In 2023, Ethos Foundation commissioned New Philanthropy Capital to research and report on what an effective system of child poverty prevention looks like in the UK. The NPC team used an evidence review and workshops with policy experts, researchers, organisation leaders, charity professionals and funders from a range of relevant fields to understand the factors shaping children’s experiences of child poverty and ways that the system could be redesigned for more positive impact.
The report gave us some principles that have helped shape the ten-year strategy for our endowment spend down:
A systemic problem needs a systemic approach: Because child poverty is fueled by deeply intertwined issues like housing, work, and health, we cannot treat it with isolated fixes; we must coordinate across sectors to address the root causes holding families back. In our 25-35 strategy, we have focused down on working across the systems shaping early childhood.
Philanthropic funding needs to find points of leverage: Our funding is small in scale compared to the value of the systems shaping childhood, but it is flexible, with high risk-bearing ability and a long view. We need to get focused on where our resources can have maximum ripple effects. For 25-35, we are focused on investing in the ‘glue’; implementation models that can make existing diverse assets more than the sum of their parts.
Systems are about more than activities: an effective system isn’t just a collection of great programs, but a web of strong relationships, shared data, and trusted collaborations that ensure the whole ecosystem works together smoothly for children and families. For our 25-35 strategy, this includes explicit thinking about power: whose positive power is underutilised (e.g. citizen power); whose profound power is under-appreciated and under-scrutinised (e.g. industry). It also means thinking critically about how to share and leverage our own institutional powers and reflecting on our institutional boundaries and constraints.
We are one part of a broader field shaping children’s outcomes in the UK. Our aim is to get crystal clear on the specific roles and actions that we take alongside others, to maximise the impact of our resources over the next ten years towards a vision of a society without child poverty, where all children thrive.
Sarah, Feburary 2026
