We wish all of our supporters and partners a very happy and restful Christmas. Before we close for the holidays, here are our highlights of 2019!
1. Oxford Homeless Movement launched and we are match funding their Christmas campaign
OCF is a founding member of Oxford Homeless Movement which launched on World Homeless Day in October. OCF is hosting the Christmas Match Fund campaign on behalf of Oxford Homeless Movement. Any donations will be doubled up until Monday 6th January.
2. Growing Minds – our school readiness project – set to begin in January 2020
Growing Minds is OCF’s new initiative to improve school readiness in disadvantaged communities. OCF has convened a partnership of education and early years charities to deliver the project in Littlemore and Berinsfield. We are looking forward to celebrating the birth of the first baby in January 2020 who will officially kickstart the project!
3. We welcomed a dedicated co-ordinator to Age Friendly Banbury
It’s in at three for Bee! We welcomed the appointment in July of Bee Myson as dedicated co-ordinator for our Age Friendly Banbury project. Age Friendly Banbury is a partnership between local organisations with an interest in making Banbury a great place to grow older.
4. Step Change Fund continues to grow
A flagship in OCF’s grant funding, with its strategic focus, Step Change continues to make a significant contribution to OCF’s annual grant making. The proactive engagement of its donors, panel members and project managers adds real value to the organisations it supports and makes it an exemplar donor advised fund.
5. We widened the scope and strength of our Donor Advised Funds
We are delighted that many of our donor advised funds, for example Our Common Good and the Jane Wates Patron Fund, have embraced their role as catalysts for our strategic programmes. Our work in this area is gaining lots of interest and is featured this week in the UK Community Foundations news.
6. We celebrated #GivingTuesday and look forward to 2020 when we will be celebrating 25 years of OCF!
Over 80 of our supporters and funders attended our #GivingTuesday event this year, which took place in the wonderful tree-house inspired venue of Maggie’s. See our first plans for 2020 on our events page.
7. We continue to develop our support to the High Sheriff of Oxfordshire
Since 2014, OCF has hosted and managed the High Sheriff of Oxfordshire’s Charitable Fund. In April 2019, Richard Venables ended his year as High Sheriff and you can see Richard explaining the role, history and nomination process behind this oldest royal appointment. Lady Sylvia Jay, the current High Sheriff, has chosen to focus on prison reform and local work happening across Oxfordshire to prevent criminal behaviour.
8. We created the OCF knowledge hub online!
We set up a Knowledge Hub on our website to make our insights and research reports available to anyone who is interested. We are committed to developing our knowledge and understanding of Oxfordshire’s needs to inform our strategy and these pages will continue to grow as we do so.
9. We continued building great local funding partnerships
We believe that collaboration will take us further than competition every time and by working together for our common good we will ‘close the gap’ between what we would like to happen and what we can actually achieve on our own. A good example of this is our partnership with the Good Exchange, where we now have some great success stories around match funding.
10. We had our first OCF baby!
We welcomed baby Parrinder in April as Kate, our Marketing and Communications Manager, went off for a year maternity leave. The team have really enjoyed working alongside three new faces who are covering Kate’s role on a job share basis.
Keep up to date with OCF by following us on social media and reading our blog