The opaque charity funding St Anne’s new scholarship

Cherwell has conducted an investigation into the charity which jointly administers the Tikvah scholarship with St Anne’s College. The income of the charity, Leg-Up Charity for Kids (LUCK), dwarfs its expenditure. Cherwell can also reveal that there is no evidence that St Anne’s was involved in the alumnae fundraising process, despite claims otherwise.  St Anne’s College recently launched the Tikvah scholarships, meaning “hope” in Hebrew, in order to “support Jewish and Israeli students in Oxford”, and to foster “greater understanding between people of different faiths and cultures”. 

The Tikvah scholarships were announced last August and beginning in the 2025/26 academic year. St Anne’s told Cherwell that “four … students have been awarded” scholarships this year, each receiving £5,000 for the academic year. The College states that they “are designed to support Jewish and/or Israeli (of any or no faith) undergraduates”. It also requires the candidates to write a personal statement which would “demonstrate a clear plan to give back to Jewish or Israeli communities”.

Opaque funding

Very little information is publicly available about the charity which provides for the scholarships. The Tikvah scholarships are jointly administered by St Anne’s and Leg-Up Charity for Kids (LUCK), which lists its charitable purpose as “the advancement of education of students” and “relief of those who are in need by reason of their youth, age, ill-health or disability, financial hardship/other disadvantage”. It has a very limited online presence, with no website or social media pages.

LUCK was established in December 2021 and has more than doubled its assets in two years, going from £199,000 in 2023 to £449,000 in 2024, in most part due to £210,000 received in donations during the period. However, it has only distributed a handful of education grants since its founding – just £2,830 in the last financial year, and a single school scholarship in the North East of England the year before.

In 2024, it distributed £5,901 in donations, amounting to less than 1.5% of its total assets. It is unclear whether the donation income came from St Anne’s alumnae, as the college suggests, or whether LUCK plans to increase its grant amounts in the future. LUCK did not respond to Cherwell’s request for comment.

The address where the LUCK charity is registered in London is home to over 52 companies, including 3 in liquidation and 17 dormant ones – a dormant company is a registered business which does not actively conduct business activities, and which has limited filing obligations to HMRC. The same address is shared by the accountants that certified LUCK’s accounts in 2024.

Trustee involvement with college

Cherwell has also found irregularities in the charity trustees’ dealings with St Anne’s College. The same individuals running the charity that finances the Tikvah scholarships are also in managerial positions – and one a company director – at Alfreton Capital. 

LUCK has three trustees, who are individuals that run the charity and are legally responsible for it. Two out of three trustees at LUCK, Andrea Morall and Natalie Abraham, are in leadership positions at Alfreton Capital – respectively as CEO and Director. The company is an investment management firm for long-term endowments and charitable foundations, which offers internships for students at St Anne’s.

Since Cherwell initially contacted St Anne’s regarding the scholarships in August, the college has removed all references to the Alferton Capital internship scheme from their website. Other internships that are currently available retain their page on St Anne’s website, so it is unclear whether the internship scheme has been discontinued since August. 

St Anne’s told Cherwell: “Annually the information on the College website is updated as a matter of course to show the internships available that year.” However, other discontinued internships are still publicly advertised, stating that they are “unfortunately … no longer available”.

A spokesperson for St Anne’s told Cherwell that the scholarships are “unrelated to other programmes or internships” and that there are “no conflicts of interest” involved. The scholarships are awarded by a panel of College trustees with no external involvement in the selection process. 

Communication with alumnae

The Tikvah page states that “St Anne’s alumnae and others have generously donated to LUCK to establish these scholarships”. However, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by Cherwell demonstrates that St Anne’s had no involvement in the fundraising process for the Tikvah scholarships.

The College’s response to the FOI stated “that there are no communications sent by the College to alumnae that mention The Tikvah Scholarship scheme or opportunities to donate via Leg Up For Kids (LUCK)”. It is therefore unclear how St Anne’s alumnae would have been made aware of the opportunity to donate to LUCK given the charity’s lack of online and public presence. 

St Anne’s declined to share correspondence between the College and LUCK, or any records of agreements between the two parties, citing concerns that it would “inhibit the free and frank provision of advice” under section 36 of the FOI Act.

St Anne’s later told Cherwell that “donations to LUCK were made independently by alumnae and others through their own networks and were not solicited by the College”.

Lobbying from a Tory MP

According to St Anne’s the scholarships came to be as a result of individuals supporting LUCK and asking the College to establish these programmes. The College spokesperson told Cherwell: “When the scholarships were first proposed by LUCK, a number of individuals wrote to the Principal in support of the proposal, including Oliver Dowden”. 

Dowden wrote in an opinion piece for Jewish News that “[h]aving lobbied Helen King QPM, Principal of St Anne’s College to back them, [he] was absolutely thrilled to see the recent announcement”. Dowden is not an alumnus of Oxford University. Cherwell approached Dowden for comment.

