Investments & Endowments
As a charity trustee, you’re in a unique position to make a meaningful impact through your investments, whether that’s driving financial growth or advancing your charity’s mission.
Our expert team helps you navigate the complexities of trustee duties and regulatory requirements, empowering you to seize emerging opportunities and make decisions that benefit your charity’s long-term success.
Charity investment decisions come with unique legal and regulatory complexities.
Trustees must ensure investments align with their charity’s purpose and navigate the challenges of managing permanent endowments while making the most of available charitable tax relief.
Our specialist charity investment and endowment lawyers provide expert guidance to trustees and charity finance teams, supporting them at every stage, from setting investment policies and strategies to assessing specific investment opportunities.
We support a diverse range of clients, from large grant-making foundations managing substantial portfolios to operating charities investing reserves or engaging in social and impact investment.
With the evolving landscape of charity investment law and an expanding range of opportunities, our sector-specific expertise ensures you can make informed, confident investment decisions with clarity and ease.
Our expertise
As specialists in charity investment and endowment law, we understand the challenges you face in navigating the complex legal landscape. With our extensive experience, we can help you meet the expectations of the Charity Commission and ensure compliance with charity law, particularly in areas like tax and investments.
We’ve also played an active role in shaping key legal developments, including providing technical support to the Law Commission on projects about Social Investment by Charities and Technical Issues in Charity Law. This involvement gives us valuable insights that we can share with you to enhance your decision-making.
Working alongside investment advisers and charity-specialist accountants, we can guide trustees through the process of appointing investment managers and finalising the terms of engagement. We're here to support you in making informed decisions and driving positive outcomes for your charity.
Our team advises on the following areas:
We assist trustees in crafting charity investment policies that align with their fiduciary duties and Charity Commission guidance. Our expertise ensures that policies incorporate non-financial considerations, such as excluding investments that conflict with a charity’s objectives or contribute to climate change. We also guide trustees on selecting investments that excel in ESG criteria. In collaboration with investment advisers, we help trustees review and update their investment policies and objectives effectively.
Increasingly charities are thinking about how they can deploy their investment assets to directly to advance their purposes. We support charities in deploying their investment assets, whether through large foundations with established social investment programmes or smaller charities entering the impact investment space. Our services include advising on socially responsible investment strategies, such as designating funds for social investment to achieve long-term financial sustainability, beyond traditional grant-making approaches.
Our comprehensive advice covers legal, regulatory, and tax considerations in charity investment matters. We guide charities on investment powers, duties, and tax implications of alternative investments, including FCA regulations and private benefit rules. With our specialist “investor services practice,” we also provide tailored support on US tax and corporate issues that are relevant to charity investors.
We specialise in assisting endowed charities to adopt a flexible "total return" investment and spending strategy from permanent charity endowment funds. Our expert guidance simplifies the technical rules, offering charities clear, bespoke advice, supported by detailed guidance notes and template documents, enabling them to manage endowment funds with greater flexibility and efficiency.
Our services help charities optimise the value of their endowments by facilitating access to funds through spending or borrowing in line with statutory requirements. We also assist in consolidating smaller funds into larger, more flexible ones, making management easier and enabling charities to utilise endowment assets more effectively for their mission.
The individuals are very attentive to our needs and provide a fast and effective service. They are quick to size up a problem and offer a number of solutions. They act with the client's best interests at heart. They go above and beyond expectations.
Our work highlights
Supporting a community foundation with legal, tax, and FCA regulatory considerations in the establishment of a new programme of repayable grants as social investments.
Advising a large charitable foundation with an endowment worth nearly £1 billion on its investment powers, in the context of a proposal to invest permanent endowment funds on a pooled basis alongside expendable funds. This advice is part of the broader "investor services" we provide to this client.
Collaborating with the finance team of an arts charity on a major project to restructure approximately 400 small endowment funds, securing approval from the Charity Commission to maximise impact and streamline administration in preparation for the adoption of a total return investment strategy.
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