Martin Lewis: What happened to my pledge to give £10m to charity – 2022/23 update (spoiler: it's now £20m)

Where the money has gone so far... the big projects

1. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute: £3.87m (around £500,000 funding a year – I've pledged to core-fund for at least the next two years). I set up the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI) charity in 2016 and still chair its impressive board of trustees.
   
   Its core job is to research and advocate non-partisan practical policy change at government, regulators and companies to break the toxic link between mental health issues and debt. (We need those with lived experience to help hone policies. Please do consider volunteering here.)
   
   The donation mainly funds 17 permanent members of staff – who are all passionate about the subject and brilliant at what they do. Changes from gambling blocks on credit and debit cards, to debt breathing space, and improvements in how firms treat those with mental health are directly due to the charity. See MMHPI's impact report for more.
   
   
2. The 'Martin Lewis Coronavirus Poverty Fund': £3.4m (£2.1m from me, £1.3m raised from others). In March 2020, my aims were simple...
   
   - To provide urgent relief to those struggling due to the pandemic.
   - To use my profile to bring in other donations (started before the official fundraising scheme was in place).
   - To do this via small charities, in order to help them survive too – including food banks, domestic abuse charities, cancer groups and more.
   
   At the final tally, I'd put £2.1m in and wonderfully, after asking others with deep pockets to join, they added £1.3m, all of which meant 415 small charities received an average of £8,000 each at speed.
   
   For full details, including a breakdown of where the money went and how we decided, see my Covid poverty fund – where the money went blog.
   
   NB: While the external donations technically went to my charity fund, so they could be paid out, I haven't included them in the fund total at the blog's start.
   
   
3. Financial education in schools (including textbook): £1.76m. Financial education has long been a campaigning priority for me. I worked with the Young Money charity (Pfeg as was) in our successful campaign to get financial education on the English national curriculum in 2014. So the charity seemed a natural partner, and we've done a number of projects...
   
   - Funding My Money Week from 2016 to 2018, so children in all UK schools get access to free resources and education on managing money.
   - Funding and developing the first curriculum-mapped financial education textbook, and sending 340,000 of them to all English state schools (100 per school). Click for a free PDF download.
   - Joint 50-50 funding with the UK's official Money and Pensions Service, which agreed to go halves with me on the additional costs to then do textbooks. for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with each of us putting in £162,000.
   - To go with the textbook, funding a new teachers' digital e-learning pack to help teachers learn to teach it.
   - This year, I've funded an extra pilot project to work out if we can reversion the textbook into a guide for adults too. When I get the results I'll decide whether we should do that, and it will of course be available for free.
   
   
4. Citizens Advice UK: £2m. Two £1m donations in 2012 and 2015 split across UK nations in proportion to population. I did this partly as I love Citizens Advice's voluntary ethos, but also to expose that debt-counselling funding had been cut by the Government in the recession.
   
   With the second donation, I was delighted they used the money in England to set up the Martin Lewis Citizens Advice Fund (its choice of name, not mine), giving local branches innovation grants to develop new digital and other ways to reach and help more people – which hopefully has paid dividends during the pandemic.
   
   
5. Trussell Trust: £650,000. The bulk of this money was for the Trussell Trust to first pilot, then in 2015 roll out, putting financial triage in food banks (see this Trussell Trust release). Part of the idea was to see if the concept worked so that the food banks could then engage councils and other community stakeholders to do it everywhere. It did work.
   
   Then this Christmas, I also funded a straight £50,000 donation towards food poverty, in light of the terrible cost of living crisis.
   
   
6. Grief Encounter (helpline): £206,000. Grief Encounter provides grief counselling and help for children who have lost a parent (or sibling). While I normally focus on charities within my expertise, as those who have heard/seen my 2018 Radio 5 Live interview will know, this is something that resonates with me.
   
   I was already a patron of the charity when a couple of years ago they mentioned the idea of a helpline so children who were struggling had someone they could call. It struck a chord. I wished I'd had such a service, so I agreed to fund setting it up and running a year.
   
   As that year ended, Covid hit, demand went up, but funding opportunities elsewhere disappeared, so I agreed to fund a second year to keep it going.
   
   
7. The MSE Charity: £386,000. This is the total of my personal donation(s) to the MSE Charity since 2012. I set the charity up in 2007 to give grants to small charities working in consumer education or financial empowerment.
   
   This money is separate from MSE's (ie, my) donations before 2012 and MSE's (ie, Moneysupermarket Group's) donations since. In total, they add up to a further £1.15m (again this isn't included in my charity fund totals at the top, as it is from a different source).
   
   
8. The mortgage prisoners campaign: £60,000. To write now three LSE mortgage prisoners reports, to provide policy solutions to help the 200,000 people unjustly, desperately and life debilitatingly trapped in closed-book mortgages due to the financial crash. The last report is due out imminently and includes the costings the Government asked for before it could consider our policy suggestions. I just hope it listens.
   
   
9. This one's a cheat. £3m to set up Citizens Advice Scams Action (not my money). In 2018, I started a campaigning lawsuit against Facebook for defamation after it kept publishing huge numbers of scam ads with my name and image in. In 2019, I dropped the case, and as part of the settlement it agreed to donate £3m to set up a new anti-scam wing of Citizens Advice, and launch a scam ad reporting tool unique to the UK. For more, see Martin Lewis in possibly record settlement with Facebook.
   
   The last time I wrote this blog, I said: "I'm delighted this year that we also succeeded in persuading/pushing the Government to change its mind and include scam ads in the Online Safety Bill." This year, frustratingly we're still waiting for this law to be put through, meanwhile scam ads on social media, including on Facebook, only get worse.
   
   NB: Clearly this Facebook money isn't included in the funds I've noted above, but in my head it fits within similar aims.

Where else money has gone, other projects...

• £110,000 to Demos to fund a digital democracy toolkit, to allow policy suggestions to be worked on with the general public rather than just policy wonks.
• £100,000 to Mind for mental health work.
• £100,000 to National Energy Action to fund a new web chat service in time for the 1 April 2022 54% price hike – in order to relieve pressure on its oversubscribed phone lines.
• £115,000 to the Support Through Court helpline. I'd been a patron of this charity which helps those having to represent themselves in the civil or family courts (due to terrible legal aid cuts). Then Covid hit and its helpline funding ran dry, so I stepped in to help for the year.
• £147,500 to Money Buddies, a Leeds-based financial help counselling charity.
• £45,000 to the John Schofield Trust to support mentoring, to improve the range of voices in my industry, broadcast journalism, so it's not just those who know someone who get the help.
• £35,000 to First Light Trust for financial triage and drug help for military veterans.
• £20,000 to the RNIB to support those who have just lost their sight to manage their financial lives.
• £16,000 to fund the Alzheimer's Society financial services charter.
• £10,000 to Winston's Wish to help children and young people who have lost a parent.
• £8,000 to CILIP to write and publish the A warm welcome: Setting up a warm space in your community report.

There are a substantial number of donations below £8,000 too, but I think that is a good cut-off point.