The Robertson Trust’s vision is a fair and compassionate Scotland where everyone is valued and able to flourish.
In 2020, we launched a 10-year strategy to reduce the impacts of poverty and trauma – two of the most significant challenges faced in Scotland today – and to build long-term solutions by funding, supporting, and influencing change that lasts. To do this, we must invest our resources in a way that not only delivers direct impact in the here-and-now but also works upstream to prevent hardship and harm.
As we deliver our strategy, we think we have a responsibility to do more than just alleviate the worst impacts of poverty and trauma. We can use our assets, our independence, and our voice to help shift the dial towards prevention and lasting social change. This is what drives our work and why we have recently refined our mission statement:
Our mission is to prevent and reduce poverty and trauma in Scotland, by funding, supporting, and influencing solutions to drive social change.
We recently marked our 60th Anniversary since being established by the three Robertson sisters, pioneering women of business and philanthropy. You can read our story and watch the film marking this Anniversary.
Our latest Impact Report can be viewed here – and we invite you to take a look at some examples of the valuable work we have funded recently including North Edinburgh Support Service Consortium (NESSie) and Serving the Future project, a research collaboration between Fraser of Allander Institute and the Poverty Alliance which we are supporting through Partners in Change.
The Trust is the majority shareholder of The Edrington Group. Our income flows from a dividend on the company’s operating profits and a significant set of pooled investments. This enables us to commit an average of £25M charitable expenditure per year by 2025. A new Social Impact Investment (SII) plan has recently been approved to bring a further set of tools and resources into play to help achieve our mission. The SII plan will enable the Trust to commit up to £20M further for this purpose.
Our values of Ambition, Integrity, Connection and Equity [new Value proposed in March 2024] are the compass points we use to shape our contribution around four primary themes:
- Financial Security,
- Work Pathways,
- Education Pathways,
- Emotional Wellbeing & Relationships.
We are building our know-how on issues of power and justice across our work. We seek to build solutions that meet two cross-cutting objectives on climate change and our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) approach which we call EDPR (Equity, Diversity, Participation and Rights), especially advancing racial justice. We have committed to a whole organisational approach to active learning on anti-racism and allyship, becoming trauma-informed and advancing meaningful participation of people with lived experience.