Now and forever...
Cathy Pharoah and Mark Pincher review gifts, endowments and the future-proofing of sector funding
Endowments have recently become a hot topic – in a typically contradictory voluntary sector sort of way. While government has hit upon the building up of new endowments as a potential route to sustainable funding for museums and galleries, and the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) has asked the director of the British Museum to look into this, others see scaling them down as the answer to the sector’s current funding problems. Reports on trust ‘spend down’ have been published by leading philanthropy bodies (see for example, The Power of Now, Spend-Out Trusts and Foundations in the UK, Institute of Philanthropy1 and Spending-Out: learning lessons from time-limited grant-making, Association of Charitable Foundations2). Others have an eye to a more gradual unlocking of the resources held in endowments through US-style mandatory pay-out levels (Philanthopy for the 21st Century, Grant and Driscoll3). So how important are endowments to the UK sector? This article presents some data on the scale of endowments funds in the sector, which charities benefit from them, and some trends in their value, concluding with pointers for future policy.
Author: Mark Pincher
Mark Pincher is data editor and development manager for Caritas Data.
Author: Cathy Pharoah
Cathy Pharoah is co-director of the ESRC Research Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy (CGAP) at Cass Business School.
www.cass.city.ac.uk/philanthropy
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