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The Peter Sowerby Foundation supports charities, CICs and registered social and healthcare providers. We do this by providing grants towards projects in healthcare, the community, environment and conservation, and the arts.

In terms of geography, we largely support UK-wide projects, but have occasionally provided grants to international ventures. Our Trustees are particularly interested in supporting projects in Dr Sowerby’s much-loved home of North Yorkshire.

Since it was established in 2013, the Foundation has awarded a total of £10 million by way of 89 grants to 63 organisations.

The case studies below are just a selection of the grants that the Foundation has made. We have enjoyed working in partnership with these organisations over the years and witnessing the impact of our grants.

Choose a theme to see the organisations we have funded and the work they’re doing.

Themes:
Healthcare innovation

University of Exeter BCG Trial

As part of a global trial entitled “BCG vaccination to reduce the impact of Covid-19 in healthcare workers (BRACE)”, the University of Exeter is running a UK trial that will recruit 1,000 care workers and community health practitioners.

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Community and environment

Horatio's Garden

Horatio’s Garden is a national charity creating and nurturing beautiful gardens in NHS spinal injury centres to support everyone affected by spinal injury. 

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Learning and education

Bradford Literature Festival

Bradford Literature Festival (BLF) celebrates the spoken word in all its forms through an annual festival held in Bradford, which includes 500 events over 10 days.

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Learning and education

The Economist Educational Foundation

The Economist Educational Foundation aims to enable disadvantaged young people to fulfil their potential through engagement with current affairs. In a world in which the truth is becoming harder to find and young people’s voices are often excluded from debate, it has never been more important to develop news literacy.

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Healthcare innovation

MS Society

The MS Society’s central mission - The Stop MS Appeal - seeks to find effective treatments for the 107,000 people with MS in the UK and the 2.3million people living worldwide who live with this relentless, painful and disabling condition worldwide - the Society seeks to bring an end to MS as we know it.

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Learning and education

King's College London

The chair in Philosophy and Medicine was established to foster a generation of medical students with an interest in the crossover of philosophy and medicine.

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Community and environment

AESOP

AESOP (Arts Enterprise with a Social Purpose), which trains professional dancers to deliver routines designed to prevent falls among the elderly. 

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Community and environment

Yorkshire Arboretum

Yorkshire Arboretum is a stunning landscape of parkland, lakes and ponds is the backdrop for a collection of more than 6,000 trees from around the world

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Community and environment

Shared Assets

Shared Assets believe that land is a common good that should deliver shared benefits for everyone. They've created a free-to-use map-based platform that will help people who are trying to use land for the common good.

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Community and environment

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The Foundation has renewed the Ann Sowerby fellowship for Dr Hauke Koch, with a grant of £223,790 over three years to continue Kew’s influential studies into the effect of plant chemicals in nectar and pollen on bees.

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