Tudor Trust Statement: 

In 2022, the Board of family trustees started a challenging widely-publicised process of organisational change and subsequently agreed to centre racial justice to tackle all forms of injustice and achieve a fairer society for all. 

The trustees, including family members, some of whom departed their roles three years ago, with the final family trustee concluding their role in 2024, stepped down amicably and approved the appointment of the new board.

They did not step down as a result of a “race review”, and there is no executive director in place.

They are confident in Tudor's renewed vision and we all feel it’s a loss when efforts to address these issues are shut down before they even begin. It helps no one and only fuels division.

The Tudor Trust is excited to announce its first funding round following a major transformation of the organisation. As part of its new Change We Seek strategy Tudor is focusing on providing larger, but fewer, longer-term grants to organisations and leaders tackling social injustice through a racial injustice lens.

In this first round, Tudor made a total of £10 million in grants to 18 groups across the UK committed to advancing racial justice and driving meaningful systemic change. You can read more in the press release.

Written by Raji Hunjan, CEO

As the year draws to a close, our final blog of 2024 is a reflection on the past year at Tudor, as well as a chance to tell you about an exciting new job vacancy. It is also our opportunity to thank all our supporters as we continue on our transformation journey.

Head of Programmes new job alert!

For anyone thinking about a new role in 2025, we encourage you to consider the Head of Programmes role, newly designed to oversee our ambitious grant-making. We are genuinely open-minded about the right candidate and are looking for someone who is collaborative in their leadership style and shares our commitment to systems thinking and learning.

Staying Brave report

We are grateful to Stephen Bediako, Louise Mousseau and Fancy Sinantha for their work in helping us to reimagine what a total asset approach could be for Tudor in the context of a transformation. The report is an exploration of the themes that influenced our starting point, including our approach to governance, people practices, our partnerships and grant-making, as well as our investments.

Our understanding of racial justice

Earlier in the year, we published a blog that gave an insight into our understanding of racial justice in the context of our grant-making. Written originally as a reflection after the summer riots in the UK, it gives context to our vision of a world as it should be – one that is just and equitable, and where there are enough resources for everyone.

Announcing Derek Bardowell

October 2024 saw the departure of our long-standing Chair, Matt Dunwell and the appointment of Derek Bardowell as our new Chair. We are very excited about Derek’s leadership and the knowledge he brings to Tudor.

Celebrating our people

I would personally like to take a moment to acknowledge the team we are building here at Tudor and the commitment they are showing to deep learning and shifting the traditional power dynamics between funders and grantees. Our programmatic and operational staff are Eryl Foulkes, Anna Cooper, Mariam Radi, Daniel Seifu, Jemmar Samuels and Rosie Hodsdon. Most recently we welcomed Tim Nicholls as our new Head of Finance. Priya Cinar has been with us for the whole year on secondment, and has been phenomenal in developing our People and recruitment practices. Nina Kowalska has worked with us over the year as a consultant, providing us with additional communications and leadership capacity. In addition, we are joined by Jonny Matfin as our very own resident historian who is working on a retrospective look at Tudor’s history. I am humbled and grateful for all I have learned from each and every one of our team.

Wishing you all a joyful festive season and restful end to the year.

The Tudor Trust is pleased to announce that Derek Bardowell has officially assumed his role as Chair of the Board of Trustees. Bardowell brings with him two decades of experience as a respected leader in the charity, philanthropy, racial and social justice sectors, marking an exciting new chapter for the Trust as it shifts towards building community power in the UK.

Appointed to the Board in February 2024, Bardowell has served as the Chair Designate since then. Now formally leading a new Board, he brings extensive expertise and a profound dedication to community-led philanthropy. Bardowell has previously held trustee roles with organisations including Sir Lewis Hamilton’s charity Mission 44 and the Thirty Percy Foundation. From 2009 to 2019, he managed portfolios distributing over £150 million in grants to support critical causes across 34 countries.

Tudor Trust CEO Raji Hunjan said: “Derek is one of the most respected leaders in the racial and social justice sector. His nearly two decades of work have given him strong insights and he has all the credentials to do a fantastic job in supporting the organisation as we work towards our new strategy.”

