published by the Association of Charitable Foundations, says that charitable spending exceeded the previous record of £1.61bn recorded in 2007/08. It also rose 18 per cent from the £1.4bn recorded in the last sample, which covered financial years ending between 2010 and 2012.
The report – which was produced by the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at the Cass Business School – uses figures in the most recently available annual reports of the top 100 family foundations based on the annual value of the grants they give out. Because foundations do not all use the same year-end, the most recently available data spans 2011 to 2013.
By far the biggest giver over this period was the Wellcome Trust, which made grants worth £511m in the year to September 2012, more than triple the £145m given out by the second-largest grant-maker, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, in the year to April 2012.
The ACF said that the drop in the level of donations to family foundations raised concerns about the amount of funds that would be available to support charitable purposes in the future.