Mohn Westlake Foundation

The Mohn Westlake Foundation is a family charitable trust driven by dual missions: enhancing lives of children and young people through expanded access to education, performing arts, and enrichment opportunities, and advancing data transparency for public good and societal benefit. Core values emphasize trusting grantees as experts, delivering flexible multi-year support, fostering long-term resilient partnerships, and enabling systemic change via strategic philanthropy. They believe impact arises from empowering innovative charities to scale proven interventions, build capacity, and respond dynamically to crises like mental health emergencies or educational disruptions, prioritizing equity, enrichment, and impartial information access.

They fund education innovation including nationwide distance learning platforms for school-disrupted pupils, national theatre learning programmes and opera house engagement delivering performing arts workshops and creative enrichment for children and young people at risk of exclusion, future skills centres providing employability training and mentoring for disadvantaged youth, cradle-to-career pathways supporting holistic development from early years through adolescence, and mental health crisis interventions like text-based helplines offering immediate counselling and peer support for young people facing anxiety, depression, or emotional distress. In data transparency, they back initiatives combating misinformation through fact-checking services, open data platforms, and connected data ecosystems promoting evidence-based public discourse, ethical data use, and accessible information to counter societal harms like disinformation. Interventions emphasize preventative education access, therapeutic arts-based activities, early intervention skills training, scalable digital outreach, and community-wide enrichment to foster resilience, creativity, confidence, and informed citizenship among pupils with learning barriers, social disadvantage, or mental health needs.

They exclude campaigning, lobbying, faith-based activities, animal welfare, and non-UK work, focusing instead on large-scale, innovative charities driving national impact. Distinctive priorities target children and young people facing educational exclusion, mental health crises, or enrichment deficits, alongside broader society benefiting from transparent data ecosystems. They favor evidence-based, scalable models led by expert organizations, with crisis-responsive unrestricted funding, deep multi-year relationships, and leadership in collaborative initiatives like mental health helplines and arts education outreach.