Welcome to the Freshwater Foundation. We are a charity aiming to support small voluntary and community organisations in Ealing, Hounslow and Hillingdon with grants for small-scale projects, infrastructure spending and any other work considered charitable in law.

But making a charity or community group work is about far more than money, so we also go far beyond simply financially supporting charities and use our experience and expertise to provide a range of other services vital to the growth and success of voluntary groups. These include:

• Training and advice in the managerial, governance and fundraising aspects of a small charity’s work, from the basics to complex business planning.
• Giving hands-on support to people who want to start up their own groups, but feel they lack the experience and knowledge to do so. Taking them step-by-step through the process, we show them that as long as they bring the commitment and vision, we can give them the tools and confidence to achieve their goals.
• Setting up forums where charities, community groups and other interested parties can reach out and support each other, discuss topics of common interest and come together to influence policy in the areas where they work.
• Doing research into important aspects of the small charitable sector so as to provide accessible briefings and discussion documents.

(See the Advice and Training page for more details.)

We come to these services with a strong grounding in all these areas, having a large store of managerial, public service and academic experience at our backs.

We’ve now complemented this background knowledge with a detailed insight into the local charity and community sector gained from our extensive grant-making and support activities; we’ve now funded around 170 groups over the past 8 years, supported many of them through difficulties and periods of change, and helped around 60 new groups start up. We have now also:

• Partnered with Ealing and Hounslow councils on many of their voluntary sector initiatives.
• Created a Networking & Cooperation Directory to facilitate partnership working amongst the groups we’ve supported.
• Organised events to bring parties from the voluntary sector, local communities, expert bodies and local councils to discuss key policy issues and to push them up the local political agenda.

All this means that we can now combine an impressive array of theoretical, practical and locally relevant knowledge to provide services that are authoritative, detailed and relevant.

This all aims to help make voluntary and community groups more effective, to give them an ever-greater presence in public life and to encourage them as an important way in which people can engage in community life. We very much see this as a joint effort; between the groups that we help and between ourselves and these groups, with you learning from our expertise and with us learning from you – your experience and your priorities, what can feasibly be done and what can reasonably be aspired to.

Behind all of this lies an idealistic belief that thriving voluntary and community groups are essential to a healthy and flourishing national public life. If this idea of an enhanced public life through the efforts of public-spirited individuals interests you too, then we invite you to join us as we set out on our adventure of discovery. Your experiences, ideas and hopes will be indispensable as we encounter both the obstacles and the opportunities that such an adventure will inevitably bring.