Research report: Evidence Review for Future Grant Making

This report, produced by the research company Rocket Science, represents an important step for Hampton Fund. The findings in it will drive our decision making over the next couple of years, as we aim to maximum the impact of the funds we disribute.

Dina Papamichael, the Director of Consultancy at Rocket Science, and our CEO, Richard Barron, have written a blog reflecting on the research findings, which you can read here.

The report itself is the second we have worked on with Rocket Science. In 2017, we jointly commissioned, along with Richmond Foundation, the ‘On the Edge’ research. This has been an incredibly important resource. Hampton Fund’s trustees have used it to guide their decision making over recent years and it also resulted in the creation of a new local initiative, OneRichmond.

However, On the Edge is now out of date. So, in early 2025, we asked Rocket Science to update the evidence base on need within the community and map our current funding against these needs. In order to do this, they have focused on our recently defined priority areas of the financial, physical and emotional hardship experienced by local residents.

The report also contains analysis of over 500 responses from a survey of our individual grant recipients; interviews with both individual grant recipients and a range of local stakeholders and the output of in-person event held in March. Here, sixty representatives of local social care organisations had the opportunity to discuss initial findings from the research and share their own ideas about how our grant making could be developed.

As soon as we have fully translated the findings into a plan for the future, we look forward to making this available too. In the meantime, we hope that there is data and insights in the report that will be of interest to the wider social care sector locally.

Please click here to see the report or go to the Publications page.