A new initiative has launched with the aim of using £50m of dormant assets to help create the UK’s first endowment fund for women’s charities.
The Women’s Forever Fund launched in the House of Lords yesterday and is being supported by the Women’s Resource Centre, which represents over 4,000 members and connects with approximately 20,000 women’s organisations nationwide.
Speaking at the launch, Women’s Resource Centre chief executive Vivienne Hayes said that “social justice work, and investment into it, has been in through unprecedented turmoil” in recent years, with women’s charities in particular “still at the end of the queue when it comes to charitable funds”.
Citing statistics from 2021 which showed that women’s charities received less than 2% of charitable grants, Hayes said that “persistent underinvestment into our sector is leading to the closure of expert organisations who have developed programmes to support women over decades, doing work that nobody else does”.
£50m sought from government
The fund is currently seeking an initial contribution of £50m from the government, drawn from the Dormant Assets Scheme, which corporate partners and philanthropists have indicated that they will match-fund.
After the initial contributions are made, the Women’s Resource Centre said it is seeking a total of £350m from government, corporates and philanthropists to be ethically invested over the next six years, with a return of over £20m for grantmaking over this period.
Last year, the government announced that £1bn of dormant assets had been donated to charities around the UK via the National Lottery Community Fund, with plans to unlock a further £240m from the scheme.
Hayes said yesterday that “women must be included in government plans for who benefits from this public money”.
She added that the Women’s Forever Fund would unlock long-term, “stable, future-facing” funds for women’s organisations that will enable them to plan better for the future.
