The Bromley Trust

The challenge 

The Bromley Trust is an independent grant-maker supporting work on human rights and prison reform in the UK. Following the recruitment of new trustees and in the context of a rapidly changing external environment, the Trust was looking for support to engage the board and refresh its strategic framework. The Bromley Trust wanted this strategy to consider how it could maximise its impact, building board consensus on core strategic questions.  

The approach 

NPC supported The Bromley Trust through a strategy development process that covered: 

• Insight gathering: NPC and The Bromley Trust worked together on a landscape review to understand the current picture for its funding areas, and the trends affecting these sectors. This included a grantee survey, interviews with peer funders and sector support organisations, and desk research. With each trustee bringing specialist expertise in an area of The Bromley Trust’s work, this process helped the board as a whole to reach a shared and complete understanding of the context. 

• Board discussion: Across a year, NPC facilitated sessions within extended Bromley Trust board meetings and a one-off strategy workshop to develop the new strategic framework. This included discussion of the external environment and key strategic principles that would guide work, such as the planned life span of the Trust and its approach to supporting systemic change. By acting as an external facilitator, NPC was able to ensure that questions were properly resolved to give the new strategy a solid basis for the next 10 years.  

• Articulation: Outside of board meetings, The Bromley Trust began to articulate the emerging strategy with support from NPC. This involved distilling decisions from the board meetings and gaining additional views from board members via online tools such as Miro and Menti. By acting as a critical friend while The Bromley Trust “held the pen”, NPC helped to ensure that the final articulation reflected the views and priorities of the board in a way that will be practical to implement with grantees going forwards. 

The result 

The final strategy was signed off by the board in February 2024. At the time of writing, implementation has begun–first with existing grantees, and then through reopening to new applications later this year. This strategy will see the Trust refine its focus within the fields of human rights and prison reform, create an overarching strategic portfolio that supports the mission, and strengthen the Trust’s role as a supporter and connector of its grantees. 

At the end of the project, the Trust reflected on how valuable the process–as well as the output– was for the organisation.  

We are grateful to NPC’s consultants for their enormous knowledge and expertise. They provided the board and staff with a framework and process which enabled us to have informed, comprehensive discussions, out of which emerged a robust strategy which we believe builds on the legacy of our work to date and will ensure our impact over the next few challenging years.

Fiona Cramb, Chair of The Bromley Trust