Who We Are

The Linbury Trust is a UK-based grant-making foundation; we are part of the wider Sainsbury Family Trust network. You can read more about the Sainsbury Family Trusts here: http://www.sfct.org.uk/

The Linbury Trust was established by Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover KG, and his wife Anya, Lady Sainsbury CBE, the former ballerina, Anya Linden.

The Linbury Trust made its first grant award in 1973 since then has awarded grants across the world. Our Trustees are Mark Sainsbury (Chair), Lady Anya Sainsbury, Sarah Butler-Sloss, Julian Sainsbury, Richard Butler Adams, James Barnard, Emily Stubbs, and Laura Marshall.

How We Work

The Linbury Trust does not accept unsolicited enquiries or applications. We appreciate that a highly competitive open application process can be time consuming for the organisation applying.

Through partnership work and research, we identify organisations we want to work with. We aim to be more conversational than transactional and we invite applications for projects we are interested in supporting. The Linbury Trust has a small and dedicated staff team, and our Trustees meet 4-5 times per year to take the final decisions on which projects to support.

As part of our work in the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust network, we are committed to addressing inequality through our grant making. You can read more about our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion here: Diversity, equity and inclusion – The Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts (sfct.org.uk).  Another shared value is around environmental sustainability and more detail on this work can be found here: Sustainability – The Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts (sfct.org.uk). The Linbury Trust is also a signatory to the Funder Commitment on Climate Change.

What We Fund

We fund charities and charitable organisations and can support core costs and specific activity projects.

Our focus is public engagement with culture, including arts, dance, museums, and heritage, especially when this has benefits such as improved wellbeing and life opportunity. We also support work that improves the choices of people experiencing disadvantage and inequality, including homelessness, and refugees and asylum seekers.

We fund work and projects that helps older people to live well, especially those experiencing isolation and complex health needs.

We help projects that support the environment and climate, and connect people with nature; we also occasionally support work overseas, especially emergency relief.

We rarely support substantive building or capital projects, or arts activity that is performance only.

Recent awards have included English National Ballet who use dance to support people living with Parkinson’s; RefuAid and their ongoing programme supporting refugees to have their professional qualifications accredited in the UK; Horatio’s Garden, funding activities at the garden at the spinal injury unit in Shropshire; and the Museum of Homelessness to establish their site in London and develop their public programme.

360 Giving

The Linbury Trust is committed to transparency and we work with 360Giving to publish information about our grants. Using the 360Giving Data Standard, grants awarded by our Trustees since June 2023 are available as a CSV file here.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This means the data is freely accessible to anyone to be used and shared as they wish. The data must be attributed to The Linbury Trust.

Other Sources of Funding

We are not able to support all the ideas shared with us; there are a variety of resources available that may help you to find a suitable funder for your work.

Finally, if you are searching for funds, a good place to start is to talk to your local Community Foundation, CVS or Council as many offer grants, advice and sources of help.

Please note: The Linbury Trust is not responsible for the content of third party links.