2020 Annual Report
The Farrar Foundation was established in August 2011 with the aim to provide young people with opportunities and a way into Education, Research, the Arts and Sport. As we enter our tenth year, we have been able to directly support 155 Farrar Foundation Fellows from Viet Nam, Nepal, UK and in partnership with the Africa Research Excellence Fund to support 123 additional Fellowships in twenty-three countries in Africa.
2020 has inevitably been a year dominated by COVID19. A year like no other. But as so often in a crisis the ingenuity of people is a source of inspiration. The Farrar Foundation updated our governance through the Charity Commission, ensured all our financial statements are all in order and consolidated our asset base and income. The foundation is in a strong financial position with an asset base on 31 January 2021 of £36,544 (31 January 2020 ~£32,700) and a current annual income of approximately £10,500. The awards made each year are funded through this income. The asset base remains invested for long term growth.
In 2020 we bid farewell to two founding Trustees of the Farrar Foundation, Cathy Rustom and Tony Crawford. Cathy and Tony have been absolute stalwarts throughout the foundation’s existence, providing insights, challenge, unselfish and gracious support. We could not have set up or delivered our success over the last decade without both Cathy and Tony’s wonderful contributions. We are extremely grateful. We also welcomed three new Trustees Elena Perticucci, Danil Ukhorskiy and Sofya Sudets who will join Sam Farrar, John Hankin and Jeremy Farrar as the new Trustee Board. We have modernised our governance statutes with the Charity Commission, renewed our commitment to diversity and inclusion in all we do, ensured all financial reports are complete and on schedule and in 2021 we will update the foundation’s web site and this newsletter. The foundation spends approximately 0.6% of its annual budget on running the organisation (maintenance of the CAF Bank Currentaccount), 99.4% of all other funds are made available to our partners for theirinspiring work.
The Foundation has now and will in future focus on a small number of established partnerships and will make more substantial awards for three years to allow long term planning by our partners and the foundation and as a result wehope achieve greater impact. In 2020 we made multi-year awards to the Quy Vuot Kho Foundation in Viet Nam, the Mountain Medicine Society of Nepal, the Birat Nepal Medical Trust, the Swasthya Foundation of Nepal and the Africa Research Excellence Fund. These three-year awards have refocussed our work to provide opportunities and a way into education, research, the arts or sport for young people. We are particularly committed to opportunities for a diverse and inclusive community and will report every year on issues of diversity, inclusion and culture in all our work and that of our partners. We are delighted to report that over the first ten years over fifty percent of all awards are to women, in Asia, Africa and the UK.
