Mission, vehicle, assessment and measurement, applied to charitable capital with the same rigour used everywhere else on the balance sheet.
We treat giving as a programme with a defined purpose, a budget, an assessment process for every recipient and evidence gathered against what was intended. That approach takes more work at the outset. It produces a body of decisions a family can defend to its own children, and it makes failure visible early enough to change course.
Everything begins with a mission agreed on paper, stating which problem the family intends to address, in which places, and over what period. Vehicle selection follows: a charitable foundation with its own board, a fund held at an existing foundation, direct grants from personal or corporate assets, or a combination where branches of a family want different degrees of formality. Every proposed grant receives an assessment memo covering the organisation's finances, its governance, its evidence base and the risk of displacing other funding. Measurement is agreed before the first payment, using indicators the recipient can realistically collect, and reported each year to whoever holds the decision.
Families arrive with commitments of their own, and these are the areas where our own working knowledge runs deepest, where the relationships are current and the assessment work is already done. A private family sets its own terms and can hold a position for twenty years. Patience of that kind is scarce capital, and it does the most work in the places other funders reach last.
Results take fifteen years to appear, which is exactly why the field suits patient private capital. A modest sum can alter one life permanently.
Across climate work, capital concentrates in a few visible categories while whole areas go unfunded. We steer families towards the underfunded end: adaptation in regions already living with the consequences, and the unglamorous engineering that has to follow a successful pilot.
Because most fortunes are made somewhere specific, families often understand a local labour market better than a national funder does. We build programmes on that knowledge, working with organisations already embedded in this space. We also fund core costs, including the salaries most project grants exclude.
We support public health and human rights both as standalone priorities and as practical elements within wider programmes. This can include primary care and mental health support in education work, legal aid and documentation in migration programmes, occupational safety in workforce initiatives, and health system resilience in climate adaptation. Where a family prefers a focused commitment, we support organisations working on maternal health, access to essential medicines, journalist safety, and the protection of civic space.
Few problems worth funding can be solved by a single donor. We place families inside existing collaborations where the analysis has already been done, and we co-fund alongside institutions with operational depth we do not possess.
Return-seeking impact capital sits inside the portfolio and is underwritten to the standard applied to any other holding. It has to clear the return hurdle in the policy statement. Both appear on separate lines of the consolidated statement, each showing a financial result and an outcome measure. An impact measurement framework is agreed per mandate and reviewed annually alongside the portfolio review.
Whether you are drafting a mission for the first time or reviewing a programme that has run for a decade, the opening step is a conversation about what you want changed.
