Victoria Harrison
On the basis of varied experience in different types of fundraising, I will discuss four questions in this essay: how far should the origin of funds be scrutinized and publicized; what are the benefactors’ motives and expectations; how far can and should benefactors have influence; and how far are the founders constrained by the structures that grow out of their pioneering effort?1 In considering these questions, I will give special attention to the issue of ‘naming’ because of its overall relevance.
On the first question, funding by government presents relatively few problems. The research councils, for example, readily assign their institutes and laboratories titles such as the ‘M.R.C. Laboratory of Molecular Biology’, the ‘M.R.C. Biostatistics Unit’, or the ‘B.B.S.R.C. Bioenergy Centre’. They were not only set up with funds assumed to be ‘respectable’, but could be closed if circumstances changed and if no longer needed. The names of prominent and relevant researchers are sometimes incorporated uncontroversially into the title of such institutions: the ‘M.R.C. Weatherall Institute’ or the ‘Sanger Institute’, for example. Royal Society or British Academy professorships (government funded and for a limited term) also seem acceptable.
The frontier between public and private funding is not, however, clear-cut. To begin with, public funding can come from municipal institutions as well as from central government; many nineteenth-century British universities, for example, owed less to central government initiative than to the municipal pride of great provincial cities: Liverpool to William Rathbone, for example; Birmingham to Joseph Chamberlain. British universities can also combine acceptance of public funding with incorporating a major benefactor into their title: Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, for example, or Liverpool John Moores University (as renamed from 1992), not to mention major institutions within a university such as Oxford University’s Nuffield, Kellogg and Wolfson colleges.
‘Naming’ difficulties do not seem to arise with charities that lack the name of an individual. The University College London Hospital charity, for instance, likes its grants to be acknowledged, partly as a way to advertise its existence and thus ensure an ongoing flow of funds through legacies and donations. With ‘naming’ after individuals, though, it may sometimes seem wise to hesitate – as with investments – where (for example) slavery, tobacco or armaments manufacture are involved. Universities are increasingly setting up committees to adjudicate on these issues, and their minutes, when released, may provide rich sources for future historians. I do, however, know that some academics think that charitable funds when transferred to a university are thereby washed whiter than white.
But what of private benefactors’ motives and expectations? Richard Crossman, Labour M.P. and minister, reacting strongly in 1973 against the inter-war labour movement’s repudiation of charity, claimed that ‘if volunteering is stifled, the altruistic motive which exists in normal people is blocked or perverted with deplorable results on the community’.2 He was pioneering a shift in opinion that by the end of the century lay at the heart of ‘New Labour’. In the Goodman lecture (2000) Gordon Brown said that ‘those who embark on voluntary action out of a sense of duty often end up with the realisation that it has brought a new richness of meaning to their own lives – that in the giving, they have received in a different way as well’.3 As with any human activity, charitable motives will be numerous, interacting and complex. They may include a desire to promote a particular area of study that interests the donor, or a cure for a disease from which donors or their relatives have suffered. The search for a cure for the child that dies young, a motive now diminishing, still remains significant – in the Anthony Nolan Trust, for example, set up in 1980 by his mother to create a bone-marrow transplant register which might have enabled her son to survive. There may be a wish to promote a particular cause, such as the Wolfson Foundation’s funding of buildings in all the Oxbridge women’s colleges in the 1960s to promote women’s education. A benefaction may result from a desire to perpetuate gratitude to the source of the benefactors’ personal success, such as the university which educated them. The incentive may arise from the aspiration of the newly rich or of an ethnic minority to win social acceptance: it was a shrewd move on both sides when the prince of Wales in 1990, at a reception, invited rich Asian businessmen to support his Youth Business Trust, to which they responded generously, so that by the time coffee had been served, £5 million had been raised.4 Another motive may be a sense of guilt at survival. Numerous statues, gardens and buildings in Britain as well as war memorials reflect the huge philanthropic impact made by two world wars. Dame Stephanie Shirley’s outlook illuminates the close relationship between entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and gratitude to the society that enabled her to survive. Referring to her status as an unaccompanied child refugee arriving in the U.K., she explains that ‘there is a relationship between trauma and entrepreneurship. You become a survivor, full-stop. I think my “guilt” about surviving the Holocaust gave me a strong urge to prove my life had been worth saving’, and she saw philanthropy as ‘a kind of contract’, that ‘you get as much as you give. The more I give away, the richer I feel’.5
Some benefactors prefer to remain anonymous and collaborate unobtrusively in a joint project, but others prefer to specify the exact destination of their funds and identify themselves. This has long been so, whether an afterlife seemed a reality or not. ‘Wherever we look among the social elite of early modern England’, Sir Keith Thomas writes, ‘we find that fame was the spur, the acknowledged incentive to perform deeds of merit’.6 In our own time, for several million pounds an entire building might be named, sometimes also with named areas within it. There is also the pleasure of putting your hand on the wall and saying ‘this is our bit’. It is a pleasure that can be quite widely ‘sold off’: £1 million for a named lecture room, £500,000 for an entrance hall, £100,000 for a seminar room, and plaques on seats in lecture and dining halls can go for a few hundred, though lavatories do not seem to be on offer. Fundraisers distribute brochures with shopping-lists and prices attached. The initiative in naming can also, of course, come from the donor. When I was Wolfson’s chief executive I quite often went to see a new facility which my charity had funded, and if the topic had not arisen already I’d ask, before departing, ‘now tell me, where is it that you are going to put the plaque?’ The naming of charities after the donor isn’t always straightforward: one surname may be fine, and even a first name and surname might be acceptable. But what about ‘The Mary-Lou Smith and John Paul Jones Jun. Institute’, not unknown, especially in the U.S.A?
