James Percy Foundation Home What we do How we work Contact Providing more opportunities to children in disadvantaged environments Our understanding of philanthropy The environment in which you are born and that you grow up in has a huge influence throughout your life. For example, a child born in Switzerland will have a different set of opportunities than a child born in Uganda. Two babies with exactly the same traits will have very different lives depending on the environment in which they grow up. We believe that the world would be fairer if everyone had the same chance of living the life they would like to lead. Our ultimate goal is to reduce the “opportunity gap”: to provide more opportunities to those who are born in disadvantaged environments. The first years of human life are dedicated to learning and acquiring the necessary skills in order to be productive and contribute to society in the future. As people grow up they become financially independent and are more able to make their own decisions as to how they should continue their journey through life (with the opportunities that are available to them). We focus our assistance on the first years of our beneficiaries’ lives, a period in which an individual has less influence on his/her future and a period when it is possible to have a long-term positive impact on a person’s life. For that reason, we focus on interventions that directly or indirectly impact children’s lives. Our interventions We will support interventions that we can understand and evaluate. We will focus on implementing existing solutions and not on researching innovative solutions. Research interventions are outside of our current circle of competence. We will continue to focus on a limited number of issues which enables us to gain a deeper expertise in what we are doing and to have greater impact. We have searched for and reviewed studies which evaluate the effectiveness of different types of intervention in order to find out which interventions work best and subsequently focus our resources on the interventions which are the most effective. The types of intervention we currently support are described in What we do. James Percy Foundation Registered with the Charity Commission 1144494