Community Foundation Wales achieves Quality Accreditation

Independent assessors have praised Community Foundation Wales’s grant-making and support for donors.

Community Foundation Wales was judged to be Good or Excellent in all 14 areas assessed and achieved the UK Quality Accreditation.

The assessment, carried out by Ideas to Impact, evaluated the ongoing practices of Community Foundation Wales and 46 community foundations across the UK by interviewing staff, examining documents and looking at the way they work to measure their progress and plan for their development.

Within 14 Core Standards including governance, finance, philanthropy, grant-making, community participation and organisational development, Community Foundation was regarded as demonstrating either good or excellent practice.

Within the assessment, Community Foundation Wales was praised for its reputation for understanding the needs of the sector and using this to influence donors and policy makers.

Their Loud and Clear report was used as an example of this “comprehensive view of the needs of the sector and its role in raising donor awareness of issues, informing grant-making and its usage by other stakeholders such as the Welsh government to inform policy development.”

The assessors noted that “because Community Foundation Wales have consulted groups directly about their needs and wishes, they pick up on the passion of those groups and this is then transferred to their conversations with donors.”

This accreditation programme is unique to the UK Community Foundations (UKCF) network, providing the only international accreditation process that is tailored to and designed by community foundations.

Richard Williams, Chief Executive of Community Foundation Wales, said:

“We are proud to have been awarded the Quality Accreditation as it is testament to the dedication and hard work of our staff and trustees, especially in the challenging circumstances of the past 18 months.

We work hard to ensure that our policies and processes are consistently of a high standard and support our work in inspiring people to give, helping Welsh communities to thrive and changing lives together.”

John Gordon, Chair of the QA Committee, said:

“Being now in the fifth round of Quality Accreditation, we have seen community foundations throughout the UK raise their game and clearly demonstrate a high standard of governance, administration and financial diligence through external assessment across all ranges of team size and capacity.”

Rosemary Macdonald, CEO of UKCF, said:

“It is a mark of the commitment and diligence of our members that they have completed this rigorous accreditation process at the same time as distributing record-breaking levels of funding to their communities. The UKCF team is proud to support a network which reaches every part of the UK and whose good practice has been so clearly demonstrated throughout this process.”

The Quality Accreditation will last for three years until October 2024 and is an initiative designed to provide due diligence that confirms community foundations have the capacity to deliver grants and programmes on a national level. It promotes excellent practice across the community foundation network to ensure that they can utilise their resources most effectively to listen, support and advocate for their communities.