* Six lessons the Joffe Trust has learned about getting to national impact as a funder – and where we’re going next. *

For over a decade, the Joffe Trust has been working on the UK’s dirty money problem. It’s a complex policy area, linked to challenges like the rise of populism. We’ve helped build a great coalition that has proven impact at national level.

We were recently asked what we’d learned about how we play our part. Here are six lessons we hope are interesting for other grant-makers. And the journey’s far from over.

#1. Achieve strategic focus

As a medium-sized trust, we recognised that we can do anything charitable, but not everything. We had to choose what to focus on.

For us, this meant closing one of our two programmes to new applicants (another story we hope to tell soon). And we narrowed the other from “fighting corruption and promoting tax justice” across many countries to “fixing the UK’s dirty money problem”. It took time for trustees to work carefully through these decisions.

By focusing on one issue in one country, we hope to make a lasting national-level difference. That meets our core aim of using our funds to achieve real impact, which drives everything we do.

#2. Learn about the landscape

By choosing a specific field, we could invest in understanding the key issues and organisations. This enabled three things:

Better grant decisions. Without understanding the landscape, making grants feels like gardening with your eyes shut: you might plant a tree in a bog where it can never grow. Understanding the field helps us support the entire ecosystem of organisations, not just individual grant recipients.

Better conversations. We can bring informed views to conversations with grant recipients, at every stage from developing proposals to reviewing progress. This improves dialogue about the issues they face: focusing on the things that matter.

Better partnerships. We try to understand the issues as policy-makers see them, as well as civil society perspectives. This gives us the credibility to build bridges and help develop more effective solutions.

A wise friend once said “funders get the proposals they deserve”: applicants naturally shape proposals to unlock the money. By improving our analysis, we believe that we improve the proposals we receive and the work we fund.

#3. Get the basics right

We aim to make grants that help busy people run effective civil society organisations. We know they have tough jobs and we are only one funder among many. So we apply IVAR’s Open and Trusting grant-making principles, for instance with a two stage application process.

We assess proposals by asking: “Who do you want to do what?” This moves beyond general ideas about how things could be better, to identifying who has the power to make change and what they could realistically do. It can be tough to answer – but it gets to the heart of political realities.

For each grant, we agree a few high-level outcomes. They are very significant: across the coalition, they set out plans for collective action. (With permission, we shared them among grant recipients.) We ask recipients to report against them, rather than detailed budgets or activity plans. We respond to every grant report we receive with substantial comments within a month, often with encouragement or connections to related work.

#4. Build bridges

Fixing the UK’s dirty money problem is beyond any single organisation. Progress by civil society requires a team effort, with co-ordination across areas like investigations, policy proposals and advocacy.

So we fund a “backbone organisation” for co-ordination, the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition. We convene an annual retreat for civil society leaders to deepen relationships and shared analysis. This led to a set of joint objectives, which we also use to guide our grant-making. And we consult them on what else we should fund. We make plenty of introductions abnd actively encourage collaboration through our grant-making.

Our funds alone are not enough to support civil society. So we engage other donors, exploring connections between their priorities and dirty money. We were thrilled when a global donor backed the entire field via a major grant through us. This has all helped strengthen civil society resilience and sustainability; though “wholesale fundraising” is an endless job.

Finally, dirty money hinges on how government regulates the City. It involves many moving parts and huge interests, like international banks, with massive influence: Goliaths compared to civil society’s David. So we set up the Latimer Network to build mutual understanding across sectors and find common ground. We’ve found important goodwill alongside the conflicting interests.

We see all this convening as a crucial contribution to the collective effort, making the most of the assets we have.

#5. Stick with it

We started funding work on illicit finance before 2010. Over time we funded more, learned more and tightened our focus—identifying “corruption and tax” as a programme in 2018, then crystallising around the UK’s dirty money problem in 2023. We think that consistent funding has helped grant recipients develop their expertise and credibility.

On our side, some of the same key staff have worked on these issues since 2018, and we expect this to continue until we close around 2030. It has taken time to build our approach and relationships. Our continuous involvement over more than a decade underpins all these lessons.

#6. Keep improving

We keep asking how we could help achieve more impact in response to changing circumstances. And we adapt our work as a result. Of course there’s further to go, and we make our share of mistakes. Here are three things we are working on now.

Relationship with the coalition. We aim to support collective leadership of the coalition by its members. Inevitably there are sometimes disagreements, for instance about roles or approaches. Coalition members also face a natural tension between organisational priorities (and fundraising) and joint priorities. We try to stay aware of the inherent power imbalance, as a funder: staying out of operational work, seeking feedback and keeping dialogue going about ways of working.

Closing well.  We plan to spend out and close in about 2030. We want to do this responsibly, recognising the implications for the field. We are consulting now on priorities like the balance between achieving what impact we can before we close and strengthening civil society organisations for the future.

Defence of democracy. We are talking to other funders about defending democracy in times of rising populism and extremism. Much more is needed to refresh and protect UK democracy across political parties, together. Tackling dirty money and corruption should be a top priority.

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Those are our reflections from the journey so far. It’s such a privilege to work with so many committed and talented people. And there is plenty more to keep learning. We’d love to hear any ideas for improving what we do or these lessons.

Photo by Sofía Marquet