The Tudor Trust is set to replace its trustee board, as it evaluates how the trust operates and focuses on racial justice.
The organisation, which has assets of around £288m, is currently recruiting a new cohort of trustees to the board.
It said the decision for the board to step down comes from the present board, and no trustees have been dismissed.
A statement from the trust reads: “Recent media coverage has sought to cast our well-publicised change agenda in the context of contemporary public debate.
“No trustees have been dismissed. The decision for the present board to step down comes entirely from the existing trustees and is an exciting opportunity for a new group of trustees to take on the work that the current board has begun.
“This is a carefully managed period of change and it’s of importance to us that the trust continues to serve communities most in need of its funding going forward.”
A spokesperson added: “The Tudor Trust has embarked on a well-publicised step change in its mission, which involves reviewing the giving priorities of the charity to reflect contemporary needs of our grantee community. As part of that planned evolution, the trustees resolved to refresh the board with the objective of making it more representative of the demographics and lived experiences of the communities we serve. We’re immensely grateful to all our trustees who helped us reach this stage in our journey and wish all those who decided to take this opportunity to pass on the baton all the best for the future.
“The Tudor Trust continues to have strong funding relationships with its existing grant holders and has funding commitments to around 650 organisations across the country. This amounts to around £20m going to good causes every year. These relationships will continue until such time that we are ready to launch a new funding strategy.”
Closed for applications
The Tudor Trust is currently closed for applications, having “set aside time to re-think how the trust operates in future”.
It closed for applications in 2022, at the time planning to be reopening in April 2023, but then decided it was not ready.
The nine trustee positions will be refreshed on a rolling basis over the coming months, and grant applications will reopen once the change process is complete.
The trust issued a statement that said: “We want to reopen as a trust that can say we’re truly striving to be an anti-racist organisation. At the moment, we aren’t able to say that. Staff and trustees are still learning about racial justice, white supremacy culture and how racism exists within Tudor and the wider society in which we operate. We need to do more work here.”
A key driver for this is the learning it has done around racial justice, the trust added.
“We’ll also be looking at how we build all aspects of diversity, equity and inclusion more fully into our work, and challenging ourselves around accessibility and power dynamics,” a statement on its website reads.
It adds that the trust may be looking for opportunities to devolve some of its grantmaking by providing funds to a number of partner or intermediary organisations for distribution.
“Our hope is that working in this way will also provide us with useful learning around different funding approaches, and ‘ways in’ to communities we may not have been good at supporting in the past.”
Tudor Trust recently announced Raji Hunjan as its new interim director.
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