The Dawes Trust
Many readers, especially those involved in criminal justice research, will know of the Dawes Trust which funded over £28 million of research and service delivery in the criminal justice sector between 2011 and 2026. The Trust will have spent all its funds by the end of the year and the Trustees commissioned me to write a review of the Trust’s work for three principal reasons:
- To provide an account of the work funded by the Trust and a description of its processes and procedures for making grants.
- To describe the impact of that work.
- To identify key learning points from the Trust’s experiences to enable greater discussion and understanding of charitable trust funding in the criminal justice sector.
You can find the published review here.
The work of the Trust
The Dawes Trust was established with a very widely defined charitable aim:
“the fighting of crime including organised crime by the protection of people and property, the preservation of public order and the prevention and detection of crime for the public benefit”
This meant meant that the Trustees could consider funding a broad range of initiatives which included a range of service delivery initiatives ranging from youth diversion dance programmes to prison coaching schemes. There were also numerous research studies into a range of issues including organised crime, online child sexual exploitation and money laundering. The Trust also funded major initiatives such as the development of a new national model of policing. Additionally, it was instrumental in establishing new research bodies including:
- The Sentencing Academy
- The Dawes Centre for Future Crime
- The International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University
Over a period of fifteen years the Trust made a total of 109 grants to 39 different organisations and 14 individual PhD students. Over this period, the Trust evolved to focus on three main types of proposals:
- Those which would generate new knowledge of a kind which could drive policy and operational changes and have a real impact in terms of reducing crime.
- Activities which were considered hard-to-fund because they were in sensitive or unpopular policy areas. Examples included work with the perpetrators and families of sex offenders and initiatives for Muslim offenders.
- Work which addressed emerging crime trends such as online fraud and online sexual exploitation.
The Dawes approach to funding
The Trustees adopted an atypical approach to grant making, perhaps more like that of a charitable foundation than a mainstream charitable trust. The application process was informal, applicants were encouraged to share ideas with Trustees who would encourage a full proposal if they felt the proposed work fell within the Trust’s remit and interests.
There was no template or prescribed approach, rather applicants were encouraged to make a clear proposal with an emphasis on how the work would have impact in terms of driving policy or practice improvements and to ensure that costs were transparent and clear.
Applicants would then be asked to present their proposal to the Trustees and field a set of probing questions to ensure that the programme of work was well thought out and likely to deliver sustained impact. The Trustees felt confident in this approach not least because most had held very senior positions across different parts of the justice sector.
Grant recipients interviewed for this review were generally very positive about this approach. They liked the fact that the Trust was open-minded to well-reasoned funding applications that were innovative or which focused on unpopular or emerging issues.
They also like that it responded quickly to applications and was happy to engage in robust and constructive discussions which often resulted in programmes being modified to focus more on outcomes and impact.
The application process was unencumbered by bureaucracy and was not restricted to certain time windows. Funding decisions were made and communicated promptly, and recipients were free to proceed in any way that they judged was most appropriate – provided they delivered the agreed programme of work to a high standard.
For researchers in particular, this streamlined but robust approach contrasted very favourably with their experiences of approaching research councils for funds.
Another distinguishing element of the Dawes Trust was that it had no exclusion criteria; university departments, voluntary sector bodies, Think Tanks and private companies were all eligible to propose programmes of work.
Questions to consider
While the Dawes Trust has not operated a traditional approach to grant giving, its flexibility and focus on innovation has already caused many grant recipients in the criminal justice sector to mourn its passing.
The final chapter of the review offers a number of questions for both grant-givers and grant seekers to consider in the hope that these will stimulate a constructive debate and consider whether some features of the Dawes approach might be replicated elsewhere.
People wishing to read the review in full can find it here.
