EPISODE SUMMARY

Alex Jacobs, Director of the Joffe Trust, joins Alex Blake for a close look at how a specialist funder actually makes grantmaking decisions.

Alex walks through the Trust’s two-stage process, from a simple four-paragraph inquiry through to a full application, and the one question, “who do you want to do what?”, that does more to separate strong proposals from weak ones than anything else they ask. He explains how the staff team assesses applications before they reach the board, why the board overturns staff recommendations roughly 10-20% of the time, and what that says about good governance.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How a two-stage enquiry and application process works in practice, and why success rates differ sharply between the two stages

• Why the question “who do you want to do what?” is more revealing than a list of problems, and what it forces an applicant to clarify

• How staff assess applications before they go to the board, and why the board’s independence matters even when it disagrees with staff recommendations

• Why the Trust commits to substantial feedback on every grant report within a month, and how that shapes trust between funder and grantee

• How a specialist funder uses convening to build relationships across civil society, government, and the private sector

ABOUT THE GUEST

Alex Jacobs is Director of the Joffe Trust, a UK grantmaking trust currently spending down its endowment over ten years. Before joining the Trust, he worked with international NGOs including Oxfam and Plan International, where he was Director of Programme Quality, and founded and led the charity Mango for ten years

TRANSCRIPT

Alex Blake (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Inside Grantmaking. I’m Alex Blake, a Trust Fundraising Consultant with 20 years of experience helping charities secure major grants. In this podcast series, I’ll hold honest, practical conversations with people working at Grantmakers to share how they work and what the big issues are in the grantmaking field.

Alex Blake (00:17)
Hello, Alex. Welcome to the podcast.

Alex Jacobs (00:20)
Thanks very much, nice to be here.

Alex Blake (00:22)
Thank you. So, today we’re joined by Alex Jacobs from the Joffe Trust. So Alex, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit, give us a little brief introduction to your role at the Trust and also to the Trust,

Alex Jacobs (00:36)
Great, thanks Alex. So I’m the director of the Joffe Trust. I’ve had that role since 2018. I worked with our founder. We were set up by a guy called Joel Joffe, who was a wonderful man who some of your listeners might know. He was Nelson Mandela’s lawyer in the 1960s and then he was kicked out of South Africa immediately after that. Came to the UK and kind of amazingly, one of the things he did when he was still in his mid thirties, just after he arrived here, was set up a charitable trust. So that’s a whole story about why he would have done that.

I first got to know Joel in the 1990s when he was the chair of Oxfam and I was working for Oxfam and that was relevant to what the Trust did at that time and when he ran it very personally with a focus on international aid. But over time we’ve come to what we do now which is really tackling dirty money and in particular in the UK. So I worked with Joel for about 20 years from the late 90s to the time I took on the running of the Trust in 2018.

And what we learned through that period was that, you know, Britain is a major centre for dirty money, enabling all sorts of crime and corruption and horrors around the world. And that’s a pretty bad thing. rather than worrying about international aid and trying to fix problems over there, as it were, we’re a small trust and we’re a long way away from the rest of the world in some ways. Why don’t we try and help get our own house in order in the UK?

And the more we looked into it, the more compelling that became. For reasons I couldn’t go into in more depth later on, if you like. But we’ve gone further and further into this particular area. And we now see our role as helping support the whole field of civil society that’s working on dirty money in the UK. And in fact, now we’re going to be spending down. We’re halfway through a 10-year spend down. We’ve got about five years left to go.

Alex Blake (02:12)
just for clarity. So by dirty money you mean money that’s come through criminal means and such and is being laundered through the UK system.

Alex Jacobs (02:23)
Yeah,

exactly. The proceeds of crime and corruption from around the world, they wash through the UK. The police, the National Crime Agency in the UK, estimate that at least 100 and possibly hundreds of billions of pounds a year of illicit finance, dirty money, are associated with the UK every year through the city of London, through our overseas territories like the British Virgin Islands, invested in London property. And it’s an astonishing business.