Bardowell said: “I’m delighted to take on this role and am deeply honoured by the faith shown in my leadership by the previous Board. I look forward to guiding the vision, alongside the Board and staff, and championing racial and social justice alongside other people and organisations already doing great work in this area.”

Bardowell succeeds Matt Dunwell, Tudor’s long standing Chair. In recent years, the Tudor family Board has made a commitment to a strategic approach centred on racial and social justice and has evolved to be governed by a more diverse group of trustees with a range of relevant experience.

It paused taking on new grant applications as it underwent a process of internal transformation. In the financial year 2022/2023 Tudor committed more than £20m in grants and remained actively engaged with its current grant partners.

Commenting on the transition, Dunwell said: “Derek’s track record speaks for itself, and I have no doubt he will excel in leading the Board as it embraces this exciting new phase.”

Hunjan also expressed her gratitude to Dunwell and the family trustees. She said: “We extend our heartfelt thanks to Matt and our family trustees for their commitment over many years. We’re excited to now return to the work that Tudor does best - transforming lives through positive grant-making. This process is set to begin imminently.”

Tudor expects to start awarding grants again in the new year once its strategic review is complete.

Tudor's transformation is continuing, and we have recently shared our perspectives on applying racial justice to systems thinking and embedding systems thinking into strategy. In each of these, we discuss how the changes we are making encompass every facet of our organisation. While much of the focus has been on our external-facing work, and particularly our grant-making, this has also been underpinned by a transformation of our internal systems, including our staffing structure, hiring processes, team support, and organisational values.

As we continue our journey, we are now looking for a new Head of People and Culture to join our team.

This is a role which will continue the work of our current Interim Head of People and Culture, helping to embed Tudor’s values and behaviours into every aspect of the organisation: collaboration, integrity, bravery, creativity, inquisitiveness, humility, and compassion. They will ensure that Tudor's culture is one which centres Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles, ensuring Tudor remains an inclusive, high-performing environment where people feel valued and empowered.

We are excited about the next steps of our journey, and invite you to join us as we build on the foundations that we have created as a team and an organisation. We would also be very grateful if you could forward this call to your networks.

To find out more about the role and how to apply please click here.

The bridging between Tudor’s past and future continues - Raji Hunjan, CEO

As we reach the halfway mark in the year, this feels like a good moment to update our friends, stakeholders and partners. If you follow our work, you will see that we have a made a number of changes to our website, giving a clearer sense of the direction of travel.

The last few months have focused on recruitment of staff and trustees, as well as inducting those who are new to Tudor. In addition to this, we are continuing to work on strategy and our plans to make grants in the Autumn.

We were delighted to welcome Ozzie Clarke-Binns and Georgina Wilson this month to the Board of Trustees.

A list of all our current trustees can be found here.

On the staff side, the team is growing. In June we welcomed Jemmar Samuels, Mariam Radi and Daniel Seifu as Programme Officers, along with Rosie Hodsdon as our EA & Operations Manager. We will soon be joined by a Social Historian, who will work alongside us to explore our past as we continue our transformational journey and look towards our future.

We are currently recruiting for a Head of Finance and Operations. This role will involve the supervision and management of Tudor’s finances, including budgeting, reporting, financial planning, risk management and liaising with the team and external partners. We would be very grateful if you could forward this call to your networks.

You can find further details about the Head of Finance and Operations role here.

As we develop our strategic plans, we are conscious that we want to make new grants alongside our current grant commitments. Our new team of staff and trustees gathered together for the first time earlier this month, where we continued to develop our learning and approach to our work, including our values, behaviours and strategic learning questions. Over the coming weeks, our Programme Team will be beginning to develop our new grants strategy, as we aim to begin making grants towards the end of the year.

Our team are excited about our transformational journey, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months.

In the meantime, I would like to wish you all a summer full of peace and rest.

Please look at our new job posts as we continue our organisational transformation.

There is so much happening at the Tudor Trust as we continue the work to build a new strategy and plan our new approach to our grant-making in line with this.

We are excited about the new posts we are developing and hope we can attract candidates with a wide range of skills and experiences. This blog is to give you more of an insight into what we are looking for as we build our team, and to hopefully tempt you to apply.

