Quartet Community Foundation achieves Quality Accreditation

Logo UK Community Foundations – Quality Accredited

27.10.2021

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We’re delighted to announce that this month we successfully completed the fifth round of Quality Accreditation

The rigorous process has been designed to promote excellent practice across the community foundation network, ensuring that we utilise our resources effectively to listen, support and advocate for our communities.

Reaching Core Standards

Over the past year we’ve had an internal audit of our policies and procedures, compiled a submission of documents for external review and participated in interviews with an independent assessor.

The assessment, which was carried out by Ideas to Impact, evaluated the ongoing practices and development trajectory of Quartet Community Foundation within Core Standards on:

• governance
• finance
• philanthropy
• grant-making
• community participation and
• organisational development.

The assessors wrote: ‘The highest average score was in the Core Standard on effective emergency response. This reflects the exceptional skill community foundations displayed in rapidly activating local philanthropy and delivering funding to support community-led responses to crisis.’

 The programme is unique to the UK Community Foundations (UKCF) network, providing the only accreditation process internationally that is tailored to and designed by community foundations.

The Quality Accreditation assessment has revealed that:

• the value of grant-making in the UKCF network more than doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic
• total community foundation endowment across the membership has grown by 30% since QA4 in 2017
• the highest average score QA5 was in the Core Standard on effective emergency response. This reflects the exceptional skill community foundations displayed in rapidly activating local philanthropy and delivering funding to support community-led responses to crisis.

It is a mark of the commitment and diligence of our members that they have completed this rigorous accreditation process at the same time as distributing record-breaking levels of funding to their communities. The UKCF team is proud to support a network which reaches every part of the UK and whose good practice has been so clearly demonstrated throughout this process.

Rosemary Macdonald – CEO, UKCF

Quality Accreditation will last for three years until October 2024 and is an initiative designed to provide collective due diligence that confirms community foundations have the capacity to deliver grants and programmes on a national level.