Alex Blake (02:28)
Yeah.

What sort of size is the trust in terms of, I suppose, scale, just in terms of the amount of money you’re giving away each year and also staff team and that side of things?

Alex Jacobs (02:58)
Right, so I mentioned that I took on the running of the trust in 2018 and that was a year after Joel died. So we then had to reconstitute the trust and get things reorganized. At that point, we had about 10 million pounds in the bank, which is obviously a lot of money, but a drop in the ocean in the wider scheme of things. From that, we have been spending about a million pounds a year, a bit more on grants per year. Though at the moment, we’re spending…

over twice that because we’re re-granting as well with another donor. We’re very small staff team with three part-time members of staff.

Alex Blake (03:32)
So, I’d be keen to hear from you about the process of how charities receive funding in terms of application assessment, decision making and so on. And I appreciate if you’re in the spend out stage, it might be different now to how it was previously. feel free to take it whichever you feel is the most useful way if it’s changed.

obviously you’ve gone into quite a niche field, so I don’t know how sort of open access or proactive it’s been during that time.

Alex Jacobs (04:00)
Well, that’s a really good point. And just on that last point, we’ve been funding in this field, well, since before 2018 and then more intensively since then. So that’s over quite a while now. And we know quite a lot of the civil society organisations working in this space and we’ve been funding quite a lot of them. So quite a lot of our funding now is to people in the field, to people we have ongoing relationships with, organisations we know. But we also, we’re open to new applications.

and we’d love to hear from people who’ve got any new ideas about better ways or complementary ways of tackling the issue. I’ll say a bit more about how those two things link together in a minute. But in terms of the process, we run a two-stage process. So that’s the first stage one is the inquiry, stage two is full application. People can send an inquiry in any time. There’s details on our website. It’s just a four paragraph email. That’s what you’re asked for, well I mean a short email. Tell us what you want to do.

how much you’re asking for. then crucially, even at that stage, we do ask people just to outline how does their work fit together with what other people are already doing in this field. So we really believe in collective action, that the field as a whole can achieve more together than independent organisations can working on their own. For instance, just in terms of turning up with aligned asks when you’re talking to the minister or to the civil servants, what’s the policy change you want? If you’re all asking for the same thing, much better chance of getting it.

Alex Blake (05:18)
so that inquiry form, a few specific questions rather than just a general.

Alex Jacobs (05:24)
Yeah, I mean as I mentioned, we put a few bullet points on our website about the kind of areas we hope people will cover in an inquiry. The main one is just what do you want to do and why is it important? How much money would you be asking for? And then the third one is how does it fit with what other people are doing? And that’s about it. So that’s the inquiry stage. We’ll get back to…

Alex Blake (05:41)
Are you able

to have a conversation with you at that stage or is that kind of you need that inquiry bit first because I appreciate you obviously, a small team.

Alex Jacobs (05:50)
Yeah,

people can get in touch any time. We try to be flexible and responsive. If people want to chat, send me an email, send someone on the team an email, and we’ll do what we can. Sometimes we might ask if you could send a couple more details in writing first, and just to see, is there a good enough fit here? Is it worth your time? Is it worth anybody else’s time, our time? But if it looks like there’s a reasonable fit, then we’d be glad to talk. We’ll try and get back to you on the inquiry within a few weeks.

We generally manage within a couple of weeks, sometimes it’s four weeks, sometimes a little bit longer. But that’s the kind of time scale. And then again, we’ll assess the inquiry, think about it, maybe talk to one or two other people working on related areas. If it seems to be worth your while pursuing, we’ll invite a full application. If we think there’s a reasonable chance that our trustees might approve a grant, and it’s worth everybody’s time going through that stage of the process.

