Our history
The Mohn Westlake Foundation was established by Marit Mohn and Stian Westlake in 2016, after the sale of their share in the family company, Frank Mohn AS of Norway. The dual missions of the Foundation; to enhance the lives of children and young people, and advance data transparency, emerged according to the philanthropic passions of Marit, Stian and their family.
Now funded wholly by Marstia Invest AS of Norway, a company owned by Marit and Stian, the Foundation has donated or pledged more than £100 million to charitable causes in the UK. In 2023, Marit was awarded a Damehood for services to philanthropy in the King’s New Year Honours list. The hope and intention of our trustees is for future generations of the family to take the Foundation forward, so it can continue to empower and support essential charity work, long into the future.
Our principles
We know we work with leading experts who are unfalteringly passionate about their causes. That’s why we put real trust in our grantees and often support them with flexible and multi-year funding.
It’s also why when disaster strikes, we don’t simply pull the rug from under those we fund. We’re proud to say that during the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, we provided extra support to all of our grantees. We also removed any funding restrictions to help provide a safety net while they navigated challenging circumstances.
Our achievements
At The Mohn Westlake Foundation, we take real pride in the achievements of the remarkable charities we fund. Some milestones we’ve celebrated include…
Educating
- We were the lead private funder supporting our grantee, the Reach Foundation in the early development and subsequent growth of the Oak National Academy, which protected learning opportunities for children across the UK during the Covid-19 schools lockdown, and which has since become an independent public body supported by the Department for Education. In less than two years Oak National Academy developed 40,000+ resources with the support of 550 teachers and delivered over 150 million lessons in its online classroom.
- We were the lead funder to advance Kingston University’s work on Future Skills and further funded the development of the university’s Centre for Graduate Success.
- We were the first major funder to support the development and roll-out of the Cradle to Career model of the Reach Foundation and it’s Feltham Convening Partnership, through an unusual 7 year grant (2020-2026), which led to the model being replicated by education trusts up and down the country.
Supporting
- Our early grant enabled Mental Health Innovations to launch its crisis text line Shout in 2019, which, since launching, has engaged in more than two million text conversations with 675,000 children, young people and adults in distress
Inspiring
- We are the main funder of the National Theatre’s nationwide learning programmes for Children in schools and Young People.
- We have been a long-standing champion of the Royal Opera House’s education and engagement work with children and young people, with a focus on increasing access and maximising the impact of the Royal Opera House’s work with children and young people nationwide.
Countering
- Our longstanding grantee Full Fact, an organisation devoted to fighting misinformation, was chosen as the first organisation to ever win the prestigious President’s Medal from the British Academy in 2022, a prize normally awarded to individuals.
Innovating
- We supported Imperial College London to develop and launch Invention Rooms, a unique space in White City, where the local community and Imperial College come together to collaborate, innovate and make.
Our Trustees
Marit Mohn DBE
Chair & Co-founder
Marit has degrees in chemical engineering from Leeds University and Imperial College, as well as a law degree from Kingston University. She is a qualified solicitor specialising in civil litigation and has worked in industry in Canada, the USA and the UK. Passionate about performing arts, she is a previous trustee of the Rose Theatre in Kingston and is a current trustee of the National Theatre. She is also the former chair of a London Housing Association.
She is the chair and co-owner of Marstia Invest AS of Norway, which is the sole funder of The Mohn Westlake Foundation. In 2023 Marit was made a Dame in the New Year’s Honours List in recognition of her services to philanthropy.
Stian Westlake
Trustee & Co-founder
Stian is Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council. Before this, he served as Chief Executive of the Royal Statistical Society, as Executive Director of Policy and Research at Nesta, as lead adviser to three UK science ministers and as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He is co-author of two books about the economics of innovation, “Capitalism Without Capital” (2017) and “Restarting the Future” (2022). He also serves as a Trustee of Two Magpies Fund, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Market Research Society.
Robert Westlake
Trustee
Robert Westlake is a Chartered Occupational and Counselling Psychologist. Following working in both the UK and USA, in 1985 he formed a company providing employee assistance programmes (EAPs) and psychological services to some of the UKs leading organisations, eventually going on to sell the company in 2008. He then sat as a Magistrate in Westminster between 2008 and 2019.
Diana Gerald MBE
Trustee
Diana is the CEO of BookTrust, the UK’s largest children’s reading charity whose mission is to get children from low-income and vulnerable family backgrounds reading regularly and by choice, with a focus on the early years. Diana is also Deputy Chair of Creative Education Trust, a network of schools in disadvantaged areas of the Midlands and East of England, and Chair of the Bentley Wood Trust, which includes an Ofsted outstanding secondary school. She joined BookTrust from the Arks Schools Group and also worked for the Young Foundation and in the commercial sector at Boston Consulting Group.
Øyvind Bjørnsen
Trustee
Øyvind Bjørnsen has a Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration from the NHH Norwegian School of Economics. He is the Managing Director for Marstia Invest AS in Norway. Prior to this he worked as a Private Banker in Luxembourg from 2001 to 2018.
