30 Years of Community Giving: A Time of Growth
As we continue reflecting on the past 30 years, the next chapter in our story was one of growth.
To mark our 30th anniversary, we recently wrote about where our story began, three decades ago.
Early on in our journey, demand for community funding became clearer, and so too did the need for an organisation that could support grassroots groups who often had limited time, resources or fundraising expertise. So we began to expand, bringing in more staff, raising independent funds for distribution and building links with the wider network of community foundations across the UK.
In 1998 the organisation also adopted a new name, the Scottish Community Foundation, a name that better reflected our national role supporting communities across Scotland.
Building invested philanthropic funds remained at the heart of our mission and alongside this, the Caledonian Challenge continued to thrive, at its peak raising up to £1 million each year. Its success even inspired a second fundraising event, the Loch Ness Marathon, further boosting our ability to support communities.
As the organisation expanded, we secured important external investment to strengthen our team and grow endowment funds. Support from partners including Atlantic Philanthropies, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Scottish Government helped build our capacity and long-term sustainability. At the same time, relationships with philanthropic individuals, families and professional advisers grew, with more donors choosing Foundation Scotland as a flexible and effective way to support charitable causes.
Grantmaking programmes also diversified. Funds were delivered for partners including William Grant & Sons, the Women’s Fund for Scotland, the Volant Charitable Trust, and companies such as Asda, ScotRail, Johnson & Johnson, the Oak Foundation and Comic Relief.
We also delivered a community capacity-building programme funded by the National Lottery. This approach brought community residents and local representatives together to shape a shared vision for funding in their neighbourhoods, marking the start of a stronger focus on involving people with lived experience in designing and deciding funding programmes.
This period also saw the emergence of place-based funding, bringing communities together to help shape funding priorities and decisions for their own areas, an approach that continues to influence our work today.
The model was soon extended to community benefit funds linked to wind farms and other energy developments, and we developed strong expertise in this field, becoming a trusted partner for both companies and communities, managing and supporting these funds.
Together, these developments significantly increased the scale of our work. From small grants of around £250 to awards of tens of thousands of pounds, by 2009 the Scottish Community Foundation had distributed over £20 million in grants and was soon distributing more than 3,000 grants each year to a wide range of community organisations and projects the length and breadth of Scotland.
As we neared the halfway point of our journey so far, other changes were afoot, including another – and final – name change. But that’s for the next chapter…