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Community foundations are local champions, inspiring social equity through place-based philanthropy by advising individual donors and organisations who want to give at the heart of their communities for both now and in the long-term.

The community foundation network includes 47 accredited community foundations in the UK, and four international members in Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and Bermuda – although it is just the UK organisations being explored in this analysis. In addition to the 47 accredited organisations (two of which are reported together for statutory accounting purposes) and UK Community Foundations (UKCF) itself, there are two unaccredited community foundations outside the network.

The organisations in the UKCF network vary greatly in scale.

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As this is a defined group, all the community foundations are included below:

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The totals from the UKCF members including UKCF itself show grantmaking of £175 million and assets of over £1 billion.

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Grantmaking

Grantmaking increased by 15.8% which is a real term increase of 6%.

On average, grantmaking was 82% of spending, but again, it varied greatly depending on economies of scale and the level of non-grantmaking programmes delivered – for example, in some areas where the local infrastructure has closed, the community foundation is providing some capacity-building support.

Income

There was a great diversity in the income trends between the organisations. The main contributor to the drop in income overall was a decrease for the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland from £37.5m to £4.4m and Foundation Scotland from £33.3m to £25m. Excluding these two from the totals, there is an 11.5% increase in income, but no consistent trend in other organisations, with some reporting significant increases and others decreases.

Assets

Assets decreased by £56m (5.3%). £16m of this decrease was from the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland and Foundation Scotland, who had spent down the higher income they’d received the previous year. However, unlike the income position, there was a more consistent trend towards most organisations seeing a small drop in overall assets.

UKCF members facts and figures from UKCF Survey (financial year 2022-2023)

47 – members in the network

40,804 – total number of grants awarded

£170.6 million – total grants collectively awarded

£4,000 – average grant size awarded

£811 million – total network endowment

Where UKCF member funding went in 2022-2023

£73.2 million – cost of living, winter and other immediate support

£49 million – health and wellbeing

£28.5 million – improving diversity and inclusion

£12.8 million – community sector development

£3.5 million – environmental climate / activities

£2.3 million – disaster relief

£1.2 million – social investment

Community foundation recipients

31 of the 47 members of the UKCF network publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard, although only 21 of these published data for grants awarded in 2022-23.

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As seen in the previous grant recipients section, community foundations supported smaller charities (over 82% with income of under £1m). The vast majority of grants were for a year or less, and the highest proportion of income supported organisations working with children and young people.

Geographical analysis

The map below shows the relative level of grant spending per head, based on the totals published by community foundations in their annual accounts. The values range from foundations that spent under £1 per person in their area to the Cumbria Community Foundation which spent the equivalent of £11 for every person in Cumbria.

It is to be noted that spending by individual community foundations will vary over time according to the resources available and the lifecycle of their grant programmes.

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Deprivation analysis

Analysis of community foundation grants by deprivation is based on those grants that have geographic data at the Lower Super Output Area (LSOA) for the place or people that are accessing the benefits of the funds (it is recorded as beneficiary location in the 360Giving Data Standard). LSOAs are small areas used in the production of census data. Around 8,000 out of the 12,300 grants published by community foundations in 2022-23 could be matched to an LSOA. Matching these LSOAs to deprivation data accessed from MySociety, community foundations are more likely to fund in deprived areas, both in terms of the number of grants made and the monetary amounts.

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Reflections