How a small foundation will work: local first, and a failure report

Oriel will be a small foundation. We will not run schools ourselves, and we will not fly in with a programme designed somewhere else. Our work will be to find people who are already doing good work with children, back them steadily, and show everyone what happened. This column is about how we plan to do that, and why we have decided to publish our failures as well as our results.

The money rarely reaches the people closest to the work

In 2016, the large donors and agencies that signed the humanitarian Grand Bargain committed to send 25% of global humanitarian funding to local and national responders "as directly as possible". In 2025, the share that actually went to them directly was 4.3%, up slightly from 3.9% in 2024 (Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026, via ALNAP).

Humanitarian aid is not the same as education work, and Oriel is far smaller than the agencies in that count. But the pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched aid up close. The teachers, parents and community groups who know a place best are often the last in line, and the first to carry the risk.

How we plan to choose and trust partners

We will start the other way round. Our partner page sets out the steps, and three choices sit underneath them.

1. Local people lead. We look for groups already working with children in their own community, led by people who live there. They propose the programme; we do not hand them one.
2. Small and staged. One partner, one small programme, one simple measure of success, agreed in writing. Funds go out in stages, each with a receipt on our public record. A second partner comes only after the first year works.
3. Trust is built in both directions. We will ask partners for a safeguarding policy, or offer to write one together. In return, we owe them steady support they can plan around, not a burst of money that disappears after one good photo.

None of this makes us immune to mistakes. A partner may be the wrong fit. A programme may look good on paper and fail in a classroom. We will misjudge something, probably more than once.

Why we will publish a failure report

Since 2008, Engineers Without Borders Canada has published reports on what went wrong in its own development projects, as a tool to learn from mistakes on the ground (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2011). When the 2011 report came out, the idea was seen as brave, partly because it handed sceptics of aid something to quote (Devex, January 2011).

We think the risk is worth it for a foundation like ours. Our whole promise is glass for giving: that anyone can check what happened to a gift. A ledger that only ever shows successes is not glass. It is a shop window.

So we plan to keep two habits from the start. Every quarterly report will include a short section called "What did not work", in plain English and Korean. And once a year, we plan to publish a failure report of our own: what we got wrong, what it cost, what we changed, and what our partners told us we should have done differently. Partners will see it before it goes out, and nothing in it will identify a child.

Where we are now

We are still preparing to launch in January 2027 and are not taking donations. Our next ledger block, planned for November, includes a shortlist of local partners. When that list exists, we will explain on this site how we built it, and why some good organisations were not on it.