Hunter Foundation

The Foundation prioritises entrepreneurship and enterprise development, investing in entrepreneurial capacity building across schools, further education, higher education, and business communities – including skills training, mentoring, and growth accelerators to boost youth employability and combat youth unemployment. Education initiatives span primary to postgraduate levels, supporting employability training, ambition-building activities, and social mobility pathways for young people facing barriers. Central to their work is child poverty alleviation and family support through systemic strategies addressing family hardship, food insecurity, and opportunity gaps, partnering with charities for co-designed interventions that scale via government adoption. Internationally, they back sustainable economic development in Africa, focusing on agri-business training, rural community development, and education access for disadvantaged families and young people, emphasising local ownership and evidence-based scaling of innovations like peer mentoring and community-led enterprise.

The Foundation supports charities and social enterprises with a demonstrable growth mindset and proven impact. They fund organisations based in Scotland, including registered charities, social enterprises, unincorporated associations, and community benefit societies. They also support individual entrepreneurs running businesses with real ambition and drive to go to scale, provided they are based in Scotland. Their programmes are sector agnostic, welcoming applicants from any field. They prioritise disadvantaged young people, families in poverty, and underserved communities in Scotland, alongside select African initiatives, favouring partners with outcome measurement, scalability potential, and cross-sector alliances.

The Foundation excludes isolated charitable acts, short-term relief that substitutes for state services, and unproven models lacking evaluation. They do not fund organisations without a growth mindset or those unable to demonstrate impact. They avoid supporting initiatives that do not align with their entrepreneurial, evidence-based approach to systemic change.

The Foundation provides grants for project delivery and training, with a focus on scaling evidence-based models. They offer risk capital and capacity building, and they welcome unsolicited applications. Their funding style is characterised by a 'hand up not hand out' philosophy, favouring partners who embrace rigorous evaluation and cross-sector collaboration. They support both one-off grants and multi-year partnerships, depending on the programme, and do not require match funding.