For us, ‘commitment’ comes first. You’ve got to decide you want to get more involved - that you’re going to make a commitment of time as well as money; a commitment to going on a journey with a project or charity. Once you do that, the learning comes. My learning, and our team’s learning, is refined on a daily and weekly basis in terms of how we operate, who we work with and what we do - it’s a continual, evolving process.Sir Trevor Pears CMG
Our philosophy is...
We believe that thoughtful and effective philanthropy is about creating spaces
Beneficiary Space
The Pears Pavilion at Coram provided a new home for the charity’s adoption support and creative therapies services.
Financial Space
We have been a core funder of AfriKids for over 14 years, enabling it to grow from £50k to £2 million and thrive in an uncertain financial climate.
Physical Space
Our operating programme JHub run a residency and professional development programme that supports new charities and Pears partners.
Safe Space
The Linking Network helps schools and teachers to engage with and explore issues of identity and diversity.
Space for Ideas
The Pears Project is enabling the Scout Association to pilot an innovative model of volunteer recruitment to increase opportunities for young people.
Space to Connect
We helped to set up UK Task Force on issues relating to Arab citizens of Israel, which built a coalition of over 35 organisations across the spectrum of the Jewish community.
Space to Explore
The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has conducted the world's first large-scale research study investigating what young people know about the Holocaust.
Space to Study
The Pears Scholarship initiative is providing skills and training to equip the next generation of public health leaders in Africa.
We build close relationships with our partners and provide more than financial support.
Through our operating programme JHub we offer a professional development programme open to JHub residents and all Pears partners. We work closely with our partners to identify the issues they encounter and have developed a high quality programme with a particular focus on supporting people.
We offer a mixture of technical skills training and more reflective workshops focusing on teamwork, leadership and problem-solving. The reflective seminars we offer include Managing unsolvable problems using Polarity Management; Building effective teams using Belbin and Building stronger teams using MBTI. The skills training takes the form of workshops, small-group coaching and one-to-one advice surgeries on areas such as finance, HR and delivering effective presentations. We also run an annual Action Learning Set for CEOs and senior leaders of small to medium charities.
We recognise that our partners are not operating in a static environment and that some of the most valuable support we can provide is by sharing our access to knowledge and policy developments that will impact on them and their work. We do this through convening one-off ‘lunch and learns’ or ‘tea and talks’ on topics that have come up in our conversations or to present new research and ideas from the field.