North West London Community Foundation

It’s Creation

Since the introduction of Community Foundations to the UK in the mid-1980’s, the role of foundations in London has always presented difficulties. This occurs for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the lack of a collective community identity and the social, political and ethnic diversity that exists throughout the capital. Historically, the movement in London began to emerge through the creation of foundations based on Borough boundaries such as Harrow, Redbridge, Ealing and Richmond. However, each of these foundations struggled to attract endowment funders and only remained in business as sources of flow-through money for their respective communities.

The decision by ACTAF (the Association of Community Trusts and Foundations) the then national organisation for the community foundation movement which was subsequently renamed CFN (the Community Foundation Network), to sponsor a project to establish an umbrella foundation in London resulted in the emergence of a model for London that advocated a fund distribution arrangement organised around a small number of multi-borough foundations which would mitigate the unacceptably high operating costs of separate foundations in each of the 32 London Boroughs. Although the project failed to produce a viable scheme for the launch of a Community Foundation for London, the thinking and discussion that occurred within the movement at that time has strongly influenced progress subsequently.

In 1999 the Trustees of Harrow Community Trust commissioned a study of the needs within North West London which embraced the communities in the boroughs of Brent, Ealing, Harrow and Hillingdon. This study identified a number of common community interests across the territory that gave credence to the concept of a foundation for North West London and underpinned the initiative that followed in 2001 to form the North West London Community Foundation.

Malcolm Churchill 2005