People and culture at CIFF
2025 was a landmark year for CIFF, we made over US$1.45 billion in charitable commitments, the highest in our history, against a backdrop of significant change – both within CIFF and in relation to the external context. Achieving this scale required extraordinary efforts across every team, and ensuring that our people continue to be best enabled to do this was a key people priority. We embedded the 2024 individual and team moves directly impacting 70% of our teams with significant skills building and a shift in delivering our 2-year strategic scaling change plan, whilst holding our core establishment stable.
Strategic scaling through our people workstream of our continuous improvement agenda
In delivering the ‘people’ workstream of our continuous improvement agenda, we continued our focus on the three core pillars of this workstream, empowering our talent; ensuring effective and efficient resourcing; and capability and performance.
One pivotal element of this workstream focused on embedding and further resourcing our director cadre as part of our strategic decision to increase the proportion of senior staff, both within our core establishment, and through our periphery model where we bring in senior specialist skills for the short-term to build bench-strength and greater agility in resourcing. This has been achieved through a blended approach (50/50) of recruiting new talent and developing and promoting outstanding senior managers as a critical talent pipeline in CIFF, supported by tailored development on how to best lead and collaborate in an evolving organisational environment.
Continuous improvement through capability building and performance management
For all our staff, focused learning and development (L&D) has continued to be central to how we deliver impact with agility and resilience. Throughout the year, we have continued to roll-out our comprehensive Strategic Scaling L&D plan specifically designed around nine core capabilities to support our shift to strategic scaling in terms of skills and knowledge, with an enhanced focus on learning by doing, supported by new mechanisms for peer learning and knowledge transfer internally. Our streamlined four-goal performance framework is now fully embedded across CIFF, ensuring that everyone understands how their work connects to CIFF’s strategic priorities and what is expected of them.
A people-centric foundation
As an organisation dedicated to creating a world where all children are safe, healthy, and have opportunities to thrive, we want to ensure those values are modelled internally as well as externally. That’s why we focus on treating all members of staff with dignity and respect, and our Leadership Behaviours and Code of Respect are critical in shaping how we work together. As a result, despite 2025 being a demanding year, career satisfaction rates remained high and staff turnover was low. These outcomes reflect the strong people foundations we have built to support our people and enable them to deliver our work in an increasingly volatile and challenging external environment.