My third question concerns how far benefactors should be free to attach conditions to their proposed grant, such as influencing a building’s architecture and design. A university will usually have drawn up detailed plans for the building before fundraising begins, plans which reflect its own taste or its environment. On the other hand, major funders might well not want their names attached to buildings that they think are carbuncles. And the building, once funded, requires maintenance: a donor or foundation have their own name and image to preserve and might reasonably expect the building to be kept in good repair, inside and out. Chairmen, trustees or chief executives have been known to visit buildings that they have funded with a view to monitoring their interior decoration and maintenance, or indeed to inspect the washrooms. Such philanthropic ‘interference’ is not necessarily negative. After all, academics are not the only people with good ideas: the benefactor’s influence may be beneficial, whether on conception or execution, on financial aspects or on subjects covered. I recall instances where questions inspired by the donor’s business background cut costs; alternatively, the donor may decide to give more, so as to deal with the problem: for example, to improve the standard student rooms or make the building more attractive, or promote the study of a particular subject.
Some philanthropists (or possibly trustees acting as their agents) transfer to the charitable world the risk-taking that is widespread in business. The Nuffield Foundation pointed out in 1956 that private philanthropy
finances projects that may yield dividends not in terms of cash but of public good. It is a risk-taking bank. It is least interested in secure investments which will produce a modest return. It is out for high dividends and can afford to balance its failures against its successes. Its first concern must be the credit-worthiness of the applicant; its second, the originality of his idea; its third, the soundness of his project.7
In taking forward their aims they may not confine beneficiaries to those who apply, but seek more highly qualified executors. Or, as the secretary of the Carnegie Trust put it more succinctly in 1952, ‘it is the business of trusts to live dangerously’.8
Integral to discussing the philanthropist’s ‘interference’ is the question of timescale. For how long can a charity reasonably expect a beneficiary to lodge a donation in its institutional memory? I have on occasion visited a university holding a list of the grants it has earlier received, and when I asked about a named laboratory for which a grant had been made twenty or thirty years before, nobody quite knew where it was or for what it was now used, perhaps because the nature of the research for which it was originally designated had lost significance. It could have been difficult for the university to commit itself in perpetuity to the donor, and yet the funds might never have been forthcoming without any such promise. A further problem is that names can sometimes quite quickly come to seem unsuitable, or go out of fashion. For example, Hearing Dogs recently organized an anniversary event (essentially a fundraising event, as these occasions usually now are) which the then prime minister attended. One might have thought that the presentation of ‘Cameron’, the puppy, to the prime minister was uncontentious enough at the time; yet as we all know, ‘a week is a long time in politics’.
My fourth question highlights the potential tension which arises between the wishes of the founder and the machinery that implements them. ‘I am essentially what may be called a strong man’ said Dr. Barnardo, ‘ i.e. I rule’.9 How many twentieth-century benefactors could say such a thing? It is now quite common for benefactors to set up a charity as the vehicle for their philanthropy. There are advantages such as tax relief, as well as establishing a means of allocating funds arising from an endowment when they are no longer personally involved. But organizations with charitable status must comply with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.
Even since I joined the sector in 1997 there have been significant increases in state regulation of charities. Some such changes are well justified, especially on the need to scrutinize the proportion of the funds allocated to administration, to make it clear that they aim at the public benefit, and to publicize their policy on reserves, investment and managing risk. For fundraising charities, new rules are also now being introduced to prevent harassment through unwanted phone calls and the like.
And charities are run by boards of trustees. Such boards may consist of family members, friends and business associates, or experts appointed for their knowledge of the fields within which the charity operates. The benefactor will probably chair the charity initially, but the trustee body as a whole has the responsibility for the proper running of the charity and indeed has the power to outvote the founder.
