About the Barrow Cadbury Trust and the Barrow Cadbury Fund
Our Vision and Mission
The Trust’s vision is of a just and peaceful society which recognises the equal value of all people.
The Trust’s mission is to use all of our assets, especially our money, to work with others to bring about structural change for a more just and equal society.
Overview
The Barrow Cadbury Trust is an endowed foundation. We seek to promote structural and systemic change by supporting others whilst also running campaigns, carrying out research and policy initiatives. We work primarily in policy, advocacy, campaigning and public discourse. We collaborate with those working in our fields of interest.
The Trust has a Quaker heritage and a 100+ year commitment to social action. This means tackling injustice by a variety of means. We try to focus on the lived experience of people at the sharp end of injustice and inequality to help devise new solutions to age-old problems and vested interests. We see ourselves as part of civil society and seek to use all of the assets we have to effect change.
Our interest is in tackling the root causes of injustice, and so our focus is on catalysing long-term change. As such, we don’t fund a great deal by way of frontline community services (there are folk with much deeper pockets able to do this at larger scale). Those services are vital of course, but out of our scope by and large.
Changing deep-rooted social problems and inequity is challenging, painstaking, and takes committed focus over a sustained period of time. To that end we work in collaboration and with long-term funding or partnerships (10 years plus) on complex problems, endeavouring to change the structures and the policy environment that perpetuates injustice. The Director of Programmes and Learning will play a critical role in helping the Trust to continue to innovate and learn, so that we are regularly reflecting upon our impact and how to best position ourselves in wider civil society to achieve our mission.
Our Programmes and Campaigns
Our work is focused on three strategic themes:
Criminal Justice – Which aims to strengthen the evidence base for structural and practical change for young adults to support their rehabilitation and desistance from crime.
Migration – Which aims to promote an immigration system that is fair to both migrants and established residents. We also seek to promote a policy and public debate on migration based on shared values as well as evidence.
Economic Justice – A place-based programme working with partners in Birmingham with the aim of supporting and being involved in influencing and change-making activities.
Our work includes collaborative initiatives deploying external finance which are managed by us, or in partnership. Recent examples include:
Fair by Design – A movement aiming to tackle the poverty premium, dedicated to reshaping essential services, so they don’t cost more for low income consumers.
The Connect Fund – A £6 million fund managed by Barrow Cadbury Trust between 2017 and 2024 in partnership with Access to strengthen the infrastructure for social investment in England to better meet the needs of charities and social enterprises.
Our Financial Resources
Money is a highly prized and useful enabler, but it is not the only tool in our kit. We are very active shareholders, promoting justice at company board level. We have a social investment portfolio and are becoming more and more responsible in our choices of commercial stocks and shares, with people and planet in mind.
Find out more about our responsible investments here.
Our Values
- Voice: The Trust is committed to ‘speaking truth to power’ by enabling the unfiltered voices of people’s real lived experience to influence those in power.
- Collaboration: Recognising that we can achieve little on our own, the Trust works in partnership with others to build movements for change.
- Engagement: The Trust aims to use the power that having independent money endowment gives us and to work with all our partners respectfully in the interests of our shared goals.
- Independence: The Trust sees a strong civil society, of which we are a part and which we will nurture, as a key mechanism for holding the powerful to account.
- Learning: The Trust seeks to learn from all the work we undertake and support and to share that learning widely to increase impact.
- Innovation and Evidence: The Trust will work over a sustained periods of time to find and build an evidence base for new solutions to old problems.
- Quaker values: The Trust respects its historical roots in Birmingham and in Quaker values, although now embracing all faiths and none.
Our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion journey
The Trust has a long history of work in racial and gender justice going back many decades. A significant proportion of our time and financial resource is directed to these issues, along with support for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) infrastructure organisations. Since the development of a racial justice auditing tool (2019) data shows over 33% of our funding is going into racial justice work.
Our model of working is to be catalytic and pursue long-term structural changes to the root causes of inequity. To that end we have also proactively worked to raise the profile of DEI issues and been a party to major initiatives to tackle them, in criminal justice, migration justice and economic justice in particular.
We have a relatively diverse staff team and DEI is woven through all of our work. Yet, the board and staff team are keen to pursue an ambitious agenda on this topic over the coming years.
Read more about our DEI journey and commitments here.
Our People
Our Trustees
The Board of Trustees are a mix of descendants of Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury and non-family members. The Board is engaged and committed and the trustees work hard to ensure that the governance underpins our work in a strategic, constructive and supportive way. Our Trustees come from a broad range of backgrounds: from academia and teaching to charities and think tanks, journalism, finance and policy and decision making. Together they bring a rich tapestry of knowledge, skills and experience.
You can find out more about our trustees here.
Our Team
There are currently 17 staff members at the Trust, all of whom are actively involved in delivering our mission and vision. They are passionate and committed and achieve a huge amount of progress and successes every year. We have a diverse team of staff, but we know we can’t be complacent, and we have an ongoing commitment to consciously enabling and embedding EDI into all of our employment practices.