New UK charity tenders entire £50m endowment, with focus on PRI and ethical investment

UK charity the Life Changes Trust is seeking its first investment manager for its newly established £50m (€63m) endowment with a mandate that stresses responsible and ethical investment.

The Life Changes Trust, based in Glasgow, was established last year with an endowment from UK funder BIG Lottery Fund Scotland.

The trust’s mission is to support young people and young care leavers and people with dementia and their unpaid carers in Scotland.

It has this week put out a tender for an investment firm to manage the endowment. “The Life Changes Trust requires a competent, suitably qualified and experienced fund manager to maximise the investment income from the Trust’s “spend-out” endowment,” it said.

Its criteria for its potential investment manager includes a “sound understanding and experience of responsibleand ethical investment” that can achieve its investment objectives in line with the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and the Trust’s ethical investment policy.

The tender stipulates a minimum of five years’ experience of managing charitable investments in the UK. The aim is to cover the Trust’s annual operating costs, allocate funding of around £5m a year until 2023 and secure some modest additional capital for reinvestment.

The contract will be for three years from January 2015 and the closing date for applications is October 10.

The trust – which is currently in build-up phase under CEO Maddy Halliday – says it aims to support its beneficiaries directly through an individual grants scheme and by providing funding to a wide range of organisations which provide support.