I am delighted to share our Annual Review 2013/2014 which looks back on our key highlights and successes over the past year. There’s an adage that one should spend as much time reviewing one’s work as planning and delivering it. We’ve certainly spent a good deal of the past year thinking about our direction and organisational personality; I am now pleased to share the UK Branch Strategy 2014-2019, which outlines our refocused priorities and ways of working for the next five years.

Our ambition going forward is to help bring about long-term improvements in well-being, particularly for the most vulnerable, by creating connections across boundaries (national borders, communities, disciplines and sectors) which deliver social, cultural and environmental value.

The three main themes that guided our work before – Cultural Understanding, Fulfilling Potential, and the Environment – remain but we have been even more selective in identifying the areas in which, within this broad frame, we can help to make a difference. We recognise that there are many actors of different sorts active in every area we could have decided to focus on; we want to add value to the work of others and bring our own unique capabilities to bear. Our new priories are: Transitions in Later Life, Participatory Performing Arts and Protecting our Oceans. We will be publishing the frameworks for our new strands of activity this coming month, including clarifying how organisations can express an interest in working with us.

We will also seek to secure the legacy of, and disseminate the learning from, programmes that have recently reached, or are about to reach, their conclusion including, amongst others, Portuguese Visual Arts, Literature in Translation and Greening the Economy. We will continue to support work aimed at creating the conditions within which change can happen with an emphasis on innovation and collaboration.

Our defining approach in the next five years will be to: explore, experiment, exchange, explain and exit. We have thought through how we might achieve the most impact by exploiting our intangible assets which include our position as a small operation in the UK and one that is – unusually – part of a much larger European foundation with an international footprint. We will champion evaluation and learning, dissemination, the securing of a long-term legacy for necessarily time-limited interventions. We will remain largely proactive in identifying the organisations and activities we want to support – though with occasional open calls for proposals – and then aim to foster relationships of mutual benefit with and between our partners including some unusual suspects.

In clarifying what sort of “funder” we are (though I am not an enthusiast for the term which overemphasises our tangible assets), we will be engaged and supportive. Being clear about what we want to achieve and the way we hope to work with partners is at the very least a courtesy – transparency and openness to challenge is important to us – but it also lays the basis for collaborations of mutual understanding, benefit and ultimately impact.

Over the past few years, our premises in Hoxton Square have served as a space for our partners to meet, share information and forge alliances. We look forward to continuing to welcome partners and other organisations to gatherings so that we can, over time, help realise our shared ambitions. The next five years will be challenging but we are all very excited about what the future holds if we stick to our guns and behave in a way that is true to our unique organisational personality.