LH Speech for MCF Members’ Meeting on 12 December 2018

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Ladies, Gentlemen and Brethren, good afternoon.

At our Members’ Meeting in the summer I spoke about the MCF values and

how these had been reflected in our activities since the MCF was created in

April 2016.

Today I have the great pleasure of launching our 2017/2018 Impact Report,

which focusses on the significant charitable achievements of Freemasonry,

through the MCF, over the last year. At the end of this meeting you will all

receive your own personal copy of our Impact Report, which is hot off the

press and I hope that you will share in our pride in what we have achieved

together. I particularly emphasise the word “together” as nothing that we do

would be possible without the fantastic support of the wider Masonic

community the primary reason for our existence. Our Provincial Almoners

and Charity Stewards, Communication Officers, Festival Committees,

Visiting Volunteers, family, friends and particularly our Members play a very

significant part in what we do and today it is only right that we should

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celebrate our success together. When you return to your respective

Provinces, please pass on our thanks to all those who contribute so much

on a daily basis.

In my short slot today I would like to share with you just some of the

highlights that you will find in your printed Impact Report. These are

captured in three distinct sections, our reach, the way we work and what we

have given and I hope they will show to you what a busy period it has been

and just how much has been achieved.

Taking these sections in turn,

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Together we have reached more people

As a new charity one of our aims for the first few years was to make sure

people knew who we were and how to contact us for support and services.

Through events, social media activities and our magazine Better Lives we

have worked hard to make sure Freemasons and their families know where

to turn for help.

Over the last year our enquiries team received no fewer than 9,380 calls

and emails from Masonic families, an 85% increase on the year before. In

October and November this year we continued to see record numbers of

enquiries, twice exceeding 1,100. Clearly this part of our communication

strategy is working. Our circulation of Better Lives continues to grow and

the circulation is now over 90,000. Up 10,000 from when I spoke to you in

the summer.

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Perhaps one of our biggest achievements last year was the Community

Awards, which enabled us to involve the public in in our grant making for the

first time ever.

During the voting window, over 3,000 votes were cast each day, 87% of

those voting were from the general public and almost 7,000 of these wanted

to learn more about Freemasonry. Our small contribution towards the

UGLE recruitment strategy, we hope!

The level of media coverage around the Community Awards was

unprecedented we estimate that our reach was in the millions and can only

have had a positive effect.

In the months that followed the awards, Freemasons across the country

visited each of the 300 charities to celebrate the Community Awards and

learn about the difference Masonic funding will make to their work. There is

no doubt that the MCF Community Awards have helped to build a better

understanding of the charitable nature of Freemasonry and this is something

we will continue to build upon through our ongoing charity grants

programmes. It is an interesting fact that last year we achieved 647

separate newspaper articles, reaching an estimated audience of 7.75 million

and in 2018 news about charity accounted for 50% of all media coverage

relating to Freemasonry. Together we are definitely getting the message

out!

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Together we have improved the way we work

One of our stated aims for the year was to improve the way that we work for

the benefit of the people we support. We started by introducing new training

courses for staff, including a variety of modules delivered through our e-

learning platform. We have upskilled in terms of GDPR, safeguarding,

health and safety and fire safety. We have further developed our grant

making system GAMES to help us process applications more quickly and

this now includes electronic data and record management to help ensure

that the information we capture is held correctly.

We also commenced the full roll-out of our Visiting Volunteer programme. A

new approach to completing applications for support which sees trained

volunteers across England and Wales visit applicants at home to make sure

the necessary information is collected to complete applications . This new

approach was piloted in 2016 and proved successful. By April 2018 we had

recruited 341 Volunteers in 36 Provinces and over the year these volunteers

made 1,343 home visits to help complete applications for support. Visiting

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Volunteers are now active in all but one Province and the scheme has been

a great success.

Last year, we undertook our first beneficiary survey to learn more about the

difference our grants and support services have made to those that we have

helped. The outcomes were extremely positive and we hope to build upon

them over the coming years to further improve the way we support and the

impact we have.

