Community foundations perform strongly in annual Foundation Practice Rating

The fourth annual assessment of charitable foundations by Foundation Practice Rating (FPR) has found that community foundations have continued to perform strongly overall and individually in the three categories under review: accountability, transparency and diversity.  

Each year, the FPR assesses publicly available information on a range of foundations, awarding each one an overall rating, and a category rating from A to D.   The aim is to provide a snapshot of foundation practices across the sector, and to encourage discussion and improvement.  

For the 2024/25 assessment, FPR looked at 100 UK charitable foundations of many sizes and types, including six community foundations in the UKCF network. 

The six selected community foundations were:

Community Foundation for Northern Ireland

Hertfordshire Community Foundation

Cambridgeshire Community Foundation

Cornwall Community Foundation

Community Foundation for Calderdale

Cheshire Community Foundation 

Outperforming the broader sector

The FPR confirmed in its report that ‘community foundations continue to outperform the broader sector, and by an appreciable margin.  By Year Three, there was enough data for the [FPR] research team to be confident that this is statistically robust, and the difference in scores in Year Four remains marked.’ 

Emma de Closset, Chief Executive at UK Community Foundations says, 

“We welcome the open and proactive work of the Foundations Practice Rating to hold foundations to account while supporting them to develop key areas of service and grant-making culture. I am delighted to see that the latest report highlights the strong performance of community foundations, relative to the broader sector, building on similar findings in recent years.”  

Danielle Walker Palmour, Director of Friends Provident Foundation says, 

“The intention of FPR is to make foundations aware of some of the things they’re doing or not doing, and which they could be doing.  Often, these things can go unnoticed because the people working in foundations are so fully concentrated on doing the best they can for their grantees.” 

Lead researcher, Caroline Fiennes, says 

“The feedback that we hear from foundations indicates that FPR continues to prompt foundations to improve, which is great.” 

Read the FPR’s full report here