The London Marathon Foundation (LMF) has announced that it has now awarded £100m in funding since it was founded and plans to be “more strategic” in its grantmaking going forward.
Founded in 1981, the same year as the first marathon, the charity crossed the threshold after announcing last week £2.4m of grants from its Active Spaces Fund, which launched last autumn.
The £100m has been awarded to more than 1,600 projects across the UK over the past 42 years including £7m towards London 2012 Olympics legacy projects.
Speaking to Civil Society recently, LMF executive director Catherine Anderson said the organisation received £5.9m in the 2022 calendar year, its second highest ever total after the £8.3m raised in 2018.
The charity gets all its income from the organisers of the annual marathon, with this year’s event taking place on Sunday 23 April.
Plans to fund ‘more strategically’
Anderson told Civil Society that LMF, which rebranded from the London Marathon Charitable Trust earlier this year, has awarded much of the £100m in a “quite reactive” way and that it now aims to be more strategic on how it makes grants.
“It would then give grants to communities for around 30 years that were solely funding facilities. So, it was always very flexible and open. But arguably, it wasn't very strategic.
“When I joined, following the governance review of the London Marathon group and the creation of my role, in some ways we were a start up, I suppose, because there was new leadership, there was a desire to move away from that reactive approach to funding and to be more strategic.”
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