LISTENING, LEARNING AND LEADING

Janet Morrison OBE, who recently stepped down as chair of ACF, spoke to Sarah Myers about her pride in the ACF community and her hopes for the future of our sector.

I've always been driven by social justice. But I'm a head and heart person. I need to have an intellectual challenge as well as a purpose to believe in. I want to know that what I’m doing is, somehow, making the world a better place. My career has taken me everywhere from NCVO to the BBC, Nesta to a rehabilitation charity. In March this year I started as the CEO of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee which represents and supports the interests of all NHS community pharmacies in England.

I’ve worked with trusts and foundations throughout my career, but always in a non-executive capacity. I got to know a huge range of charities, voluntary sector bodies, and trusts and foundations when I was a director of NCVO. I was part of a deregulation taskforce, looking at simplifying rules for charities, including the Trustee Investments Act and Charities Act 1993. The taskforce was headed up by Tessa Baring, chair of the Baring Foundation. Tessa was a fantastic person, really committed and insightful, with so much knowledge of the sector. We got on like a house on fire. Many years later, I was approached to become a trustee of the Baring Foundation and then chair. I later ended up becoming chair of ACF – as Tessa had been too. It was lovely to follow a little way in her footsteps.

What I loved most about the Baring Foundation was the way it cared about the overall health and independence of civil society. During my time as a trustee, we were on a progressive path. Our Strengthening Civil Society programme funded legal action to tackle discrimination and disadvantage at a time of real challenge to human rights. I was initially asked to join in 2014 because they were setting up a funding stream for arts and older people. I’d been chief executive of Independent Age for nearly 12 years and a founder of the Campaign to End Loneliness, so I understood the benefits of creativity to add meaning and improve mental and physical health and inclusion. I loved the projects we supported – it really challenged perceptions of older people and gave them voice.

When Barings Bank collapsed, the foundation lost a huge amount of money, so they had to think much harder about how to be an impactful funder. When they had less to work with they had to think about how to invest in field building [growing the community of organisations and individuals working together in support of a common goal] to add value to direct funding with strategic research – sharing learning, developing partnerships and leveraging other funders. It wasn’t just about grants but understanding the space we were operating in and making a strategic intervention. With our arts programme, for example, we worked with all four arts councils as well as other foundations.

Setting up the Campaign to End Loneliness was very exciting and important to me personally. I was involved for around 10 years. We partnered with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – they were a very inspired start-up funder who really believed in what we were doing. We worked closely together, evolving plans as we built a movement of over 10,000 members and ended up with a national loneliness strategy. We influenced a national conversation about loneliness, that’s only grown in significance during Covid-19, but we also went around the world learning and influencing. I personally visited the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Japan and Finland. I was inspired by so many creative initiatives to engage and involve older people and tackle loneliness.

I'm proud of what ACF has achieved in the three and a half years I’ve been there. We’ve had some great collaborative initiatives like the Funders Commitment on Climate Change, and the Funders Collaborative Hub, which has helped so many organisations to connect and work together. And, of course, the Stronger Foundations initiative … I think ACF has been on an important path leading and influencing the foundation sector and I’m immensely proud of everything it’s achieved at a critical time.

Stronger Foundations was a provocation to think differently and harder, while also giving organisations tools and evidence from authoritative sources on a range of issues for foundations. The whole Stronger Foundations engagement process was extremely valuable – having peers come together to discuss what stronger foundation practice actually looks like, and work through evidence and thinking from around the world. The team then did a brilliant job to support the distillation of principles out of that work, while making it a live debate and discussion with trusts and foundations.

My wish for Stronger Foundations as I leave ACF is that it remains a dynamic process. Thinking always moves on and develops. There’s never one right answer. So, you must keep re-asking the questions. I hope that Stronger Foundations enables dialogue to continue.

Trusts and foundations are born out of inequality. They’re incredibly privileged, with a huge amount of freedom and power. And with that comes a lot of responsibility to justify that privilege and use that power wisely. When you’re putting private money to public purpose, for current and future generations, it comes with an obligation and a need to demonstrate your legitimacy, credibility and ethics.