Our four grant-making foundations have long been interested in supporting later life. Like many, we have generally favoured funding projects with direct, tangible benefits for users. We have funded many developments that deserve celebration and have worked with many inspiring individuals who are responding creatively to the needs and desires of the older population.
However, we were receiving too many of the same types of applications from the same organisations, which suggested civil society was being slow to respond to the changing needs of our ageing population. We struggled to identify many leaders who were ambitious for improving later life. The voices of a diverse cross-section of older people was even harder to find. There appeared to be some lack of forward thinking and ambition, which was limiting, and in stark contrast to other areas of civil society.
We have established a collaboration between our four foundations and Social Finance, with whom we are in the early stages of developing two concepts that we hope have potential to be scalable and sustainable ways of improving quality of life for older people. Together, we wish to reinvigorate a sense of possibility and ambition for new ways to support older people and the ageing process, and to invite other funders to join us on this journey.
Being part of this process has challenged us to think about how and when we fund if we wish to bring about systemic change; it has reminded us of the value of being opportunistic and linking our funding to the wider policy context.