The Alternative Commission on Social Investment argued that finance for social sector organisations is not working as well as it could – that too little is getting to the places it is needed and that responses to social needs are struggling to thrive.

Alongside repayable finance that attracts a good deal of the attention at the moment, grant-making trusts and foundations play a huge role in supporting and developing social sector responses to social and environmental challenges. But it has long been argued that they do not operate as well as they could – through little fault of the foundations themselves, the system is broken.

Foundational Thinking was a multi-day hackathon held in 2016 at Marmalade (the Official fringe festival to the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship) to explore the ways in which grant-making trusts and foundations – both public and private – can innovate and adapt to better serve the needs of the organisations they support and ultimately communities and beneficiaries.