People occasionally ask why an alternative investment firm bothers running a Foundation properly, rather than writing the odd cheque and putting a line about it on the website. The honest answer is that I don't know how to do anything properly without applying the same discipline I learned assessing investments. That discipline didn't stay in one part of my working life. It shaped how I look at everything, including how we choose which charities to support.
What assessing an investment actually teaches you
Before New Capital Link, my career took a route that wasn't especially linear: time spent in financial services, then Bank of Bullion and Bank FX in Dubai, working with gold-backed products and foreign exchange, alongside years running a tea room in Chelmsford. What all of that had in common, oddly enough, was the same underlying habit: don't take a claim at face value, however good it sounds. Look at the evidence. Check the outcome. Work out whether something actually does what it says it does, not what it's presented as doing.
That habit is second nature in investment work, where an overly confident pitch and a genuinely sound opportunity can look identical on the surface. What surprised me, once we set the Foundation up, was how directly that same habit applied to charitable giving. A cause that sounds compelling and a cause that will actually use support well are not automatically the same thing, and the only way to tell the difference is to look properly.
Why we evaluate causes rather than just respond to them
Every charity we back at New Capital Link Foundation goes through the same kind of scrutiny I'd apply to a potential investment: what specifically are they trying to achieve, what happens if we get involved, and how will we know, concretely, whether it worked. That's not scepticism for its own sake. It's the only way I know to make sure support goes where it will actually count, rather than where the ask happened to land first.
It's part of why the Foundation doesn't accept public donations. We're not built to be a general collection point for goodwill. We back a small number of partnerships deeply, on the same basis I'd back an investment: real due diligence first, then genuine, sustained commitment once we're in.
"The same skills that help us identify strong investments allow us to select impactful charitable partnerships."
— Rachel Buscall, Founder & CEO, New Capital Link
Where that thinking has taken us
It's why we didn't simply write a cheque to a homelessness charity and move on. With CHESS Homeless, we looked at what they were actually short of during a severe cold snap, specialised sleeping bags, and funded exactly that, because it was a concrete, evidenced need rather than a general appeal. It's the same reasoning behind funding computers for an education programme in India: not because technology access sounds like a good cause in the abstract, but because it removed a specific, identifiable obstacle standing between children and their education.
None of that is complicated thinking. It's the same question I'd ask about any investment opportunity, applied somewhere it doesn't normally get applied: does this actually work, and how do we know?
Why this matters to me personally
I didn't found New Capital Link with a five-year plan to build a charitable arm. The Foundation grew out of a simple discomfort with the idea that a business doing well shouldn't also take seriously where its support goes, and a stubborn refusal to treat that support any less rigorously than we treat our core work. Every cause we back gets the same standard I'd want applied if it were my own money going somewhere I couldn't personally check on. Because, in a very direct sense, it is.