May 2016

Effective philanthropy: another take (edited by Caroline Hartnell and Andrew Milner) is a collection of 11 stories describing a philanthropic intervention against some form of injustice (socioeconomic and/or political) at a local, national or global scale. These stories are told through the lens of a grantmaker illuminating the sorts of considerations, dilemmas, and uncertainties a grantmaker might wrestle with when making a grant to effect positive social change. They delve deep into the analysis of the problem, the solution, the strategy, and tactics used to address it, the risks and challenges involved, and the impact of the philanthropic support.

The purpose in telling these stories is to broaden the circle of philanthropy practitioners whose aim is to help produce lasting change in the lives of people and communities, by showing how such grantmaking is done and giving evidence of its impact.

The stories broadly fall into three categories:

Supporting marginalized groups and communities to achieve change in their own lives

The Society We Want, a report based on research commissioned by the Webb Memorial Trust by leading pollster YouGov on attitudes to poverty in the UK has shown the qualities that people most treasured were social ones such as fairness, security, safety, freedom, compassion and tolerance. Economic indicators mattered far less.

Click here to download the report.

From a list of 17 key components of a good society identified in pilot research, the highest economic indicator ‘well paid work’ was ranked sixth, while ‘prosperity’ came twelfth.

The research forms a key plank of the WMT`s report, launched on March 2, 2015 at a cross-party conference in central London, which responds to the question “what does a society without poverty look like?” Answers are drawn from population studies, a manifesto created by children and young people, and Trust-commissioned research projects.

The findings of this in-depth report are: