Our transformation
2024 was a significant year for Tudor, as we bridged away from a model of grant-making based on family-led decisions and governance to one where grants would be developed and approved by staff with lived and learned experience of the sector. As the family-led Board started to step back, recruitment of new trustees was implemented with the intention of moving forward with an oversight model of governance. In line with Charity Commission guidance, the family-led board was clear that a diverse and inclusive board of trustees was better suited to an oversight model to ensure long-term resilience and sustainability.
The transformation was designed to enact the previous family-led board’s commitment to moving Tudor to a new focus on racial justice. The previous board and staff had gone through a period of learning about anti-racism and what it would take to become an anti-racist organisation.
In the period leading up to these changes, Tudor's grant funding to new organisations was put on pause to make space to rethink Tudor's approach to social change, while continuing to work with and support our existing grant-holders.
Change We Seek strategy
In 2024, we embedded this commitment into our Change We Seek strategy, with four underpinning themes:
- Racial justice: as a vision for a world that moves beyond racism and racial inequities to one where inclusive communities thrive in all our systems and structures.
- Systems thinking: as a way of building a learning and iterative approach that enables us to change and modify our work as we learn.
- Total asset approach: as a way of understanding not just how our investments can align to our mission, but also our people practices and our relationships with our stakeholders.
- Shared behaviours: as a way of living our values and commitment to Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.
Governance & Culture
So that we could fully build a new Tudor in line with our four underpinning themes, we continued our pause of new grant-making to ensure that we responsibly laid the foundations in line with our regulatory duties, alongside the level of our ambition.
This also allowed for a responsible handover between the outgoing Chair, Matt Dunwell, and the incoming Chair, Derek Bardowell. Matt oversaw the transformation until his resignation in October 2024, working with Derek to support the new Board of Trustees to establish their governance approach.
As we established our new governance structure, developing robust policies and processes to underpin this, we also took time to design our new approach to People and Culture. This included the recruitment practices that were used to design our job descriptions and build our new staff team. The staff, with trustees, began by building ways of working that would underpin a culture of collaborative working, and developing a strategic approach that would enable Tudor to apply a robust model of grant-making based on the principles of the Change We Seek strategy.
The transformational work that was undertaken by staff and trustees was made possible with the invaluable support given by a set of consultants who generously worked alongside us, problem solving, challenging and supporting us as we worked through our ambition to become a more inclusive and brave organisation.
Our thanks
Heartfelt thanks go to Nina Kowalska and Priya Cinar who both embedded themselves into the organisation and undertook the responsibilities of a Senior Leadership Team. Nina played a key role in working alongside the CEO on strategy, communications and governance. Priya worked collaboratively across all teams to develop a brand new approach to People and Culture, as well as operational work such as overseeing the office refurbishment so that our working environment is more conducive to collaboration.
High-level governance and people policies were developed with the respective expertise of Alex Cole-Hamilton and Vanessa Johnson Burgess.
Alex’s approach to building governance is rooted in power and integrity, supporting trustees to understand their oversight role in all aspects of an organisation’s strategic and operational work. She mapped back our ambitions to the requirements of all regulatory frameworks, including the Charity Commission and GDPR. To learn more about Alex’s work click here.
Vanessa has an unwavering commitment to anti-racist, radical HR. Her strategic and coaching approach helped us to fully apply JEDIB practices to our operations, whilst also mapping this back to employment law and good practice. To learn more about Vanessa’s work go here.
Strategy in relation to all our programmatic work was supported by Stephen Bediako, Fancy Sinantha and Louise Mousseau. This led to the Staying Brave report.
Helen Sanson provided facilitation and coaching to help us move from understanding systems change as theory to applying systems thinking to all our grant-making and learning. To find out more about Helen's work click here.
There are many more stakeholders who contributed and offered their support.
Together we all worked to be the Change We Seek.