The applications, again, there’s details on our website. We asked for about six pages long and there’s nothing very surprising in there. We don’t have a very set format. I mean, it’s very much along the lines of what are you trying to achieve? How are you going to achieve it? Who else are you going to work with and so on? There’s a critical question that we asked that I’ll come back to, would think, which is who do you want to do what? And it’s a very deceptive question we found, but it really gets to the heart of things. Our field, a lot of it is in

Policy work is our field, it’s policy heavy. So rather than just outlining problems, like everybody knows a lot of the problems, in order to get to solutions, how are we going to fix some of those things? We ask people, well, who do you want to do what in order to fix this? So like dirty money is big problem, right, I’ve got it. There’s a lot of corruptly acquired wealth invested in London property. It’s a terrible thing. So who do you want to do what to try to fix that specifically? So that’s a real pivotal question for us.

Applications are then considered by the full board, by our board, and they have three board meetings a year, so about one every four months, never that far away. The next one’s in about three months’ time. And of course, the staff seem…

Alex Blake (07:40)
How does the assessment

work?

So just in between those steps, so when the full application lands, then actually the staff team review it and will score it in some way before, and then, you know, the ones that are progressed as, you know, recommended to fund, the staff team go to the board. So how does that bit work in the middle in terms of how you would assess those? Do you have a scoring criteria or is it, you know, more of a discussion among the team? What’s that part of it look like?

Alex Jacobs (07:55)
Exactly.

So that’s a big part of our job as a staff team. So when we receive the full applications, we review them. We sometimes, we talk within the staff team, it’s very important, and we’ve got to set a criteria. We don’t score them sort of in a quantitative way. don’t have, but we assess them against the same criteria that we put on our website. We sometimes then go back for some more conversation. I’d hope that somebody in a team would meet.

every applicant at that stage if we haven’t done beforehand and just get to know them a bit better, understand where they’re coming from, what their interests are, what they bring, what they want to achieve. And then we might also talk to a few other people who are involved in related work. So what do they think? Does this new initiative have potential?

So that then we distill into a recommendation and we take the staff recommendation and all the full application documents to the board and they review it. The board agrees with our recommendation, staff recommendations about most of the time, 80 to 90 % of the time, but not all of the time. So it really is their decision. And my view is very much that the board comes to better decisions than we do. I think the process works pretty well.

and we think about it and we bring as good analysis as we can but the board, our board is good and they take their work seriously and they’ve got some experience doing this stuff and they’re independent and that’s really crucial so we might sometimes be a bit close to some grantees or we have our own views on certain issues and you know push one angle a bit too strongly and the board will take their own view and they’ll say no well we’ve thought about what you’ve given us and on balance they have a good conversation this is what we’re comfortable with what we’re not comfortable with.

So I think it works quite well as a process.

Alex Blake (09:45)
And what’s the mix of experience on the board? Is it in grant making or policy or that specific niche you’re in or broader than that?

Alex Jacobs (09:54)
There’s a bit of all of that and as it happens we’re recruiting for a couple more board members just at the moment so please have a look. We’re looking to strengthen the board at the moment in our policy niche on illicit finance and dirty money. But we’ve got some good experience in that area, we’ve got good experience of grant making and we’ve got good experience of governance more broadly. And the board functions pretty well. think there’s a healthy relationship between staff team and the board team.

mutual respect. We do the work, we take the governance seriously and we’re able to have a pretty open and honest conversation.

Alex Blake (10:24)
many applications roughly would you be taking to each board meeting?

Alex Jacobs (10:28)
Yeah, that’s a crucial question. About three to half a dozen. It varies. Sometimes we have bumper meetings where you might have a dozen. Sometimes fewer. if I may, just on that, that has a very direct implication of just the amount of time and effort that trustees have to put in. And of course, they’re doing it all on voluntary basis. They’re all busy people. So one of the things that I end up talking about sometimes with applicants is

can you make it easy for them to come to the right answer for you? So keep it short, keep it clear. Nobody wants long essays on stuff. Nobody wants long words, to be honest. And in fact, where people do use of long complicated language, it’s generally a bad sign. And I’m very much to the view, and the board is very much to the view, that if you can explain something clearly, then that demonstrates you understand it clearly, and you know what you’re talking about. But if it’s not clear to understand, or if it’s difficult for trustees just to make sense of the application.

