Every UCL faculty has benefited from philanthropy

Our donors’ interests and philanthropic support extends across the breath of UCL’s research, innovation and education. From responding to immediate need, such as supporting students and academics from Ukraine, to securing longer-term aims such as curing dementia or removing barriers to higher education, philanthropic donations have enabled every UCL faculty to meet challenges and maximise opportunities for our students, our staff and the communities we work with.

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth Concentration, Inequality and the Economy

Societal concerns over wealth inequality have never been greater. The mission of the Stone Centre, founded at UCL in 2021 thanks to a gift from first-time UCL donors Jim and Cathy Stone, will be to advance research and teaching to provide a clear understanding of the causes of wealth inequality and its economic and political consequences.

The gift will support the existing Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project and fund research and education initiatives, creating a global hub that will transform economics education.

Benefits from the Centre’s work will extend beyond the social sciences, with implications for teaching and research in a large number of disciplines, including Political Science, Geography, Education, Built Environment, Public Health, History, Ethics and Area Studies.

The Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment Fund

Through a generous gift, left to UCL by Lord Randolph Quirk in his will in 2019, we have established The Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment Fund, which in 2021-22 has funded staff and students in the Department of English Language and Literature, The School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and The Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).

In April 2022, the Quirk Visiting Fellow joined UCL through the UCL Academic Sanctuary Fellowship Scheme. In September 2022, Dr Guyanne Wilson took up the Quirk Lectureship in English Linguistics. Three Wolfson-Quirk scholars in the Humanities are also currently being supported by the Fund, in recognition of Lord Quirk’s long-standing connection with both UCL and with the Wolfson Foundation, another of our philanthropic partners.

Empire, Migration and Belonging

A new, philanthropically funded project between academics in IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society and the University of Oxford will illuminate our understanding of how the histories of empire, migration and belonging are encountered by young people in England and how teachers approach these topics in their classrooms.

Pears Foundation provided a grant to UCL in 2021 to fund ‘A portrait of the teaching of Empire, Migration and Belonging in English secondary schools’ - a three-year research project that will help inform any subsequent recommendations for further professional development provision for teachers. This grant follows a number of previous grants made by Pears Foundation across UCL, including grants to support the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and the Centre for Research in Autism and Education.