Dowden is a former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister, who voted against ceasefire in Gaza and claimed he was worried about Lammy pledging to comply with the ICC arrest order for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He claims to “stand firm against the scourge of antisemitism” by campaigning to “ban public bodies from imposing divisive [BDS] campaigns against foreign countries, which invariably target the state of Israel”. LUCK is based in Dowden’s constituency of Hertsmere.

Alongside Dowden, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a charity “dedicated to exposing and countering antisemitism”, said in a public statement that it is “proud to have advised the charity that is financing [Tikvah Scholarship]”. CAA has faced criticism in the past from Jewish groups for conflating criticism of Israel’s actions with antisemitism. 

A number of MPs have previously raised concerns about CAA’s political activity, and it was under investigation by the Charity Commission for “political partisanship”, though the case was dropped in 2024. Baroness Hodge, a Jewish and Labour parliamentarian, accused the CAA of being “more concerned with undermining Labour than rooting out antisemitism”. Charity regulations state that “an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political”.

Reactions

On its launch in August last year, former Principal of St Anne’s Ruth Deech came out in support of the scholarships. Deech served as head of college until 2004, and is currently chair of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC). She told Cherwell that “the new [scholarships] at St Anne’s fill a gap left by many [other] scholarships in colleges”.

Deech is a patron of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), an organisation that campaigns to “support Israel, Israeli organisations, Israelis, and/or supporters of Israel against BDS and other attempts to undermine, attack or delegitimise them”. UKLFI faced criticism last year when its Chief Executive Jonathan Turner suggested that Gaza starvation may “increase life expectancy by reducing obesity”. Its charitable arm is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission.

Regarding Deech’s involvement, Anne’s College spokesperson told Cherwell: “The decision to proceed was made independently by the College’s trustees in accordance with its established processes. Baroness Deech has not been involved.”

Speaking about the scholarships, a student at St Anne’s told Cherwell: “I think the most relevant thing I can say is that I am Jewish, so I would have qualified, and really could have used the money, but I chose not to apply. I thought about [it] and couldn’t, in good conscience, take that money … It’s a statement more than anything – and a statement I don’t want to be a part of.”

In 2024, over 100 students signed an open letter expressing disappointment in the Principal of St Anne’s, Helen King, for signing a University statement on pro-Palestine protests. She was one of only three college heads to sign the statement, which she did in her capacity as Chair of the University Security Subcommittee. 

Then in June 2024, St Anne’s JCR passed a motion condemning “the ongoing genocide within Palestine being carried out by the Israeli government” and expressing support for the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) encampment. It demanded that the University and College make “progress towards full divestment” from companies and institutions with ties to Israel.

In response, over 60 alumni signed a letter criticising the motion for “the absence of any condemnation of Hamas”, and calling on the College to release a “public statement highlighting that this motion reflects the view of the voting members of the JCR only and does not reflect the view of the College or alumni… college members hold a range of views… Israeli and Jewish students are welcome at St Anne’s”.

The Oxford Jewish Society, the Jewish Student Solidarity campaign, and OA4P were approached for comment.

Other scholarships

Individual colleges and the University offer a variety of scholarships for students based on characteristics like nationality and religion. A spokesperson for the St Anne’s told Cherwell that the scholarships are designed to “signal clearly to prospective applicants from all backgrounds, including Jewish and Israeli students, that they are welcome at St Anne’s”. They added that “the scholarships will only be awarded after the commencement of a course of study and will have no bearing on admissions decisions”.

According to St Anne’s, the scholarships were designed to avoid conflating Jewish and Israeli identities. A College spokesperson told Cherwell that they are “open to, for example, students of Israeli nationality who may be Muslim, Christian or non-religious… It is precisely because Jewish and Israeli identities are not inseparable that the eligibility criteria have been elaborated in this way”. Reuben College also offers another scholarship for Israeli graduate students, established by the Reuben Foundation.

Oxford also runs the Palestine Crisis Scholarship scheme, which provides full graduate scholarships to students displaced by the war in Gaza and the West Bank. Several scholars from Gaza arrived in Oxford in October through this scheme. This occurred after a protracted struggle to acquire visas for the scholars, after the only UK-authorised biometric centre closed in October 2023 following the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza.

The scheme faced criticism from a member of OA4P who worked with the University on the scholarships, arguing that its postgraduate criteria “does not support students who never had the chance to go to university, or undergraduates whose studies have been interrupted”.

Cherwell recently uncovered a University scholarship tied to Russian shell companies, with around ten scholarships per year handed out even since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Hill Foundation scholarship, which has supported 56 graduate scholars over the past 5 years, states in its eligibility criteria that students should intend to leave the UK upon completing their degree.

A 2024 Cherwell investigation also revealed that the University continues to offer a scholarship requiring its recipients’ “support of the leadership of the Communist Party of China”, despite multiple other universities cutting ties with China Scholarship Council’s schemes.