I’m afraid I think this is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. If you make a grant £X to allow another organisation to buy an asset, the fact that the donee ends up with a valuable asset is obviously an argument in favour of the grant, but you’ve still made a grant for £X. You can’t offset the value of the asset, because it isn’t your asset.
It may be that in making the grant for £X, you’re saving yourself making a series of future grants (in the case the cost of hiring venues for the conferences/retreats), and in that sense it may be financially advantageous, but you still have made a grant of £X, which needs to justified on its merits, just as you would have had to justify the counterfactual series of future grants. Fundamentally what seems to have happened here is that value of the events themselves has been taken for granted, even though they were being very significantly prefunded.
I’m afraid I think this is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it. If you make a grant £X to allow another organisation to buy an asset, the fact that the donee ends up with a valuable asset is obviously an argument in favour of the grant, but you’ve still made a grant for £X. You can’t offset the value of the asset, because it isn’t your asset.
It may be that in making the grant for £X, you’re saving yourself making a series of future grants (in the case the cost of hiring venues for the conferences/retreats), and in that sense it may be financially advantageous, but you still have made a grant of £X, which needs to justified on its merits, just as you would have had to justify the counterfactual series of future grants. Fundamentally what seems to have happened here is that value of the events themselves has been taken for granted, even though they were being very significantly prefunded.