Annual Report and Accounts 2024

10 July 2025

Our 2024 Annual Report and Accounts gives an overview of our funding, investments and operations during the year.

View the Annual Report in full screen or download as a PDF document

We are grateful for the work and the organisations that we are privileged to support. We will continue to support you as you lead the way in showing the courage and resilience that is needed to make life better for people, communities and nature in the UK. It is this positive leadership that will deliver a vibrant, economically resilient and equitable future for everyone.
Dame Caroline Mason CBE, Chief Executive

In 2024, we saw huge political change, global instability, and increased hostility towards many of the areas that we support, leading to racist riots over the summer and growing fear and disconnection in communities.

But we also saw hope, resilience and the unwavering commitment of people and organisations in all communities making a difference. This has made all of us at Esmée determined to continue making our contribution to improving our natural world, securing a fairer future, and strengthening the bonds in our communities.

Funding in 2024

We're pleased to report that 2024 was one of our highest ever spending years. Over the year, we provided £59.9m in support, which includes £45.1m in main grants to 236 organisations and initiatives across the UK, and £9.1m approved in new social investments. Social investment continues to be a valuable tool for us to make impact, so we’re pleased to have increased our allocation for this to £60m.

We continued to make targeted, strategic interventions through our Tools budget, including support for a new leadership programme for people of colour in the environment sector, a roundtable on trans-inclusive funding, and investment readiness work with LocalMotion communities.

Chart 1 shows a breakdown of our funding by strategic aim and funding type, including our infrastructure support shown as 'A Sector Fit for the Future'. You can find a more detailed breakdown and a listing of grants and investments in our Annual Report and Accounts.

We aim to be an open and trust-based funder and 66% of our main grants awarded were for core or unrestricted costs. We also broadened our reach, with 39% of grants awarded to organisations that were new to Esmée.

We increased support to organisations led by communities facing structural inequity — now more than half of all organisations that submitted diversity data. We also moved into the second year of our £1.5m New Connections Fund, supporting 20 organisations that do not meet our usual criteria through a peer learning network led by Do It Now Now.

You can find more reflections on each area of work in our full annual report.

For more on the grants we awarded, including the type of support, size of award, and application data, see our grant funding overview.

Our commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and tackling climate change

To help us track our progress towards DEI and help us identify inequity in our funding, we gather DEI data on the leadership of the organisations we awarded grants to as well as the communities the work supports. See our report, Who our funding is reaching 2024, for more information. You can also find information about the diversity data of Esmée's people.

We continue to explore further actions we can take towards our commitments, which you can find an overview of below:

Other key reports about how we work include our biennial applicant research report, and a review of our Esmée's approach to racial justice.

Sustainable investing

We use a range of sustainable investment approaches with different financial and impact goals to support our work. A key highlight was developing our thematic approach to impact investing and publishing our first in-depth investment report, which explored sustainable food and agriculture.

At the end of 2024, our main investment portfolio stood at £1.325bn with performance over the year at 6.7%.