What is the Barnardo's Foundation?
The Barnardo’s Foundation launched in the spring of 2020 to invest a proportion of Barnardo’s voluntary funds in line with the priorities set out in Barnardo’s corporate strategy (2016-2025), entitled Better Outcomes for More Children.
The Foundation’s vision is that vulnerable children have improved life chances through catalytic and innovative investments – testing innovative ideas, replicating, and scaling successful programmes, and generating and sharing new evidence and learning.
If you’d like to find out more or apply for funding, please email us at the Barnardo’s Foundation email address: barnardosfoundation@barnardos.org.uk.
Tell me more about the strategy
The Foundation will achieve its vision through four strategies that align to Barnardo’s four corporate objectives:
- Focus our resources on our core mission:
By investing in innovative programmes seeking to create stronger families, safer childhoods and positive futures through an integrated health and social care approach.
- Generate as much income as we can to invest in out vital services:
By leveraging funding into funded work from trusts, foundations, philanthropy, corporate partners, and others in collaboration with the Fundraising team.
- Work with partners to improve the system surrounding vulnerable children and young people:
By supporting funded work to generate evidence and learning and apply it to achieve scalable, sustainable changes in the systems tasked with delivering services to children and young people.
- Invest in our people to become an employer of choice in our sector:
By ensuring approaches to equality, diversity and inclusion are applied in all funded work.
Tell me how I can apply for funding
The Foundation will invest its funds in line with the three strategic outcomes identified in Barnardo’s ten-year corporate strategy: creating stronger families, safer childhoods, and positive futures. Within these key strategic outcomes, the Foundation will focus its funding on supporting the most vulnerable children and young people in the following five areas:
- Early years and early intervention
- Family support
- Mental health and wellbeing
- Child sexual abuse and exploitation
- Children in and leaving care
All proposals will need to demonstrate how they will deliver against one of these priority areas.
We have five investment principles against which all applications are assessed. These have been developed in close collaboration with Barnardo’s colleagues.
If you’d like to apply for funding, please email us at the Barnardo’s Foundation at barnardosfoundation@barnardos.org.uk.
Tell me more about your approach to evidence and learning
The Foundation will support funded partners to generate and use evidence and learning. The Foundation will achieve this by:
- Supporting individual funded partners to generate and use evidence and learning, while strengthening the culture of enquiry, real-time learning and evidence-based practice; and,
- Brokering networks across the portfolio of funded partners to share evidence and experience across and beyond Barnardo’s.
The Foundation will also generate evidence and learning around its investment model and use such insights to improve.
Tell me more about Race Equality work
In 2020 Barnardo’s made a series of commitments to becoming an anti-racist organisation. One of these commitments was to allocate a proportion of our unrestricted income to address the structural inequalities faced by children and young people from minoritized communities.
Since then, we have allocated over £1m to projects with an explicit anti-racism focus. We have also worked with all funded partners to undertake an equalities impact assessment that includes considering how best to support children, young people, and their families from minoritized communities.
Our next step is to work with Barnardo’s colleagues to commission an external agency to engage grassroots Barnardo’s staff to reflect on their experiences of delivering services to minoritized communities. This work will help to reduce an acknowledged ‘knowledge deficit’ in this area and build learning and insight from the ground up. The learning would subsequently inform future Foundation investment strategies for anti-racism work.
Meeting our grant making and advisory boards
The Board of Trustees of Barnardo’s retains ultimate responsibility for all the work of The Foundation. The Foundation’s strategy is agreed by the Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) and signed off by the Board of Trustees.
The Foundation has a grant making board and advisory board.
The grant making board is made up of Barnardo’s colleagues. Their purpose is largely to make decisions on individual proposals submitted to the Foundation.
The advisory board are made up mostly of people outside the organisation. Their purpose is to perform the role of a ‘critical friend’ in support of the Foundation’s overall strategy.
Download the grant making terms of reference.
Read the grant making board bios.
Tell me more about how the money is spent and the impact of the work
The Barnardo’s Foundation is committed to being fully transparent about the funds we receive and how they’re allocated, as well as the emerging evidence of what’s been achieved and what’s been learnt.
You can click on the link below find out more about what we’ve funded. This is updated quarterly.
There’s more on the impact of the work we’ve funded on the BU site, where we share emerging evidence and learning about the work we’ve funded.
Read about the work we've funded so far.
Our annual report to the Children and Young People's Services sub-committee of the board of trustees will be available in March 2023.