We were particularly pleased to note that 96% of our beneficiaries were

satisfied with the amount of support they received and interestingly 71% of

our beneficiaries reported that their grant had had a positive impact on

someone other than themselves, for instance a family member. Providing us

with an even bigger impact than we envisaged.

We have received equally positive feedback from the residents and family of

our RMBI Care Homes and have recently received some excellent news

from CQC, but I will leave Sir Paul to say more about this later.

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Finally, Together we have given more

Last year, the £3M awarded through the Community Awards was in addition

to the £5.5M awarded to charities through our core programmes, which

tackles some of society’s most important issues. Over the last 40 years,

Freemasonry has provided over £130M to local and national charities

through the MCF and the charities that preceded it.

You may be surprised to learn that we received 4,116 enquiries, about 17

per day, which resulted in 2,597 separate applications from charities

seeking our support. Each application has to be acknowledged, due

diligence applied and then rigorously assessed. 470 of these applications

were successful, giving an 18% success rate.

In addition, we funded five medical research projects, 24 air ambulance and

research services and 253 hospices. You are no doubt aware, we have

made changes to our hospice programme, enabling us to be more focussed

in the way that we support hospices and major grants were awarded to

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hospices in 13 different Provinces following the first round of applications

which closed earlier this year.

Finally, we provided £155,000 to support disaster relief efforts following

floods in the UK and Sri Lanka and the devastating hurricane in the

Caribbean.

Turning to our support for Masonic families. During the year, over £12.3M

was awarded through 6,762 separate grants. 1,818 families were given

grants to cover essential living costs, 822 young people received

educational grants to help them focus on their studies. 720 grants funded

faster medical treatment for people on long NHS waiting lists. 713 people

received mobility equipment, which meant they could live more independent

lives, 268 people used our counselling service, 54 carers benefitted from

respite care and 1,500 people received quality care in one of our RMBI

homes.

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But we can only do all this because of the extraordinary generosity of

Freemasons and their families. In all there are 28 Masonic Provinces

actively involved in Festival fundraising appeals to fund our work. Almost all

now use the MCF Relief chest Scheme, our free service which helps

masonic groups to raise money for their chosen charitable causes. At year

end, there were 4,794 separate chests. During the year, £10.6M was

donated by Freemasons into Relief Chests. £1.4M was reclaimed from

HMRC in the form of Gift Aid Tax relief and £10.7M was paid out to

charitable causes.

Ladies and Brethren, last year, four Provinces concluded Festival appeals in

support of the legacy charities. The current average per-capital is £648 but

there have been some Provinces that have exceeded the average by some

margin. During the year, almost £9.5M was produced by Festival Provinces,

the single biggest contributor to what we do and to all those involved in

Festival appeals and fundraising more generally, we thank you for what you

are doing.

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Overall, your fundraising efforts, together with our other income sources,

including legacies, have enabled us to make a total of 7,532 grants,

amounting to £20.8M. You may be interested to know that in the league

table of top 300 grant-making Foundations, when looking purely at grants

made, the MCF now stands at No. 33, between the Professional Footballers

Association Charity and the Football Foundation. Our “goal” is to move up

the “league table” to a Premiership position, but this is something we can

tackle in the New Year when hopefully we can have some “extra time” but I

think I will leave the puns there before I am shown a red card!

We did all this whilst managing to maintain our charitable delivery overhead

at 7% and the cost of raising funds at only 8% of total expenditure. This is

only possible because of the massive support that we receive from the

Provinces which makes our job so much easier.

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Ladies and Brethren, each year we conduct a survey on the totality of giving

within Freemasonry. Last year, that figure which includes grants by the

MCF, Provinces and other Orders, stood at a staggering £48.3M of which

approximately 50% has directly benefitted Freemasons and their

dependents and the other 50% has benefited the wider society. Such

philanthropy must eventually reflect well upon Freemasonry. We did this

together and together we should feel very proud.

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Before I conclude:

All being given a copy of the annual report on your way out

This report is supplemented by an impact report website – address on

screen

I’d encourage all of you to have a look, in particular at the page which

shows out impact in your particular Province.

Thank you for listening and Happy Christmas.

Les Hutchinson

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