Blog

29/03/17

Filtering posts by topic

Read about how to filter ACCESS’s blog posts by topic.

22/09/15

An unusual journey

Chairing a new board of a new foundation is unusual. The challenge is not one of adapting an old strategy to a new context, but rather starting with a blank sheet of paper and working out how to have the greatest impact. For a start, at Access, trustees and staff have agreed to work to […]

11/09/15

AccessEd #4 – Questions, questions

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be working on a first draft strategy for our capacity building programme. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we’ll be sharing this at the beginning of October for feedback. As a preliminary to this, we’ve got some more specific questions which have come out of what we’ve heard […]

04/09/15

Risks and returns

The endowment working group met again last week to consider how best we invest our £60m endowment from the Cabinet Office. We began by looking at different portfolio scenarios, generated using our financial model. We considered how the mix of assets would impact both the financial return of the portfolio as well as the financial […]

28/08/15

AccessEd #3 – Minding the Gaps

When I opened up our consultation with a google form where all comments would be shared openly, I had feared that we’d end up with the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds. Given that, it has been really encouraging that we’ve now had 30 insightful and considered responses, from a range of organisations and practitioners. I’m very […]

18/08/15

Blue and Red Investing

The Group has been established to consider how best we invest our £60m endowment from the Cabinet Office during the next ten years before we use the funds to make grants, in grants in a way that generates the maximum social impact. We met last week and it was an invigorating and thought provoking discussion! […]

07/08/15

Second steps

We reviewed three applications at Round One*, two of which will proceeded on to the due diligence stage. These were one proposal for a county-wide fund which had come from a Community Foundation in partnership with a lender, and one from an established SIFI looking to develop a regionally focused fund targeting a couple of […]

04/08/15

AccessEd #2 – The Lay of the Land

So two weeks has flown by, and there’s plenty to share. Firstly, as trailed in my last post, we’ve polished up our Annual Plan for 15-16 to a mirror shine, and deemed it fit for your viewing pleasure – you can inspect it here. We’re not expecting that it will be a viral sensation, but […]

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