It’s really, you’re on the back foot to start.

Alex Blake (11:21)
Yeah, yeah. And do you track the success rates at the different stages? like how many of those inquiries get through to funding and how many of the full applications get through?

Alex Jacobs (11:32)
Yeah,

we do. think it’s on our website that full applications have quite a high chance of getting funded, about three quarters-ish. Inquiries, it’s much lower because it’s Fundraiser’s job to make lots of inquiries, it’s a pretty quick and easy thing to do, and it’s our job to really make sure there’s a good fit between what’s being proposed and our areas of interest. So that’s a much lower figure.

Alex Blake (11:54)
sense, isn’t it? It’s almost like that’s the whole point of having that two step process, isn’t it? you get lots of inquiries through that, you know, as you say, doesn’t take too much time for the applicants and then for yourselves, you feel like you’re getting a wide range of inquiries coming through from different types of organisations. And hopefully there’s not too many wildly ineligible ones where people are just, you know, asking something completely inappropriate. Hopefully they’re in the right sort of field.

Alex Jacobs (11:57)
point. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s

Alex Blake (12:20)
but then you can judge what’s going to get through and then as you say, three and four success rates at full application stage is pretty good. So yeah, think that all makes sense. So yeah, you mentioned in terms of…

people can do to make those applications have the best chance of success in terms of clarity, being succinct. Is there anything else in terms of what makes those strongest applications stand out and those things that you, either things you particularly look for or things that maybe you don’t think about looking for so much but you can

think of ones that you’ve seen that really stand out and maybe there’s something in particular that you can think of.

Alex Jacobs (13:02)
Well, I was thinking about this, and I wanted to be useful just to give an example. It’s all on the public record So we had a really good one just recently from the UK Anti-Slaps Coalition. I don’t know if you’re familiar with SLAPs, but they’re vexatious lawsuits, lawsuits from rich and powerful people just to shut down inquiry and scrutiny and accountability. It’s a bit of a funny acronym, but it is what it is, strategic lawsuits against public participation. And it’s strongly associated with dirty money.

in stopping inquiries and investigations into where the money is going. And Britain is a world centre for these kind of vexatious lawsuits clamping down on journalism, on free journalism. It’s a real problem. So there’s a very impressive coalition working on this and they came to us with a proposal which was terrific. So I picked out three things that really stood out.

Firstly, they were really clear in their objectives. What are you trying to achieve? So I get the problem. What’s the solution? And in terms of that question I asked, who do you want to do what? There’s reasonable grounds for optimism of getting ⁓ legislation that would really clamp down on slaps. It could take various different forms, but that’s the goal. We want some new laws that are going to stop this happening. And they’ve got to come from the Ministry of Justice. It’s their area. So we want ministers, what they want, is ministers of the Ministry of Justice to bring forward

some statutory reforms and they’re pretty clear what those should be. So okay, that’s quite clear. Who do you want to do what? I get it. That sounds like there’s a plausible goal there. And then the second one is the theory of change. And that just translates straight into the question of so why would they do that then? How are you going to encourage them to do that? And why wouldn’t they do that? Obviously all these things are contested generally. So they were able to present a very clear theory of change. How are you going to encourage ministers and the Ministry of Justice to do this thing?

they have a great track record of parliamentary engagement, they’ve got a great set of broader allies in the media landscape, and they were able to demonstrate that they understood how the mechanics would work and how they could make a compelling case. So that really played very well. So clear objectives, clear theory of change. And then the third one is that contribution to the collective effort, is how are they working with other allies on related areas? And again, you know, those relationships are very strong.

So there was a sense that they could demonstrate that what they were going to do would complement and enhance what other people are doing in this broader field rather than potentially cut across it. And so that made a very strong case as well. So those were the three things that really jumped out for me in terms of why the application was such a strong one, really clear objectives, really good theory of change, contributing to the collective effort. And then just to pick up on what I mentioned before.

