Annual Report and Accounts 2025

22 July 2026

Our 2025 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

When we launched our strategy five years ago, we knew that delivering it would require us to play a more active role and think about the different tools we have to employ. Looking back at the last year, it’s encouraging to see this embedded in our approach – particularly through our Tools budget, which has been used to commission research, convene organisations, and for influencing and co-design work.
Beatrice Hollond, Chair

At Esmée, we focus on providing long-term, flexible support, and working collaboratively towards our mission: to improve our natural world, secure a fairer future, and strengthen the bonds in communities in the UK. This approach has been especially important during a time that has and continues to be difficult for many of the organisations and communities we support. Growing polarisation in our communities, a retrenchment of gender and migrant rights, and a watering down of environmental and nature commitments, have been compounded by the cost-of living crisis, policy shifts, social media attacks, and funding cuts.

In response, flexibility remains central to our support, which organisations tell us has been invaluable in the current context. Throughout the report, you’ll find examples of how organisations and communities are addressing the challenges we face and working towards a more hopeful, thriving, and fairer future.

Funding in 2025

We provided £52.9m in grant funding towards a wide range of work supporting our strategic aims: A Fairer Future, Creative, Confident Communities, and Our Natural World. This included £1.1m through our Funding Plus support and £1.5m through our Tools budget, enabling us to take a more active role in supporting sector development and strategic initiatives.

We also approved £16.3m in social and impact investment, helping organisations deliver both social and environmental impact.

Our funding is made possible by our investment portfolio, which achieved a 9.4% total return in 2025, bringing the value of our main investment portfolio to £1.381bn.

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 continue to be an open and trust-based funder, with 67% of our main grants awarded for core or unrestricted costs. We remain committed to providing long-term support, with 66% of grants awarded for three years or more. We also broadened our reach, with 29% of grants awarded to organisations that were new to Esmée.

We continued to increase support for organisations led by communities facing structural inequity, while expanding our approach to support a wider range of organisations and constitutional forms. Through our New Connections programme, we learned from organisations with different structures and used these insights to update our governance criteria.

You can find more reflections on each area of work in our 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 identify inequity in our funding, we gather DEI data on the leadership of the organisations we award grants to, as well as the communities their work supports. In 2025, we continued to use this data to better understand who our funding is reaching and to inform our approach to equity. See our report, Who our funding is reaching 2025, 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:

Sustainable investing

We use a range of sustainable investment approaches with different financial and impact goals to support our work. In 2025, we continued to transition our investment portfolio towards sustainability, working closely with our investment advisers. We also continued to develop our impact investment approach to support organisations and initiatives delivering positive social and environmental outcomes.

At the end of 2025, our main investment portfolio stood at £1.381bn, with 31.8% specifically allocated to investments with an underlying impact or net-zero aligned approach. The portfolio achieved a total return of 9.4% in 2025.