At the end of each calendar year, we review our performance for that year including what went well and what didn’t and we then set out grant-making strategy for the following year.

For the 2026 calendar year our focus areas remain extreme poverty and physical suffering.  We remain obsessed with effectiveness and successful implementation and are particularly interested in work which remains neglected by other funders.

We will continue to fund well-managed organisations that are small enough for us to understand everything they do.  These organisations will have focus, typically having a single intervention which they are rolling out, or they will be embedded in a single community so they can tailor all they do to what that community needs.

We want to allocate at least £100,000 to charities working with extremely poor communities in Sierra Leone.  As a general rule, funding is unrestricted.  In some cases, we may make a three-year commitment if this will help the recipient organisation plan effectively for the longer term.  We don’t feel it is healthy to be a disproportionately large funder so normally cap our funding at 25% of an organisation’s income.

We are aware that there is a shortage of organisations which meet our criteria for funding.  This means we are happy to consider start-up proposals from people with strong skills and a solid track record.  We are willing to be the sole funder in any initial stages.

We will visit Sierra Leone again this autumn, to spend time with the organisations we fund, as well as to meet new people to identify new opportunities.