The founder’s or the trustees’ qualities or time commitment may well not extend to the day-to-day management of a charity. Hence the emergence within the charitable world of executive heads. As well as administering the allocation of funds, it is their job to ensure that the board of trustees has the information and assistance needed to comply with regulatory requirements. Who are these executives? Without systematic analysis I have noticed that during the past half-century there has been a shift in the charitable sector from senior ex-servicemen (and they were men) to senior or just-retired public-sector workers or business people, and later to those whose careers have advanced within the charitable world. These changes bring losses and gains. A life spent entirely in the charitable sector risks a lack of comparative perspective and breadth of experience, but it has the advantage of rendering the charity familiar with the growing and increasingly complex regulation in this area, as well as accumulated experience of working with the board of trustees which takes the decisions. And, yes, there are now more women chief executives.
How are the executives of funding bodies regarded by potential beneficiaries? Here the situations of the public and private sector differ. If the funder (acting for the taxpayer) is in the public sector, applicants may feel prejudice against what they regard as the irritating face of bureaucracy. A charity may in its relations with applicants benefit from inheriting some of the deference due to founders, and sometimes also from the relatively small size of the provider. In both situations, however, there is a certain friction when it comes to dealing with the application. The applicants must tolerate stipulations on length and format, given that competing claims have to be assessed and the assessors’ burden curbed. Applicants to a charity may worry about whether the executives know enough about their field to select the right reviewers and can run an efficient peer-review process. I found that applicants were usually civil, especially as one became more senior, and they could never be sure how far the executive could influence the decision, which does indeed vary between charities. And dealing with us was a means to their end. In the Wolfson Foundation we always emphasized that we ran our own peer-review system, and that it was the trustees who reached decisions.
Nevertheless, I was often told that giving money away must be a lovely job. In many ways it was. There was great satisfaction when – after seeing proposals on paper, guiding an applicant through the application process, obtaining expert opinions, drawing the requisite information to trustees’ attention, and obtaining a positive outcome – the day arrived when one could go along to see a new building or facilities in use. On the other hand, there were the disappointed applicants to be faced, and difficulty in knowing how far to accept offers of hospitality from the hopeful. If one’s charity funded projects in the arts, how often was it reasonable (taking an extreme example) to accept an invitation to the opera? Confronted with a preliminary inquiry about funding, it was important to know what was being promoted, and sometimes this required having a look. After an award had been made, it might also be reasonable to see the completed project. But it usually seemed sensible not to accept invitations while an application was under consideration, and to conduct discussions about an application in the office rather than over lunch. But yes, it is true that overall – even though not all applications succeed – a certain popularity as chief executive is pleasant. My husband wryly observed on one social occasion that I had been kissed by seventeen vice-chancellors – though one knows all too well that from retirement day their flow of Christmas cards shrinks and their kisses cease.
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1 My perspective reflects a career within three types of funding body. First, in funding by government from within three research councils: the Medical Research Council [M.R.C.] from 1971 to 1989 (interspersed with a secondment to the Cabinet Office dealing with science policy), the Agriculture and Food Research Council [A.F.R.C.] from 1989 to 1994 and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [B.B.S.R.C.] from 1994 to 1997. Here my roles included operating the peer-review system whereby funds were allocated to universities and research institutes and progress was monitored and assessed. Next came nine years in a charitable foundation as chief executive in the Wolfson Foundation from 1997 to 2006, administering grants made mainly for capital projects in universities, museums and galleries, historic buildings and schools. Last came my role as a trustee within a charity that supports institutions primarily funded by government: as a trustee from 2007 to 2017 of the University College London Hospital [U.C.L.H.] Charity, which in my last two years I have chaired. Since 2011 I have also been a trustee for an independent special-needs charity, Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, where we seek funds rather than distribute them.
2 R. H. S. Crossman, The Role of the Volunteer in the Modern Social Service (Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture 1973, Oxford, 1973), p. 21.
3 G. Brown, Civic Society in Modern Britain (17th Arnold Goodman lecture, 2001), p. 26; see <http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speeches.htm> [accessed 16 Apr. 2018].
4 The Times, 25 Aug. 1990, pp. 11, 22.
5 University of Oxford, Annual Review, 2001/2002, p. 22.
6 K. V. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), p. 237.
7 Quoted in L. E. Waddilove, Private Philanthropy and Public Welfare: the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust 1954–1979 (1983), p. 17, quoting the Nuffield Foundation’s 11th report (1955/6).
8 D. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Oxford, 1965), p. 557.
9 S. L. Barnardo and J. Marchant, Memoirs of the late Dr. Barnardo (1907), p. 300.