They could demonstrate expertise in the field. They use really simple language. It’s just like, this is clear and simple. I understand what you’re saying. And it makes sense. It holds water.

Alex Blake (15:39)
What sort of time period do you tend to fund for? I know you’ve got ongoing relationships, but I suppose in terms of one grant, would it typically be the standard three-year grant or does it tend to be longer? Because I know with policy work often it takes a long time to get to that sort of legislation change, doesn’t it? And are various kind of small steps on the way.

Alex Jacobs (16:02)
Well, that’s it. So we do typically do three-year funding. We sometimes do shorter funding, particularly for smaller projects or for partners we’re just developing new relationships with. Sometimes we do repeat three-year funding, but that’s the way we would think about it. We don’t think about, right, 10-year funding. I know some funders do. Amazing, we would think about it. do three years, see how it’s going throughout that, and then want to come back for three more years. Great, let’s talk about that.

Alex Blake (16:26)
I’d be interested to hear how you think about the sort of relationships that you have with…

Grantees particularly, of course you kind of develop relationships more so, but interesting as well in terms of applicants, if there’s a relationship there in terms of having those conversations through the application process and maybe providing feedback when they’re unsuccessful So it’d be interesting in your sort of relationship and communications with applicants during that process. And then in terms of the ones that you do fund, the sort of relationships you’ve built there. And I know the trust is

has done a lot of work around sort of convening and field building so we could go on to explore that as well.

Alex Jacobs (17:05)
Okay, yeah, sure. So with applicants, we try to be reasonably accessible and happy to talk, really hope to meet people and just sort of chew over ideas together, explore again some of the connections to what other people are already doing in the field, develop ideas around theory of change. So we’re happy to have phone calls, happy to meet. We say normally that we’re happy to review one draft of an application before finalizing it just because we can’t.

keep doing it too often beyond that with lots of different applications going and the build up to a board meeting gets a bit busy with a small team. But we try to be accessible and helpful. We provide feedback if applications are not successful. We try to do that in a thoughtful and respectful and constructive way. And it’s is generally about the fit between what people bring

and our priorities, it is sometimes about the content, about whether the application was compelling on its own terms.

We then try to develop much more of a, we have developed much closer relationships with the partners who we do fund. I could just give three examples of that. I mean, as you mentioned around convening, for many years we’ve convened an annual strategic retreat for civil society organizations who we fund and who are working in this space to build relationships so people have a chance to spend a bit of time getting to know each other on a personal basis.

and to explore the strategic issues together, whether that’s about the politics or the policy details, whatever it might be. And those have been very successful events. And we’ve been able to bring external speakers in. recently, last year, we had some friends from the US talk about the experience of tackling illicit finance and corruption in the US at the moment. So that was quite, there were some quite stark lessons there. But what I’m really glad about now is we’re

we’re stepping back from convening that and handing it over to the coalition secretariat which is fantastic and the more they can take that on and build it up the better. So that’s one thing we did. Second thing is engaging with other donors. We broadly try to encourage other funders to consider supporting work in this field or in related fields and try to explore connections between civil society priorities and donor priorities. It’s not always straightforward.

But that has certainly helped prepare the ground and bring other funders in to make grants to the organizations that we support, which I’m really delighted to see. We want them to succeed. It’s as simple as that. All of this just comes from asking the question, what can we do that’s helpful? We’ve got some independence and we’ve got the position that we sit in in the field. What can we do to help? So a bit of convening, engaging other donors. One of those, like I mentioned, really blossomed and we’re currently working with a major global donor.

re-granting quite significant additional funds. that’s fantastic. It has made a huge difference to coalition. And then a third thing we do is we convene across different sectors. So what I mean by that is bringing people from the private sector together with across government departments and with civil society and with academics and with others. The whole field of illicit finance and economic crime, it’s a complicated area.

there’s lots of different moving parts. There’s not terrifically strong overall government leadership. And what we realized is that there’s no forum that brings people together in that kind of neutral way, specifically for public benefit, rather than for, you know, with a private, with a commercial angle. So we thought we’d try it and it worked quite well. And that’s developed into an initiative called the Latimer Network. And it enables civil society to participate in that wider forum on a completely equal basis with

you know, senior people from the banks and with senior people, senior civil servants from across different departments, senior people from law enforcement, the National Crime Agency, the regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority and so on. So it’s really, it’s an interesting area, it’s quite a big step for us and so far so good.

