What we do

Segelman makes grants to organisations and projects working with:

Children in care

Care leavers

Families facing multiple and complex challenges, with children at risk of entering care

Segelman believes that strong relationships and connection are at the heart of change, and that everyone needs love, care, community and positive relationships in their life. By supporting work which holds long-term, trusting and supportive relationships at its heart, we aim to have a positive impact on children’s quality of life and future chances.

We partner with organisations which share our values and which we believe contribute to positive change for care-experienced young people and vulnerable families. We usually support smaller-scale organisations - those with an income of less than £2 million a year.

To give a sense of our scale, we currently fund 46 organisations. In 2024 our typical grant size was £40,000 a year for our multi-year grants.

Our current five-year plan runs from 2024-2029. We have committed to distribute up to £10 million in this period, which is likely to see us supporting a maximum of 50 organisations in any year by 2029.

  • We want all children to grow up happy, healthy and safe.

    Children entering care or at the ‘edge of care’ are likely to be part of  families experiencing high levels of deprivation, stress and struggle. The capacity of parents to provide a nurturing environment impacts children from their first days and places them at significantly higher risk in terms of their health, education, well-being and security, leading to repeated cycles of inequity.  Our aim at Segelman is to support work that ensures these children experience a happy childhood and a positive transition to adult life: sometimes this is direct support for children and young people; sometimes it is support for whole families or for the adults in children’s lives.

  • The groups we support share a number of key characteristics:

    • They build long-term, trusting, supportive relationships with those they work with, and encourage and support wider relationship-building and connection.

    • They are rooted in community (whether geographic or a community of interest) and are committed to building on the lived and learned experience of those they work with.

    • They are focused on the quality of the support they provide to meet the immediate needs of children and families, balanced with an ability to engage and influence at a strategic level to improve local or national systems.

    • They have a strong learning culture, seek to evidence long-term change and are committed to collaborating, partnering and sharing.

  • The Segelman Trust has made the decision to be proactive in seeking out organisations.

    Our staff team is small (1.2 FTE) and we want to work with a limited number of grant holders in a relational way, sometimes over a long period of time. Much of our funding is committed through multi-year grants and longer-term partnerships. At our scale this means we can only partner with a small number of new organisations each year which is why we do not have an open application process.

    We recognise the downside of being an ‘invitation only’ funder so do our best to to learn about a range of organisations filling critical gaps through our charity partners, other funders and experts in the field. We also undertake research to find new partners and follow up on connections made through sector learning events.

    Although opportunities are limited, if you work with children in care, care leavers or families with children at risk of entering care and feel there is a fit with our approach you can introduce your organisation to us on the contacts page. This is not an application but a way for us to be aware of your work if and when we are seeking new partners.

  • Most of our grants provide multi-year support, but we also make a number of smaller one-off grants to groups and individuals working to bring about innovation in children’s social care. These ‘green shoots’ grants provide funding towards convening, thought leadership, awareness raising and collaboration and often support things like events, training, pilots or publications.

    We also make occasional strategic grants which sit outside our core focus on the care system, to organisations and projects taking fresh approaches to the fundamental social challenges of poverty, exclusion and isolation affecting families. These projects tend to focus on collaborative efforts to strengthen support around children and families and create communities in which families and children can thrive.

    • We take a relational approach to grant making, working to build a positive and collaborative relationship with the groups we support, placing trust in them as the experts in the work that they do and being respectful of their time and resources.

    • We offer multi-year, unrestricted or core funding as our default, but understand the need for other kinds of funding too - project grants, capital grants and development funding. Ultimately we aim to support in the way that is most helpful to each individual organisation.

    • Our approach to learning about the impact of our grants is flexible, based on open dialogue about outcomes and focused on a shared learning journey, including a discussion of challenges.

  • You can read our current grant-making policy here