Our approach

The Mount Street Club Trust of today builds on decades of knowledge, is inspired by the legacy of the founding members, and knows the value of acting with integrity and autonomy.

In 2019, the Trustees undertook a strategic review of the Trust, its activities and its ambitions for the next ten years. What emerged was an overarching desire to support work aimed at ending injustice, inequality and poverty, and a clear set of aspirations for how the Trustees wanted to steer the Trust and allocate funding:

• Amplify the power of trust in making relationships that shape new bonds between people and across communities.  

• Promote the practice of trust-based philanthropy to facilitate ways that work better to address the effects of poverty, exclusion and disadvantage. 

• Build on the Mount Street Club tradition of promoting independence and autonomy by giving a ‘hand up’ instead of a ‘hand out’ and now commit to offering the hand of friendship and collaboration as a ‘hand with’. 

• Undertake to continually question how systems perpetuate oppression and make that visible from lived experience, so as to avoid making the situation worse for organisations and activists working on issues of social justice.

• Embrace solution finding as an active and responsive process, encouraging conversations, diversity, new ideas and the confidence to question received thinking.

These five tenets are the foundation of Hope & Ambition, the Trust’s current development initiative.