Policy&Practice has been commissioned by the Community Foundation serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland to look at the way charitable foundations support the voluntary sector in the North East of England.  The research has involved in-depth interviews with 25 regional and national charitable foundations and is concluding with seminars in Newcastle and London to test the findings from the research.

In recent years funding for the voluntary sector has remained fairly similar but its composition is changing – with a lower level of reliance on local and national government sources during a long period of austerity policy.  Charitable foundations have often stepped in where social needs have been growing in areas such as homelessness, poverty, health and personal wellbeing.  Reduction in funding for youth services by local councils has also led to higher levels of investment by charitable foundations.

The research is not just about where money from grants is flowing, Instead it is focusing on how charitable foundations determine what issues they want to support, how they know  if their grant giving is making a real difference and how they work alongside each other to have a greater overall impact.  Another key purpose of the exercise is to feed new questions in the forthcoming Third Sector Trends survey across the North beginning in June 2019.

Charitable foundations involved in the study include all Community Foundations serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, County Durham Community Foundation, Tees Valley Community Foundation, The Ballinger Family Trust, The Barbour Foundation, Big Lottery Fund, Children in Need, Comic Relief, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, Greggs Foundation, The Henry Smith Charity, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation, Middlesbrough and Teesside Philanthropic Foundation, Millfield House Foundation, Northstar Ventures, The Pilgrim Trust, Power to Change, Sage Foundation, The Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, Sir James Knott Trust, The Tudor Trust, Virgin Money Foundation and Wolfson Foundation.

A report will be published in the late summer of 2019 on the research findings and further reports will emerge in 2020 using quantitative data from the Third Sector Trends surveys.  For more information on the project, contact tony.chapman@durham.ac.uk.