Alex Blake (20:32)
Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, I mean, it seems like Funders are often in unique place in terms of being able to bring these people together.

often have these relationships with different organisations working in a particular sector and also have the learning that comes through the reporting back on grants and often in reports. They ask about the learning and it often then just gets right. They’ve reported back and filed somewhere and not done much with, so it’s good to see that happening. I think it’s something.

Alex Jacobs (21:03)
So on that,

on the reporting, we try to a couple of ways. So firstly, we’ve made a commitment, just internally, that we will provide substantial feedback to every grantee on their report within a month of them sending it. And I kind of can’t understand why donors, it just all feels to me that’s basic good practice. And in a way, it’s just courtesy. People put a lot of work, obviously, into preparing for reports.

And you want to encourage people, so you’ve got to show you read them and take an interest. And there’s always interesting stuff to discuss and to reflect on. And maybe you can help in some ways, like maybe it connects up with some other work you’re aware of or something. But that’s like step one is just do the basics. Acknowledge and show an interest in the work and try to be encouraging. And if you think things aren’t on track, then you’ve got to flag it up and have a conversation about it. There’s no point just leaving that. It’s part of the responsibility.

But then what we also very much take the view that, as you say, that we sit in this privileged position of seeing reports and insights from across the whole field. In as much as that gives us some sort of overall view, some oversight, then I think we’ve got a responsibility to share that back and say, look, this is what we’re seeing. We’re not saying it’s the whole truth or the only truth, but this is what we see. ⁓ How does it relate to what you’re seeing? And what does that mean for collective strategy going forward? So we are keen to try to bring that.

back into the conversation as a contribution to strategizing together. I should one other thing that, you know, sometimes we get this wrong. Of course we do. And we get too involved in operational work. We can all get a bit excited and go, no, you there’s really, you know, here’s something that’s happening. We want to be more hands on involved. So for instance, the government at the moment has an illicit finance summit coming through.

It was meant to be held in a couple of weeks time, but it’s been postponed to later in the year. Probably a good thing. within the Joffe Trust, we got a bit excited about that and started to sort of lean into it a bit too far. And our partners, they said, look, you better not do that. And I thought that that was probably a system working quite well. They said, look, you’re overstepping the mark and we don’t like it. We don’t think it’s appropriate. And think, well, yeah, you’re probably right. So I was pleased that they felt able to say that. And then I thought, you know, yeah, we better act on that and just step back.

Alex Blake (23:05)
Yeah, well, I was going to say funnily enough that I think there’s…

the trust that is built up by the fact that you’re playing that role of convening and obviously facilitating this sort of collaborative approach across the field that will help those grantees to trust your organisation as well. I think then you get better insights from those learning reports than maybe a much more hands-off funder where…

grantees will tend to then tell them what they think they want to hear and in the question about what were the challenges and what did you learn it might be you know a bit more sort of surface level and putting a positive spin on things rather than necessarily really getting into the detail.

So suppose that’s a challenge for funders in terms of whether they can get as much. We’re assuming there’s lots of insight in these reports that come through, but I think you probably need to do that relationship building piece in order to really get the good stuff.

