Update on AB Charitable Trust’s strategic review

As some of you will know, AB Charitable Trust (ABCT) is mid-way through a strategic review. We began this process in April this year and since then have been speaking to partners and sector organisations across all four nations. We hope to have a new strategy in place by May 2027. Many may not have realized we are undertaking this review – and that is a good thing. We committed at the beginning of this process not to pause our grant making and have been working on this process while continuing our day to day operations.

I know the news of another funder undertaking a strategy review will be unsettling for the partners we work with and the sectors we support. Fears of shifting priorities has real-world consequences for organisations who rely on Trust and Foundation income to pay staff, cover overheads and deliver vital services. For this reason I wanted to provide some reassurance about the scope of our review and to reaffirm our commitment to our overarching mission and the issues we currently work on.

Our overall mission broadly remains the same: the promotion of human dignity and the defence of human rights, with a particular focus on the most marginalised and excluded people. We have recently agreed to incorporate democracy in our mission, recognizing the interrelationship of democracy, rule of law and human rights with a commitment to defend them all accordingly.

Our new strategy will build on what we have learned from implementing our existing strategy (and what we have heard is important from our funded partners): this includes our ongoing commitment to open and trusting grant giving – implemented via core, unrestricted, and multi-year grants, straight-forward application and reporting processes, and a relational and approachable style of grant-management; prioritising leadership and organisations which combine lived, learned and practice experience; and funding a range of approaches that both address immediate harms of the systems we focus on alongside longer-term work that seeks to address injustice at a structural level.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made here:

• In 2025-26 91% of our grants were multi-year grants, compared with 25% in 2021-22. Open Programme grants are now four years as standard, and Anchor grants are up to seven years in length.
• Our average size of grant in the Open Programme has grown from £18,200 per annum in 2021-22 to £26,216 per annum in 2025-26.
• The majority of our grants (71%) continues to be unrestricted, and approx. a third of our grants supports organisations which are led by the communities they are working with, a rate that has stayed consistent over recent years.
• Approx. 51% of recent grants are primarily focused on influencing the systems which cause harm, with 10% of our grants supporting strategic litigation to bring about change. 80% of recent grants have an aspect of their work which directly supports individuals – including 49% who do this through the delivery of advice.

However, the number of applications we receive continues to increase year on year, and our declination rate has grown in tandem - from 71% in 2021-22 to 82% in 2025-26.

We are not moving away from our four thematic priority areas: we will continue to focus our funding in the areas of access to justice; work in the criminal legal system; work on human rights; and support for migrants and refugees. The focus of our strategy review has been centred on the most meaningful contribution ABCT can make in these areas – for example where we place emphasis (in terms of issues and approaches), recognizing our particular interest in the role the law can play to address inequities and injustice. We hope to be more explicit about our strategic aims in each area to ensure we do not waste time of applicants whose work falls outside these areas (and as a result reduce the declination rate).

However, we are moving away from cyclical big strategic reviews every 3-5 years: Our commitment to human rights and the issues we work on are very much part of ABCT’s DNA, so it does not make sense for us to undertake a big set-piece strategic review every few years which we know is unsettling for our partners. Our new strategic framework will provide the architecture for our work over the long term – and we will adopt a learning approach where we regularly consider the context for our work and reflect on what we have learnt through our partners, incorporating this learning into our ongoing decision making. We will aim to be better at sharing our learning with partners.

Next steps: We will present a first draft of our strategy with our trustees in autumn and are aiming for a final version to be agreed in January next year. Our focus will then be on implementing our new strategy into our communications, funding guidelines and processes ahead of formally implementing the new strategy in May 2027. I will share a further update with you on our refined direction of travel and emerging themes in November. In the meantime, if your grant is coming to an end - nothing has changed. Please follow our usual grant application process and do reach out to your grant manager if you have any questions.

Alex Sutton, ABCT Director