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 remain 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 in what they do, typically having a single intervention which they are rolling out or being 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, any funding is unrestricted except when an organisation states that they need funds for something specific.  In some cases, we may make a three-year commitment to a particular organisation if we can see this will help the recipient organisation plan effectively for the longer term.  We don’t feel it is healthy for a relationship to be a disproportionately large funder so we will normally cap our funding at 25% of an organisation’s income

We are aware that there is a limited pool of organisations which meet our criteria for funding at this time but we are ambitious in our grant-making.  This means we are happy to consider start-up proposals from founders with strong skills and a solid track record (we are willing to be the sole funder in any initial stages).

Each year, we do one country trip and we will visit Sierra Leone this year again, to spend time with some of the organisations we fund as well as meet new people to identify new opportunities for funding important and impactful work.