Alex Jacobs (23:48)
interesting.

think that’s probably right. I I see it very much in terms of a partnership, but at a strategic level. As a funder, we’re allocating money. It’s incredibly… What’s the word? It’s powerful. makes it influential. Sorry. It’s incredibly influential because our board and our organisation, we’re deciding which organisations…

get the money, can employ the staff and to do what work. And surely we want to do that in conversation with leadership across the field. Like what’s important? Should we be funding this kind of work or that kind of work? You’ve got to try to do it with your eyes open. I mean I’ve banged on before, you’ve probably heard me say this, that if you’re, it seems to me as a funder, you’ve got a responsibility to try to understand the field that you’re funding into. Otherwise it’s like gardening with your eyes shut.

you’re going to end up planting a tree in the middle of a pond, or doing something everybody knows, there’s no point planting veg in that bit of the garden, they’re never going to grow. You’ve got to try to understand the landscape, otherwise you can do an awful lot more harm than good. So I do think there needs to be some sort of, and I’m sure there is in every field, some mechanism for dialogue about what are the strategic priorities coming through and where is more resourcing needed in future.

Alex Blake (25:07)
Yeah, I suppose the challenge for lots of funders is how niche you go on where you focus your funding, isn’t it? Because it must be a lot more common to be quite a broad funder than a targeted one.

And if you’re funding across something really broad like disability for example, and all sorts of disability and health conditions wrapped up, it’s such a broad sector you can’t really get into the nitty gritty so much. And if you’re supporting more service delivery then you don’t get so much into the understanding of the details. Policy changes and things I suppose to some extent it maybe requires being quite niche to be able to do

all of that additional value work which it’s interesting kind of conflict that’s always there isn’t it. I suppose you know thinking from the applicant side because obviously my day job is as a fundraiser you kind of want those funders to be

Alex Jacobs (25:58)
Yes.

Alex Blake (26:00)
really engaged in the sector you’re working in and all the rest of it but also when criteria gets narrowed down to a very niche sector then it closes the door to so many as well so then often you don’t particularly want that as a fundraiser because then you have less opportunities to go for so.

Alex Jacobs (26:18)
It’s a real

balance, isn’t it?

Alex Blake (26:18)
Yeah, one of

the main challenges in the sort of funding field, isn’t it? Okay, so the other thing I was going to ask was, I suppose thinking a bit more broadly now in terms of grant making practice and wider trends you’re seeing if there’s particular things that you’re thinking about in terms of your own practice or the wider grant making field.

Alex Jacobs (26:42)
So here’s a thing that’s really bubbling up at the moment that I’m delighted by across donors and across various conversations that I’m a part of is around the example of the US and responding to the rise of authoritarianism and populism in the UK. And it’s a big deal. And it really relates to, you know, philanthropy in a variety of different ways, because of course, the authoritarian and populist right is supported

very generously by their own and very actively by their own donors, whether that’s philanthropy or not, we could debate. But there’s a lot of money flowing into that side of the equation and they’re having a lot of success. Our field of ⁓ illicit finance and corruption, when we look across to the US in relation to that, it’s pretty frightening and that the US has moved from a position of leadership.

in tackling illicit finance and corruption to swinging quite the other way. And they’ve rolled back all sorts of protections. And of course, famously, the Trump family is personally massively enriched through their presidency. And there are all sorts of allegations of corruption on a huge scale. So corruption is a battleground issue in this. We could all see the politics in the UK and we look across Europe and see what else is happening. Who knows what will happen? There’s all sorts of political uncertainty.

But one of the things that I’m really struck by at the moment is among donors is that conversation is happening. Okay, we need to be aware of these big dynamics. something like a Trump administration came into the UK, now the chance that is probably relatively small, but the impact would be monumental. Everything that liberal funders care about would suddenly be on the back foot.

whether that’s climate, inequality, disability, gender rights, etc. there’s really interesting, and corruption is just one little part of that wider picture, but an important part. So there’s a really interesting conversation going. So how do we get organised now to understand how these dynamics could play out and what do do about it? What do we do now in this period before the next general election? How do we consider getting organised beyond the next election?

It’s all quite broad at the moment, but we were just talking about that need for dialogue about strategy. think dialogue with civil society on these issues is very timely.

Alex Blake (28:46)
What sort of funders and donors and organisations are you speaking to in that space? Is that the ones that are particularly interested in funding policy work and that sort of thing or is it broader than that?

