For four years before co-founding Gold Lantern Advisory, I served as Operations Officer for the Hortons Social Purpose Committee — the charitable arm of Hortons' Estate, an independent Birmingham-based property company with roots stretching back to 1821. It was one of the most instructive roles of my career, and it shapes how we advise our clients today.
A company that gives back
Hortons' Estate's charitable activity runs on two tracks. Staff across the business fundraise throughout the year for a chosen annual charity — recent beneficiaries have included Birmingham Children's Hospital, Macmillan Cancer Support, Dementia UK and, in 2025/26, Promise Dreams, a small charity making dreams come true for seriously and terminally ill children. Alongside that, the Hortons Social Purpose Committee makes direct grants to local good causes, and that is where my role sat.
In 2024/25 the committee supported eleven remarkable charities across three areas of need. Six of them — and the majority of the funding — addressed hardship and social exclusion: organisations reaching some of the most deprived communities in Birmingham, offering rehabilitation and second chances to people in crisis, and tackling homelessness at its roots. Three education grants supported pre-school children overcoming pandemic-related developmental delay, brought high-quality performing arts education to young people in deprived areas, and provided bursaries for talented students facing financial barriers. And two arts-based grants countered the decline in music education for underprivileged young people and created opportunities for dancers with severe learning disabilities to showcase their creativity and challenge misconceptions.
Managing the full grant-making process
My role covered the entire lifecycle of a grant. I sourced charities whose work matched the committee's priorities, carried out due diligence on each one — governance, finances, safeguarding, track record — and prepared the cases the committee needed to make decisions. Then, crucially, I built the relationships: visiting projects, meeting the people behind them, and staying in touch long after the cheque was written.
A proposal on paper can only tell you so much. The organisations that truly deliver impact are rarely the ones with the glossiest applications. They're the ones where the leadership knows their community intimately, where the finances are honest rather than polished, and where you can see the difference in people's faces when you visit.
What I took from it
Three lessons from Hortons now sit at the heart of our advisory work. First, due diligence should build confidence, not barriers — it exists so a committee can fund boldly, not so it can say no. Second, relationships are the real infrastructure of grant-making; the committee funded well because it knew the organisations it backed. Third, focus matters. By concentrating on hardship and exclusion, education and the arts, the committee's giving had coherence and cumulative weight rather than being scattered thinly.
My time at Hortons also sat on both sides of the funding relationship. Alongside grant-making I have organised fundraising events for organisations including Amnesty International, Heart n Soul and the Teenage Cancer Trust — so I know what it feels like to make the ask as well as to assess it. That dual perspective is rare, and it's one of the most valuable things we bring to the families, foundations and charities we advise.
If you're thinking about how your own giving — personal, family or corporate — could be more deliberate and more confident, we'd love to talk. Get in touch.
Read more about Hortons' Estate's charity fundraising and grant making on the Hortons website.