At Tudor, we are currently a small team, and by the end of 2024, we expect to have grown to around 12 to 14 staff. To achieve the change we are working towards whilst also growing the team, we are committed to working with care and collaboratively so that we can maintain momentum and a level of ambition. All our new posts are designed with iteration, learning and reflection at their core to reflect how we are all aspiring to work.

In our grant-making, we want to engage with wider stakeholders to build networks and create new approaches to deeper systemic change. We want to consider how we maximise on our commitment to building strong relationships with our grantees. This means revisiting our grant-making processes to reduce bureaucracy in the application process, to gather data and evidence based on learning, and to build longer-term relationships to create new networks and ecosystems of change.

If we are serious about working in partnership and being more intentional about our focus on racial, social and economic justice, then how we build our teams must reflect this. We are therefore very open to hearing from people who have not worked in grant-making previously. We want to draw upon the skills and experiences of people who have worked in the wider social, racial and economic justice sector.

An important part of Tudor’s transformation is our organisational culture and the redevelopment of our internal people policies and practices. We have started to develop our principles which we will put into action through our behaviours and have identified the following as our starting point:

• Inquiring: Fostering an environment of inquiry through curiosity, embracing new perspectives, engaging in ongoing exploration, and committing to continuous learning.
• Collaboration: Working collaboratively with colleagues, grantees and trustees and actively communicate ideas, offer support, and participate in collective decision-making to achieve shared goals.
• Transparency: Maintaining transparency through honest communication, open sharing of information and decisions, taking accountability for actions, and ensuring clarity in all interactions.
• Inclusive: Creating an inclusive workplace environment by respect for diversity, promoting equity and belonging and demonstration of empathy towards others' experiences and perspectives.
• Justice: Ensuring justice through fairness, equity, and impartiality in all aspects of society, ensuring that individuals receive what they are due and that their rights are respected and protected.
• Creativity: Encouraging creativity, coming up with new and unique ideas or ways of doing things by using your imagination and thinking in different ways.

Currently we have job vacancies for a Programme Officer and for an Executive Assistant & Operations Manager.

If you feel you have the right skills and approach to bring to these roles, we really do look forward to hearing from you. We are expecting further opportunities to become available at trustee, advisor and staff level, so please do stay in touch by signing up to our newsletter.

Recent media coverage has sought to cast our well-publicised change agenda in the context of contemporary public debate.

No trustees have been dismissed. The decision for the present board to step down comes entirely from the existing trustees and is an exciting opportunity for a new group of trustees to take on the work that the current Board has begun. This is a carefully managed period of change and it is of importance to us that the Trust continues to serve communities most in need of its funding going forward.

The Tudor Trust continues to have strong funding relationships with its existing grant holders and has funding commitments to around 650 organisations across the country. This amounts to around £20m going to good causes every year. These relationships will continue until such time that we are ready to launch a new funding strategy.

We welcome Raji Hunjan to the Tudor Trust as our Interim Director.  Raji comes to Tudor with a track record of leadership roles both in philanthropy and the wider charity sector.  Drawing on her blended experience of working in grant making and in the field has always been important to Raji, and as a former Tudor grant holder, there is much expertise and knowledge she can bring to our work.

Raji has a particular passion for smaller organisations and building up the power and resources of grass roots communities. She has overseen change strategies in charities such as North Kensington Law Centre and Z2K, and most recently implemented a new grant making strategy at programmatic level in a large global foundation. At the heart of all Raji’s work is a commitment to racial and social justice and achieving long term change.

Christopher Graves has announced his retirement as Director of the Tudor Trust after 38 years.

Matt Dunwell, Chair of the trustees, says ‘Christopher has made a significant contribution to Tudor and to the voluntary sector over nearly four decades. He has kept a relatively low profile in the sector but has quietly influenced the way Foundations relate to their grantees through developing Tudor’s own unique way of working.’

Christopher will be leaving the Trust at the end of April. Christopher said ‘What we have achieved at Tudor over the years has been remarkable and owes much to dedicated trustees and staff putting the needs of applicants first. I really believe Tudor has an exciting future ahead of it with new people developing new avenues for Tudor to explore.’