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trusts and foundations

Barrow Cadbury Trust’s Chair, Erica Cadbury, was one of the speakers at the launch of ACF’s Origin’s of Wealth Toolkit in April.  Here is an edited version of that presentation.  

I was very pleased to be one of the presenters at the launch of ACF’s Origins of Wealth Toolkit.  It has in it a wealth of information and guidance which will help trustee boards,  their teams, and their stakeholders engage with this difficult issue in a positive way, both in foundations and in the wider voluntary sector. 

Trustee boards of foundations are used to making strategic decisions about investing, managing and spending our endowments.  We don’t think of this as introspection but a necessary activity. So is an exploration of the origins of our endowments fundamentally different?  Yes – it is introspective but it is also a vital strategic activity and encourages trusts and foundations to take responsibility for the origins of their wealth, (rather than seeing it as a ‘money tree’). 

Every foundation is unique but all our endowments came from somewhere and that is our commonality.   We are all affected by the generation of wealth and those of us who derive our wealth from 19th and 20th century industrialisation in the UK have to understand that this has its roots in colonialism, as it was colonisation that fed the enormous growth in the British economy in those centuries. 

Colonialism depends on a belief in the right to exploit both lands and people and that right was predicated on a belief in racial superiority.   And as Esther Kosayee says in the Toolkit these “historical injustices and power imbalances persist in society today”. 

Even those whose interface with the  transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people may appear tangential can use the tool kit to address the origins of our wealth.  

Barrow Cadbury Trust’s exploration began in 2020 with the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.    As a trust founded 100 years ago, based on company wealth derived from long after Abolition, we felt  that as a Quaker heritage trust, with a 50 years + commitment to racial justice we were secure in our historical narrative.  We began from that position. 

But historical events can get forgotten very easily (and conveniently) and we discovered that we were not so immune.  There is a very well-documented series of events in which the main Quaker chocolate makers of the late 19th century were engaged – which involved enslavement on a smaller scale off the coast of Africa.  But it directly involved one of our founders, Barrow Cadbury, and this, once encountered, could not be ignored.  After research and deep discussion amongst trustees, we decided to make an apology.  You can see this and our thinking behind it on our website. 

We, as a team of trustees and staff are now on a journey – we now see things from a new perspective, and we must continue to integrate our discoveries with our present day vision, mission and values, linking our history to our commitment to racial justice and to a more dynamic engagement with anti-racism.  And we have to find the time and ways to do this.   

It is not easy.  It is demanding of trustees, it may challenge the very heart of trusteeship.  It may be emotionally taxing if we are direct descendants of our founders.  But it may also be demanding of those appointed as trustees who do not hold any familial responsibility for the acts of the founders.  But it is definitely worth doing and this tool kit will provide advice and guidance to assist you in that journey.  

 

A blog by Debbie Pippard, Director of Programmes, Barrow Cadbury Trust. Originally written for 360 Giving http://www.threesixtygiving.org/ 

I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonably data-savvy person – I love a good spreadsheet and, given a quiet half-hour, can even navigate my way around the Office for National Statistics database . But I’ve increasingly realised that the world of data has not only got bigger thanks to the drive towards open data, but also a whole lot easier to understand and use with the wealth of new datasets and tools available to ease analysis and visualisation.

Barrow Cadbury Trust is an independent family foundation, aiming to influence policy and practice through the funding, collation and dissemination of evidence. We work on a small number of social issues: criminal justice, economic justice, racial justice and gender justice. We were among the early group of funders to publish our grants in the 360Giving standard. One of the joys of being in that particular family is getting to see all the weird and wonderful ways in which grantmaking data can be combined with new tools to provide a visual snapshot of the ways in which grants are made and used. A couple of my favourites are CharityBase for its practicality and David Kane’s Chord Diagram for its ability to crunch thousands of funding relationships into a single picture.

Our involvement in 360Giving has made me reflect on how we use data at the Trust. I’ve picked out five ways, though of course there are more.

  1. Firstly, and most obviously, we use data to understand our grantmaking. That data comes from our own database – but like other funders that publish to 360Giving we can start to use the visualisation tools to bring that data to life. Every year I collate information about our grantmaking to present to Trustees. To be honest, it tends to be on the dry side. This year I’m looking forward to showing some interactive visuals to supplement the tables and graphs.
  2. We use data to develop programme approaches. Our migration programme has a strong focus on strategic communications: reaching across silos to have a better conversation about migration and integration. Public polling helps us and our partners understand people’s views and design interventions. Hope Not Hate’s “Fear and Hope” series has helped us track changing public opinion – a good example of how trend data can add to the richness of our understanding of an issue.
  3. Data is essential to plan our work and understand our impact. Take our Transition to Adulthood campaign as an example. Our aim is to persuade policymakers and practitioners to recognise the unique needs, and opportunity for change, presented by young adults in the criminal justice system. We need data about incidents, locations, severity of offences, demographics of offenders and other datasets to prioritise our interventions. And we need to track that data to understand whether the numbers are going in the right direction.
  4. Evaluation, which or course is meaningless without data.
  5. Last, but by no means the least, of my five is understanding how we fit into the funding landscape. For example, 360Giving means we can look at who else is funding projects in Birmingham (it’s interesting to see how Birmingham City Council has been using the data). Until now, we haven’t been able to get an overview of where the funding is going, and where the gaps are. It means we can search for organisations that perhaps we don’t know yet but who can help us add to our evidence base for policy change.

And the note to self? To spend a few of the quiet days of early January getting to grips with some of these new tools. I recently attended the Data4Good conference. It, and 360Giving’s recent Data Visualisation Challenge, has made me realise we are moving toward a post-spreadsheet world – and I no longer need to spend so much time putting together raw data, but can have more fun and communicate my data better with people for whom lines of figures are an anathema.

During the closing plenary of the European Foundations Centre’s 2017 Annual General Assembly and Conference on Friday 2 June, EFC Chair Ewa Kulik-Bielińska announced the Warsaw Declaration to delegates concerning a new Philanthropic Alliance for Solidarity and Democracy in Europe:

EFC Warsaw Declaration

Philanthropic Alliance for Solidarity and Democracy in Europe

Today, in Warsaw, at the 28th EFC conference ‘Courage to re-embrace solidarity in Europe’, a diverse group of foundations concerned with the state of democracy in Europe came together to launch the Alliance.

“Civil society across Europe is currently experiencing increasing infringements on its ability to operate independently, resulting in a negative impact on democracy, diversity, equality and freedom. Non-governmental and academic institutions and the free media are being constrained by governments, and civil society actors are attacked, discredited and presented as public enemies.

The Philanthropic Alliance for Solidarity and Democracy in Europe is concerned both with the operating environment for civil society and, more broadly, with the urgency to respond to the violation of democratic values such as human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Therefore, we commit to pooling together broad-based, diverse philanthropic resources and establishing a Solidarity Fund to support initiatives aimed at strengthening civil society actors and safeguarding democratic values in Europe.

Initiating this alliance in Poland – the cradle of the Solidarity movement in Europe – demonstrates the ability of the European and international philanthropic community to join forces to bolster solidarity across Europe.

We believe that as a philanthropic community we must send a firm collective message that democracy prevails and can only be realised by securing a strong, independent and enabled civil society. As organisations that use private funds for public good we have a critical role to play in calling on European public institutions to develop robust mechanisms to protect, defend and promote these fundamental freedoms.

Our times call urgently for courage to stand together and act for democracy and solidarity in Europe and around the world.

If you would like to get involved with the Alliance contact EFC Chief Executive, Gerry Salole [email protected].