Blagrave was set up in 1978 and endowed in 1981; starting life as the “The Herbert and Peter Blagrave Charitable Trust”. On the death of his brother Peter, Herbert left the majority of his substantial assets to form the Trust.
For many years we had a relatively modest distributable income and focused on the three counties in which Herbert had lived and worked – Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire.
The trustees sold the Linkenholt Estate in Hampshire, which had been the main endowment, in order to diversify investments and increase distributable income substantially.
This allowed the Trust to appoint a dedicated staff member and deepen its work, in particular funding Community Foundations in the region and with a broad range of grant partners.
Under a new Director, the board slowly grew to bring in diverse skills and experience, and took the decision to focus exclusively on young people. Investments and grant giving capacity continued to grow and there was more focus put into who, where and how we fund.
We expanded our geography to include the Isle of Wight and Sussex, shortened our name to The Blagrave Trust and focused on being a relational funder that worked in partnership with grantees.
In the next years Blagrave recruited young people onto the board, and moved towards funding nationally, being more intentional and strategic in its work and collaborating with other funders to increase representation and accountability to young people across the youth sector.
The board, now including young people, highlighted a desire to invest in policy work as well as youth services. This broadened our grant giving to include policy and campaigning organisations nationally. Out of this came our research into the landscape of funding and infrastructure for youth-led change in the UK. Following the findings of the report we funded and designed several initiatives set up to invest in young people directly e.g the Young Trustees Movement was launched in 2019, and the Opportunity Fund in 2020.
Our work on feedback led to our developing the idea of the Listening Fund and bringing on board other funders. The Listening Fund provided organisations working with young people with multi year grants to centre young people’s voice within their organisations. Over the following 6 years, this fund invested £1.4m in listening and voice work all over England and generated huge learning and insight into how to prioritise youth leadership. The programme was steered by a group of young advisers.
The devastating impact of the pandemic, and the seismic changes in society brought in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the US were part of the driving force behind the launch of Challenge and Change in this year, our first funding programme where we funded young changemakers directly.
We also joined forces with Friends Provident Foundation and the Joffe Trust to launch the ESG Olympics. A first in the sector, pushing investment firms to be more ambitious in maximising social and environmental return on investment, whilst maintaining a reasonable financial return for endowed foundations.
The overwhelming response to our innovative approach led to the investment of £1m per year for 5 years from the 1989 Charitable Trust. This allowed us to expand our grant making to young changemakers, and design an ambitious new grant making strategy focused on investing in young people as powerful forces for change (2022-2026).
We launched our new 2022-2026 strategy, committing to: increasing civil society's accountability to young people, investing in youth-led change, and supporting better youth policy.
Eli Manderson Evans joined as our new CEO, bringing new perspective and focus.
In this year, we also started to bring together the changemakers we funded with our first annual Youth Led Change Day. This helped us see the importance of events that connect and build power.
We launched the Pathways Fund publicly to fill a critical gap in the funding landscape for youth-led and lived-experience-led organisations. Design as a pathway for youth-led groups following Challenge and Change and similar programmes, Pathways Fund provided multi-year funding alongside wellbeing and organisational development support, and events.
This year we also renewed our commitment to climate justice, following an audit by consultancy organisation Impatience Earth, which showed that despite being one of the founding signatories of the Funder Commitment on Climate Change, our actual contribution was low. This was set to change dramatically over the coming years.
Blagrave was a co-founding funder of the Alliance for Youth Organising, alongside Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The Alliance is an intergenerational group of organisers and campaigners from across the UK hosted by Civic Power Fund, which funds and connects groups and networks who provide the tools, knowledge and support for youth organising to flourish.
During this year we evolved our work in the South East by recruiting and training a group of intergenerational advisers to guide our small grants programme, supporting youth charities. They maintained a focus on supporting youth voice within these organisations.
We joined with three corporate foundations, Ovo Foundation, the Energy Saving Trust, and The Co-op Foundation, to launch a pooled fund called Roots & Routes. Supported by Impatience Earth, this fund aims to support young climate changemakers and the infrastructure around them.
We also relaunched and expanded Challenge and Change, with our partner the Centre for Knowledge Equity, funding an incredible 37 young changemakers.
We celebrated the end of our strategy period and prepared to launch our next with a comprehensive learning journey involving staff and trustees.
We launch our brand-new long-term strategy ‘Leading With Hope’ marking a bold evolution in our work. Moving from national and regional grant making to deep, long-term, place-based investment in: Portsmouth, London and Birmingham.
In each place, we will continue to fund young people directly, strengthen the local youth sector, as well as invest in buildings and youth spaces.