Philanthropy is most effective when it inspires others to give. That is the central insight behind match funding: the idea that a single pound committed in advance can unlock far more than its face value by motivating public generosity that might otherwise never materialise. It is a model built on trust, collaboration, and a belief that institutional donors can act as a catalyst rather than simply a source of funds.
For Michael Shanly, chairman of the Shanly Foundation, participation in the Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025 as a Champion Funder is a logical expression of a philanthropic philosophy he has spent more than three decades refining. For decades, Shanly has consistently match funded to help others who help themselves and in turn maximised their impact. By offering funds if they can go out and source equal donations themselves, Shanly helps the charity to expand their reach, accelerate growth, and boost confidence from donors and partners.
Match funding — with its emphasis on leverage, partnership, and multiplying the impact of every pound — sits perfectly with Shanly’s own values.
The UK’s Largest Public Fundraiser
The Big Give Christmas Challenge has grown significantly since its founding in 2007, but 2025 marked a new high watermark. Running from 2nd to 9th December, the week-long campaign supported a record 1,591 charities and raised £57.4 million in just seven days — making it the UK’s largest public fundraiser of the year, surpassing campaigns as well-established as Children in Need and Comic Relief. Its scale reflects not only the generosity of donors, but the distinctive mechanism that drives it.
The mechanism works in stages. A participating charity sets a fundraising target and is matched with a Champion Funder — such as the Shanly Foundation — who pledges 25 per cent of that target. The charity must then go out to its own supporter network to raise a further 25 per cent. Once that threshold is met, the campaign opens to the wider public to cover the remaining 50 per cent. Many charities go on to exceed their original targets when public generosity takes hold. In 2025, Champions contributed £25.8 million in aggregate, drawing in a further £31.6 million from over 152,000 public donors across the seven days.
The Shanly Foundation partnered with the Big Give alongside some of the most respected names in UK philanthropy, including The Reed Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, and the AKO Foundation. Sitting in that company is not merely a matter of prestige — it reflects a deliberate and criteria-led selection process. The Shanly Foundation provides Big Give with details of the types of charities it wishes to support; Big Give then returns a shortlist of organisations matching those requirements, many of them working locally in precisely the communities Michael Shanly has always sought to serve.
Where the Money Went
Campaign totals only tell part of the story. The real measure of any philanthropic effort lies in what it enables at a community level — the services delivered, the individuals reached, the gaps quietly filled. Two charities championed by the Shanly Foundation at Christmas 2025 illustrate this clearly.
In Reading, No5 provides free counselling to young people who would otherwise face significant barriers to accessing mental health support. With the support of Shanly Foundation and through the Big Give’s Christmas Challenge campaign the charity managed to exceed their target of £42,000,. The result is that the charity can continue to provide vital counselling sessions at a moment when demand for young people’s mental health services has rarely been higher.
In Surrey and Croydon, Stripey Stork works to provide essential items — clothing, bedding, and equipment — to children experiencing hardship. The charity had set an ambitious fundraising target centred on its winter warmth programme. The Shanly Foundation was its Champion Funder which enabled the charity to raise above their £108,000 target. That funding will directly support the charity’s work ensuring children have warm, safe sleeping conditions throughout 2026.
These are not headline-grabbing initiatives. They are quiet, practical interventions in the lives of people who need help most — which is precisely the territory Michael Shanly’s philanthropic instincts have always drawn him towards.
Building a Legacy Beyond the Balance Sheet
The Shanly Foundation’s role in the Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025 sits within a broader picture of long-term ambition. In 2024, Michael Shanly finalised plans for the Foundation to eventually assume full ownership of Shanly Homes and Sorbon Estates — his two principal trading businesses. Under this model, the profits those companies generate would be formally and permanently committed to charitable work — secured in perpetuity through the foundation ownership structure — creating a self-sustaining engine for philanthropic giving that will outlast any single campaign or donation cycle.
It is a pioneering approach in the UK, and one that reframes the Shanly Foundation’s relationship to the businesses that fund it. Rather than philanthropy existing alongside commercial success, it becomes its ultimate purpose — the destination to which decades of building, developing, and investing have always been leading.
Against that backdrop, the Christmas Challenge reads as more than a seasonal fundraising exercise. It is Michael Shanly demonstrating, in practical terms, how charitable capital can be made to work harder — by supporting the right organisations, and doing it in a way that funds can be maximised to good use. In a charitable landscape often crowded with gesture and announcement, it is a quietly effective way to make a meaningful difference.
