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April 2025 - Voluntary

Recent research highlights ongoing deficiencies in diversity initiatives among charitable foundations: Despite the increasing emphasis on equity and inclusion across most sectors, according to the 2024-2025 Foundation Practice Rating, many charitable foundations have yet to implement meaningful strategies that promote diversity in their leadership, staffing, and accessibility.

The Foundation Practice Rating (FPR) is an assessment initiative created by Friends Provident Foundation and its partners and is now in its fourth year of publication. As in previous years, the primary aim of the FPR assessment is to inspire and motivate foundations to foster more equitable and effective practices.

For the 2024-2025 report it assessed one hundred UK-based charitable grant-making foundations, collating information obtained from each foundation's annual report and website, to provide a comprehensive and objective evaluation of their performance across three strategic metrics - diversity, accountability, and transparency. Each foundation received either an A, B, C, or D grade across each of the three metrics, with “A” representing the highest grade.

The report reveals significant disparities across the three metrics, with diversity lagging notably behind transparency and accountability. While more than half of the foundations (58%) received 'A' ratings for Transparency and 43% received A or B ratings for Accountability, nearly half (44%) of the foundations assessed received a 'D' grade for Diversity and of those, 13 foundations failed to earn any points in the Diversity category at all. The same number (44%) received a ‘C’ rating. Despite a 1% increase on the previous year, and a 9% increase since the report was first published 4 years ago, the volume of foundations achieving a B rating was just 12%. Overall, the results show that as in previous years, diversity (which includes accessibility) remains the weakest domainfor most foundations.

Collectively the criteria on which the 100 sampled foundations scored worst were: setting numerical targets to increase the diversity of trustees or board members; developing a strategy to improve staff diversity, including specific numerical targets; providing accessible contact methods for individuals with disabilities; setting targets to enhance staff diversity, where applicable and ensuring the availability of Welsh language materials when the foundation funds recipients in Wales. 

So why is diversity important? Research suggests that groups with better diversity make better decisions than less diverse groups. And while the latest FPR assessment suggests gradual improvements in diversity ratings year on year among charitable foundations, there is still room for significant improvement.

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