Alex Jacobs (29:02)
No, it’s much broader. It’s much broader. So donors ⁓ from a wide range of different interests have shown an interest in the conversation. So for instance, from climate space, and there’s a lot of donor activity, of course, in that field. Various different aspects of social justice, whether that’s racial justice or work with migrants or other aspects of social justice, disability, as you mentioned. It’s quite broad because I think people realize that the political climate

is so influential and it links to frontline work and there are already threats are materializing and others know vastly more about this than I do but against frontline services. know the Tommy Robinsons of the world and so on they’re mobilizing it’s active and they want enemies and it makes for good you know footage. So I think it’s quite a broad

A broad set of donors and fields of work are concerned about this.

Alex Blake (29:50)
Okay, well I think I’m going to ask one final question. Is there one thing that you’d want fundraisers to particularly understand about how you work at the Trust?

Alex Jacobs (30:00)
think from our point of view, we’re all about impact. And I know everyone says that. But we believe really strongly in collective and supporting collective action to maximise impact. So that’s behind all the questions we ask. It’s why we ask, are you clear about what you’re trying to achieve? Are you clear about who you want to do what? How are you working with others in the field? It all comes down to that same basic idea. If you can demonstrate that you’ve really got a path to

achieving significant impact, which probably involves working with other people in the field, then fantastic. You’re talking our language.

Alex Blake (30:34)
It’s an interesting question around impact in the work that you fund because often it’s quite different compared to say, I don’t know…

mental health service and they’re the established evaluation tools for measuring improvement in people’s emotional wellbeing and that sort of thing. And that’s complex policy work that can take years and years to get your ultimate goal achieved. You know, it can be more difficult to demonstrate the impact of an organization. So what are the sorts of ways that you assess whether an organization or a project has been impactful?

Alex Jacobs (30:52)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Blake (31:12)
you mentioned there are theories of change, but in terms of those measures of success, what things come through in those reports and conversations?

Alex Jacobs (31:19)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. You can’t measure the ultimate impact, like is the amount of dirty money coming to the UK getting smaller? That’s not a question that can be answered, sadly. People have tried. So we look for outcomes that plausibly will make an important difference. So outcomes like policy change. And there is policy change that happens much more quickly than within a year, within a couple of two three years.

the coalition we support, there’s the really impressive track record of achieving specific changes. There’s also in terms of intermediary outcomes, demonstrating support among key stakeholders and in particular political support for specific reforms. So that counts for a lot. How strong is the Alliance? How strong is the political force?

There’s also, of course, we support media work. And then there are some very well-established ways of assessing reach and impact of that.

Alex Blake (32:06)
So yeah, I guess there’s a mix of sort of maybe some quantitative measures, as you say, like with the media kind of metrics and things and maybe numbers, of meetings with relevant ministers and that type of things. And then presumably quite a lot of qualitative kind of a sense of how supportive key stakeholders are and those sorts of things that I suppose you just have to.

Alex Jacobs (32:26)

some of the most compelling stuff is evidence that senior stakeholders are interested in talking to you about this stuff. So have you, has the minister properly engaged with you on this? And occasionally you get stuff like the government saying publicly or privately that they have particularly appreciated the input of civil society into certain policy actions. And if you can associate, you know, if there’s a plausible association with that, then obviously that’s pretty powerful.

Alex Blake (32:52)
Well thanks Alex, that’s fascinating, it’s such an interesting area of work that you’re involved with and yeah it’s interesting to hear about the grant making side of things but it’s a really interesting field that you’re working in as well so I appreciate you taking the time and sharing your insights and how you work.

Alex Jacobs (33:07)
Great. Thanks very much, Alex. It’s been a pleasure talking.

Alex Blake (33:09)
No problem. pleasure.

Alex Blake (33:10)
Thanks for listening to Inside Grantmaking. If you found this conversation useful please follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and if you’d like to get in touch you can find me on LinkedIn or via the KEDA Consulting website.