Community Foundation achieves Quality Accreditation

7 Oct 2021

The fifth round of Quality Accreditation, launched in October 2020, is now complete. Over the past year, the Community Foundation has undergone an internal audit of its policies and procedures, compiled a submission of documents for external review and participated in interviews with an independent assessor.

The assessment, which was carried out by Ideas to Impact, evaluated our ongoing practices and development trajectory within Core Standards on governance, finance, philanthropy, grant-making, community participation and organisational development. The programme is unique to the UK Community Foundations (UKCF) network, providing the only accreditation process internationally that is tailored to and designed by community foundations.

The Quality Accreditation assessment has revealed that:

• The value of grant-making in the UKCF network more than doubled during the Covid-19 Pandemic
• Total community foundation endowment across the membership has grown by 30% since QA4 in 2017
• The highest average score QA5 was in the Core Standard on effective emergency response, reflecting the exceptional skill community foundations displayed in rapidly activating local philanthropy and delivering funding to support community-led responses to crisis.

“Being now in the fifth round of Quality Accreditation, we have seen community foundations throughout the UK raise their game and clearly demonstrate a high standard of governance, administration and financial diligence through external assessment across all ranges of team size and capacity”

John Gordon, Chair of the QA Commitee

“It is a mark of the commitment and diligence of our members that they have completed this rigorous accreditation process at the same time as distributing record-breaking levels of funding to their communities. The UKCF team is proud to support a network which reaches every part of the UK and whose good practice has been so clearly demonstrated throughout this process.”

Rosemary Macdonald, CEO of UKCF

“The team of assessors has been impressed by the creativity and tenacity of community foundations and their nuanced understanding of the needs of their communities and the commitment to their local areas.  This understanding and the ongoing relationships that foundations are able to build means that there is a reach into local communities that helps individuals and organisations from all sectors to work together in the places that it’s really needed.”

Becky Nixon, Director of Ideas to Impact

Quality Accreditation will last for three years until October 2024 and is an initiative designed to provide collective due diligence that confirms community foundations can deliver grants and programmes on a national level. It promotes excellent practice across the community foundation network to ensure that they can utilise their resources most effectively to listen, support and advocate for their communities.