Education
We fund the tenth year, not the first
“Anyone can pay for a school's opening day. We pay for the decade after the one that decides whether it's still open”
Most donors want to be there for the ribbon-cutting. We're more interested in year seven, when the paint has faded and the money that funded the launch is long gone, and someone still has to make payroll. That's the part of running a school nobody photographs, and it's the part we've built this foundation around.
Where the money goes
Five focus areas, chosen slowly and reviewed every ten years instead of every twelve months. Each one answers to its own committee and gets judged by the same question: is this still working in year ten, not just year one.
See the programs →How decisions are made
Three trustees sign off on every grant. Those same three are still around a decade later to see how it turned out. Nobody who approves a grant here has moved on to another job by the time it matures.
Read governance →We publish
Audited financials. A breakdown of where every dollar went. And the grants that didn't pan out. If we only showed you the wins, you'd be trusting our word for how we make decisions instead of actually seeing it.
Open the numbers →We invest in teachers, schools and the years in between
Ten-year grants covering salaries and running costs, in nineteen countries, with no enrolment targets attached.
“Enrolment is a number schools can chase for a single photo day without keeping a single good teacher past the following year. We found something harder to fake: whether the people actually teaching are still there, still getting paid on time, still running a school that isn't held together by a September fundraiser. Ten years is long enough for a headteacher to plan a curriculum instead of just getting through the next budget cycle.”
Our grants
Our areas of work
Five programme areas, each with its own committee, each funded for ten years, each reported on publicly every year.
Education
We endow the salary line so a school can keep its best teachers next year, and leave the timetable to the people who teach it.
Fellowships covering three-year teaching posts, endowments that outlast them, and the audit that keeps both honest.Schools don't usually close because of a shortage of textbooks. They close because good teachers leave for better-paying, more stable jobs, and nobody stays long enough to fix that. What we do check, every year, is whether money we committed a decade ago is still landing in someone's paycheck.
Nineteen countries · since 1998placeholder
Health
Clinics rarely fail at the opening. They fail in year four, when the fuel and the nurse both run out. That is the year we pay for.
Our Health programme is built around exactly that moment: staff salaries, cold-chain upkeep for medicine and vaccines, and the ordinary running costs that keep the lights on, all funded on the same ten-year horizon as everything else we do. Right now, that's 44 clinics, each one within an hour's walk of the people it serves.
Forty-four clinics · since 2003placeholder
Land & Environment
Restoring a watershed takes a season. Keeping it takes title, tenure and lawyers, so we fund all three and expect to for decades.
Community land trusts, riparian restoration, and the legal defence that keeps both titles intact after we leave.Most environmental funders leave the country once the trees are in the ground. We stay for the legal part: community land trusts that hold title collectively, tenure records that survive political turnover, and legal defence for communities fighting encroachment years after the restoration crews are gone. So far, that's roughly 61,000 hectares held and restored this way.
61,000 hectares · since 2007placeholder
Community
The people closest to a problem rarely hold the budget. Local committees decide these grants; we sign the cheques and stay out of the room.
A lot of funding comes with a theory of change written by someone who's never actually lived with the problem it's meant to solve. We do it differently here: local committees, made up of residents rather than foundation staff, decide who gets funded and why.Reporting back to us takes one page, because the goal of this programme is trust, not paperwork. Twenty-three regions currently run this way.
Unrestricted operating grants, capped small and awarded quickly, with reporting that fits on a single page.
Twenty-three regions · since 2011placeholder
Arts & Culture
A community that loses its own record loses the argument about its future. We fund the archive, the shelving and the archivist who knows it.
Oral history collection, digitisation and storage for institutions too small to attract cultural funding.We aim this programme squarely at those places: recording oral histories while the people who remember are still alive to tell them, digitising records before they fall apart, and paying for something as unglamorous as proper shelving and climate control. We also fund the archivist's salary, because a collection with nobody trained to look after it degrades no matter how well it was preserved to start. Thirty-eight archives are currently supported this way.
Thirty-eight archives · since 2014placeholder
Orphanage Support
A child's home is praised on the day it opens and quietly forgotten by the third winter. We fund the years no one photographs: the long, unglamorous stretch where a home either holds together or slowly falls apart.
Our support covers care staff salaries, structured schooling, nutritious food, and reliable heating for residential homes, the basics that keep daily life stable long after the opening ceremony fades from memory. Every renewal is tied to a safeguarding review, ensuring continued funding reflects continued quality of care, not just continued need.
Because real impact isn't measured in launch-day photos it's measured in winters survived, routines kept, and children who stay safe, fed, and in school.
Twelve homes · since 2016placeholder
Twenty-seven years, photographed by the people in them
Select any frame to enlarge it. Captions and credits accompany the full archive.
Twenty-seven years of grants leave behind more than a set of financial statements. Most of what's in this archive wasn't shot by a professional photographer, it was taken by teachers, clinic staff, and the community partners doing the actual work, which is probably why it looks less like a brochure and more like what a decade of funding actually looks like up close.
Become a partner
Tell us what you are building
We accept inquiries year-round and answer every one, including the declines. Expect a reply from a programme officer within three weeks. Every inquiry that comes through this form gets read, whether it turns into a grant or not. If what you're doing doesn't fit our focus areas or our funding model, we'll tell you plainly rather than leaving you waiting on a maybe, and where we can, we'll point you toward a funder whose model fits better. If it does fit, the person who replies will be the programme officer actually reviewing it, not a form letter.