Meet our team
Genevieve Ford-Saville

Genevieve Ford-Saville
Genevieve works across Esmée's A Fairer Future and Creative, Confident Communities programmes, adding capacity to the funding team.
Prior to joining Esmée in 2022, Genevieve worked for Henry Smith Charity where she held responsibility for a UK wide portfolio of organisations supporting racially minoritised communities, refugees and migrants, and people involved in the criminal justice system.
You might be interested in
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27 July 2022
A Fairer Future – developing a new strategy
Veda Harrison, Director of Creative, Confident Communities and A Fairer Future, shares our new strategy for A Fairer Future. We will open to applications in A Fairer Future in October 2022.
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What we're doing to protect and restore freshwater in the UK
As part of our series of blogs on our roadmap to improving Our Natural World, Simon Wightman, Esmée's lead on freshwater, writes about our support and work with others towards protecting and restoring freshwater environments in the UK.
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Using Most Significant Change to understand outcomes for young people leaving care
We asked the Centre for Youth Impact to run a series of workshops on ‘Most Significant Change’ for organisations on Esmée’s Young People Leaving Care Learning Programme. Learn more about the approach and read the stories of change from participants.
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How we work with the Involving Young People Collective
Catherine Hillis, Esmée’s children and young people lead outlines how we’re working with the Involving Young People Collective to improve our practice and support for young people.
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What do people really think about Esmée Fairbairn Foundation?
Read the key findings and recommendations from research we commissioned nfpResearch to do on what people think about Esmée. Gina Crane, our Director of Communications and Learning, shares her reflections on the research findings, alongside what's next for Esmée.
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Funding Youth Activism: learning from the Act for Change Fund
A new report and resources share learning and insights on funding youth activism from over three years of the Act for Change Fund, a £3.6m partnership fund to support youth-led organisations to create and lead social change.
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Healthy UK seas and thriving coastal communities
Jenny Dadd, Funding Manager and Esmée's lead on our fishing in tandem with nature priority, writes about the range of work we're supporting towards healthy UK seas and thriving coastal communities.
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Environmental Finance and Learning Fund: initial insights
Sarah Hedley, Social Investment Portfolio Manager, shares her initial insights following the first meeting of the Environmental Finance and Learning Fund participants.
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Values for co-production between Young People + Organisations
Esmée's Involving Young People Collective share 10 values for co-production between young people and organisations. In this blog, Thalia and Betty, from the Collective, share how the work developed as well as their hopes that it will help to start conversations on best practice.
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Supporting a widespread transition to nature friendly farming
Laurence Scott, a Funding Manager in Esmée's Our Natural World team, writes about our support for nature friendly farming and how it can be part of a better food system that is positive for nature and communities.
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Review on children's social care in England published
The Independent Review of Children's Social Care led by Josh McAllister shared its final report this week. Read a summary of the proposals from our learning partner for our Young People Leaving Care funding, alongside a summary of responses from organisations we fund, and the Government's response.
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Our Annual Report and Accounts for 2021
Read our 2021 Annual Report, which gives an overview of our operations, funding and investments during 2021.
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Working towards a more diverse, inclusive and equitable environment sector
We know that we cannot address the climate and nature crises without also addressing injustice and inequity in the environment sector. In a new blog, we share what we’ve been doing to support a more diverse, inclusive and equitable environment sector.
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Our strategy for A Fairer Future – an update
Our A Fairer Future funding will now be closed to new applications until the autumn of 2022. We remain open to applications in Our Natural World and Creative, Confident Communities.
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Championing peat and restoring peatland at scale
Jenny Dadd, Funding Manager and Our Natural World Lead shares what we’ve been doing – working alongside our amazing partners – to champion peat as a climate superpower and restore peatland at scale.
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Our roadmap for improving our natural world – what more can we do?
Find out about the roadmap we have been working to for improving Our Natural World and how we are getting on as well as our plans for the coming year.
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Financing nature's recovery – the £43 billion question
In the second of our blogs on our roadmap for improving Our Natural World, Liam McAleese, Director of Our Natural World, shares what we’ve been doing to secure more money to finance nature’s recovery.
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Introducing our Involving Young People Collective’s newest change-makers
Kimberly Garande writes about her experience so far since joining Esmée’s Involving Young People Collective, and we also hear from the three other new young change-makers who have joined.
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Foundation Practice Rating shows we have more to do
We welcome the findings of the first Foundation Practice Rating report, which we think can support individual funders – including Esmée – to be more accountable, more transparent, and to make real progress on diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Funder Commitment on Climate Change: 2021 update
Read our 2021 update on our work towards the six goals of the Funder Commitment on Climate Change.
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Invitation to tender: Communications support for community-led freshwater campaigns
We are seeking a PR and Comms agency to support an informal network of community-led freshwater campaign groups who share our goal of improving and protecting freshwater environments, and whose voice and work are critical to achieving it.
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Our commitment and strategy to be net zero
We have made a commitment that our investment portfolio will be net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2040 at the latest.
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Training opportunities with Funding Plus
We're in the process of developing a training programme for the year ahead as part of our Funding Plus support. The training will be available to organisations we fund, with dates confirmed by the end of March.
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Understanding impact in social investments
Understanding the impact of our social investments is critical for our learning and ensuring that we are an effective investor. In a new report, we outline how we assess the difference each social investment is intended to make, how we track its progress over time, and how that shapes our learning as an investor.
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Temporary closure to applications in A Fairer Future
As we develop our strategy for A Fairer Future, we will close to new applications - in funding priorities for A Fairer Future only - from January to May 2022. We remain open to applications in Our Natural World and Creative, Confident Communities.
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Environmental Finance and Learning Fund
Together with the Environmental Funders Network (EFN), we have launched a collaborative Environmental Finance and Learning Fund to help unlock significant new funding for nature recovery.
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Young People Leaving Care funding: Insights from our Learning Programme
As part of our support for organisations we fund through our Young People Leaving Care funding, we commissioned a Learning Programme to facilitate learning, collaboration and alliances between the funded organisations, and with Esmée ourselves. This Insights report outlines our approach and what we've learned so far.
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Supporting capacity and capability of organisations working to improve freshwater environments
To help us make progress towards our impact goal of ‘clean and healthy freshwater’, we commissioned the Cardiff University Water Research Institute to undertake a review of organisations working to restore the freshwater environment across the UK.
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Building an impact-first social investment strategy
We outline what our impact-first approach to social investment means in practice, and we share what we’ve learned, both the challenges and opportunities, from its evolution.
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Creative, Confident Communities: update to our strategy
As our work for Creative, Confident Communities has developed, we have updated our strategy to better reflect what we hope to achieve and the types of work we are looking to support.
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