Our legacy work

Our legacy objective supports future work, and makes it a part of our mission to build a fair and equitable legacy.

Our mission and heritage

The Foundation’s mission is to help build the foundations of a healthier society. To deliver on that mission, we are committed to exploring our heritage and understanding how it impacts on health inequalities and our work today.

Like many British institutions stretching back to the 16th and 17th centuries, our history is connected to England’s colonial expansion and the trade in enslaved people. Profits from this trade formed the Foundation’s endowment. Information on our project to contextualise the statues of Thomas Guy and Sir Robert Clayton that the Foundation owns is available on our statues page.

Our work to understand our heritage and legacy will build our understanding of how the origins of our wealth have contributed to current inequalities and inequities. We will consider how that might influence our future actions.

Our work to understand our heritage and how it impacts our legacy is part of our wider diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategy. One of our five strategic goals is to clearly articulate the origins of our wealth and decide how this might shape our future actions by 2027.

Our immediate focus is on undertaking further research into the origins of our wealth and work with others to understand how our heritage might support us to do things differently.

The Associates programme

Our Associate’s programme is an important part of the Foundation’s commitment to being a more inclusive, equitable and diverse employer and organisation. It forms part of our DEI Legacy workstream, which aims to build a fairer future for communities in the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark.

Consisting of apprenticeship, internship, and placement programmes, our Associates programme aims to nurture a diverse pipeline of talent and encourage people from a range of different backgrounds into the Foundation and the sector as a whole. As a place-based foundation, we have a strong focus on people with the contextual understanding and experience of the inequalities we aim to address and the communities within Lambeth and Southwark.

More about us

Diversity, equity and inclusion

We believe better health for all is within our reach and by becoming a more diverse, equitable and inclusive organisation together we can achieve this.

Children at play mural near Stockwell Park

Our history

In a place that combines enduring inequalities and solutions that have shaped the world, we’ve been a constant at the leading edge of health.

Working here

Together, we want to build the foundations of a society where everyone can stay healthier for longer.