The List - Tracking grant-making changes from Trusts and Foundations in the UK
Observations and insights: This data is accurate as of January 2026 and relates to an ongoing, largely voluntary project, so details may be refined and amended over time as new information and interpretation occurs.
The List: A Key Resource for UK Trust & Foundation Fundraising
The Story Behind The List
Nearly two years ago, Jo Jeffery shared a simple spreadsheet that she had set up to log changes to grant-making to help manage her client’s prospects and portfolios. She never imagined it would spark a movement – a sector wide group project. She simply thought, “This is interesting to me, maybe it’ll be interesting to others too.” At a time when navigating trust and foundation fundraising had become increasingly difficult, that spreadsheet became The List, a single place to track the pausing, spend down, and restructuring of charitable trusts and foundations in the UK. In September 2025 the spreadsheet was retired, and Tom Watson developed a dedicated website.
About Jo Jeffery
Jo spent her early career in local government strategy and policy and moved to the charitable sector after her eldest child was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. She has a decade of trust and foundation fundraising experience in the UK with a special interest in children, families and health. She has been freelance for nearly 4 years.
Benefact Group’s Support for Charity Fundraising
Through our Charity Support programme, we know just how challenging it can be for fundraisers to navigate the complex world of trusts and foundations. Our free webinars, events and resources are designed to help lighten that load, and we hope they’re already making a difference.
Like many others in the sector, we spotted The List and immediately recognised its value. We’re delighted to support Jo in bringing this report to life, all with the aim of making a fundraiser’s job that little bit easier.
“The List looks incredible and is clearly built by someone who really understands what a fundraiser needs to find. Thank you”
Introduction to The List
First published in March 2024, The List is, at its heart, a practical tool to support fundraisers in their everyday work of managing portfolio and prospects by tracking changes to grant-making behaviours of Trust and Foundations in the UK . The List is a practical and collaborative resource allowing anyone to submit updates, helping to ensure the information remains accurate, up to date and free to access.
The List isn’t designed to judge foundations, closed or paused doesn’t automatically mean “bad”, and open doesn’t automatically mean “good”. Instead, The List simply tracks shifts in grant-making – both subtle and seismic – that impacts the workflow of fundraisers.
Where it started
- Albert Hunt Trust, Lankelly Chase Foundation, and Edward Gosling Foundation had announced their spending down
- Tudor Trust had paused
- Gisella Graham Foundation had announced a pause
When Jo first published ‘On Golden Ponds’ in August 2024, she’d built up 130 entries after five months of tracking changes. In 2025, that reached over 450 changes and 593 entries (noting that this figure includes multiple changes to the same funder rather than unique organisations).
The Great Restructuring – what’s been happening since?
- Children in Need paused
- National Lottery Reaching Communities restructured and did not overtly pause
- City Bridge Foundation paused and restructured
- Henry Smith Foundation paused and restructured
At first, these changes looked isolated – a single funder announcing a temporary pause, a small group of foundations deciding to accelerate impact by spending down or a small tweak of eligibility. On their own, these notices felt manageable disruptions that a fundraiser might work around. Over the past 18 months, however, the picture has shifted. What The List has highlighted is not simply scattered individual adjustments but a cumulative change across the landscape.
It’s no longer a case of managing anomalies and it is wrong to dismiss the impact of these changes because the sample size is small compared to the 10,000 trusts and foundations that exist and the amount of grants that have been distributed overall.
The numbers and stories behind The List
A deeper dive
UK Trust & Foundation Funding Trends: Types of Changes
A landscape dominated by Restructuring (144) and Pausing (143). Closures total 42, 27 closing early, while 51 are spending out and 36 are now not open to unsolicited applications. Amid these conditions, the 56 re-opens bring a welcome hint of optimism. Yet, the emergence of new categories like Short Deadline (3) and Extended Pause (5) underscores the persistent barriers facing charities navigating today’s funding environment.
Year-on-Year Trends of Funding Changes
From 2024 to 2025, the total number of changes has jumped sharply, from 118 in 2024 to 459 in 2025, almost a fourfold increase. The most dramatic growth is in Restructured (from 32 to 110), Paused (32 to 108), and Spend Out (10 to 33). There is also a large rise in funders not open to unsolicited applications (from 3 to 32) and new “One to Watch” entries (from 0 to 31) in 2025. Note that the steep escalation of some of these categories are due to improved data capture and central monitoring.
In 2025, The List introduced new labels of “short deadline”, “extended pause”, “closing early”, “deadline change” and “not open to unsolicited applications”. An observation in itself : there was enough of this behaviour to merit formal tracking. These categories make visible a kind of temporal scarcity – shorter windows and sudden deadline shifts that stretch charity capacity and place a heavy mental health toll on individuals.
Green = 2025, Gold = 2024
“I can liken The List’s new website from Jo Jeffery to the FTSE 100 with a daily update of the movers and shakers but way more interesting!”
User of The List
Frequency of appearances on The List in 2025
Amidst increasing demand and rising application volumes, grant-makers are increasingly managing pressure through invitation-only processes, tightened eligibility criteria and pauses, with Gisela Graham Foundation, Abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and The Foyle Foundation among 37 funders that have closed fully. A further 15 funders, such as The Toy Trust and Arnold Clark Community Fund, have closed early, 6 including AbbVie did not open at all, 32 such as Steel Charitable Trust, Peter Harrison Foundation, The Tudor Trust, The Peter Cruddas Foundation and The Thompson Family Charitable Trust are not open to unsolicited applications, and 33 including Hollyhock Charitable Foundation and Rowlands Trust are spending or have already spent out, noting that those spending out rarely have open grant processes.
These shifts reduce pipeline stability and are really indicative of the sector’s precariousness.
Wider impact
In October 2025, Jo circulated a questionnaire to better understand the impact of the changes on organisations and individuals – these were the findings:
• More rejections and lower sized grants from previous warm funders
• Spending more capacity on research and applications
• Pipelines are now smaller than they used to be, prospecting and planning has become extremely difficult
• Speculative applications success very low
• Funders question impact of small grants to medium sized organisations
• Increased pressure, higher workloads, and escalating rejection rates are taking a toll on fundraisers’ mental health, leading to burnout, stress leave, and lower self-worth.
• Isolation, anxiety and emotional exhaustion are common
Conclusion
The List functions as a barometer for wider sector stress, not just a digest of isolated decisions. What it’s highlighting:
- Volume and frequency: instead of the occasional pause, it shows dozens of funders simultaneously suspending or restructuring programmes.
- Duration: what once were short-term closures now stretch into indefinite and extended pauses or permanent shutdowns.
- Breadth of impact: the changes span categories – from children’s services to arts, community support, and mental health.
The List is a shared, community-built resource that grows through contributions and collaboration. You can get involved below:
Links
Find out more about the UK Philanthropy Archive
Further Resources
Jo Jeffery, LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-j-79296419a/
Substack, Circles:
https://joannajeffery.substack.com/
Briefing notes:
You can read “On Golden Ponds. How are Trusts and Foundations ageing out? What we can learn from The List. August 2024” with Emma Collier here:
https://joannajeffery.substack.com/p/on-golden-ponds
You can see Emma Collier and Jo Jeffery chat about The List for Bristol Fundraisers Networking Group here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZfGPLfb6e0
You can hear Jo chat to Felicia Willow alongside Anand Shukla, CEO of The Henry Smith Charity and Helen Gray, Trust Director of Benefact Trust here:
https://benefactgroup.com/charity-support/podcasts/the-funding-freeze-what-is-going-on/
You can see Jo present a webinar for Small Charities Week for Fair Collective here: