About

The Indigo Trust is a grant making foundation that funds technology-driven projects to bring about social change, largely in African countries.  The Trust focuses mainly on innovation, transparency and citizen empowerment. We will also consider innovative projects, which utilise Information Technologies to support development outcomes in any sector including the health, education, human rights and agricultural spheres.

The Indigo Trust makes grants to African projects or programmes, or to organisations which operate at least partly in African countries. We believe that if people have
the ability to access, share and create information, then they are empowered to
make positive changes in their own lives and communities.

Indigo’s charity number is 1075920 and the annual report is available here: Indigo Trust Annual report – 5 April 2010.

The Indigo Trust is part of The Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts (SFCT).  SFCT is the operating office of 18 grant-making trusts established by three generations of the Sainsbury family. The trusts’ donations to charitable causes over several decades represent one of the leading examples of sustained philanthropy in Britain.

Each trust works autonomously as an independent legal entity with a separate board of trustees, actively led by an individual member of the family with keenly-followed interests.  The trusts share office space and some administrative functions, however, each trust has its own unique philosophy, vision, mission and ways of working.  Different trusts may collaborate in some instances, to share expertise and where their strategies coincide, but in most cases, The Indigo Trust operates independently to other family trusts.

Trustees

Fran Perrin is Chair of the Trustees of ‘The Indigo Trust’ which she established in 1999 and now runs with her husband William. The Indigo Trust aims to help the most disadvantaged with innovative solutions to social problems. The Trust focuses on the impact and potential of the internet in the developing world. Fran was formerly an advisor at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the UK Cabinet Office, and Senior Researcher at the think tank Policy Network. She now specialises in social media campaigning. Fran is also a Board Member for the Institute for Philanthropy.

William Perrin is the founder of talk about local a unique public service project (funded by Channel4 and Screen West Midlands) to give people in deprived or isolated communities an online voice they own and run.  He has a long track record of community action in London’s deprived Kings Cross neighbourhood.  When in the UK civil service, William was Tony Blair’s technology policy advisor in Downing Street, co-authored the ‘Transformational Government’ strategy, commissioned the 2007 Power of Information Review with Fran, was Secretary to the Power of Information Taskforce, ran ‘Show us a Better Way’ one of the first open data competitions and was Chair of the OECD expert group on e-government.