A CHALLENGE SHARED IS A CHALLENGE HALVED: PEER LEARNING FOR FAMILY FOUNDATIONS

For the past 18 months, a small group of family foundations has met regularly to share experiences and help each other develop practice. They led a breakout session at the ACF conference in November. Here they share some of the ideas discussed.

Although there is no official definition, ACF has noted that family foundations are commonly defined as “funded principally by the personal gift of an individual donor, family or family business – whether or not anyone from the family is still involved in the foundation’s governance”*.

Currently, 26% of ACF’s members describe themselves as family foundations**.

Although varying in size, age and focus, many family foundations have similar attributes, for example, some sense of connection to the wishes of the original donor. They share similar strengths, such as a strong sense of personal commitment to the foundation among the family trustees, as well as challenges particular to family foundations, such as diversity in our governance.

For the purpose of membership of our group, we used a narrower definition than the one above. Our definition of a family foundation is one where the majority of its trustees belong to the family of the original donor. We felt that this would mean we would be more likely to have common issues to explore within the group.

Our group was set up after one of us used ACF’s knowledge sharing platform, Funder Network – a protected space for funders to ask questions and share knowledge with peers – to ask whether other family foundations would be interested in forming a virtual learning set to work through ACF’s Stronger Foundations self-assessment tool. We began meeting virtually during the early days of the pandemic.

Six foundations participate in the group, including: AIM Foundation, JAC

Trust, LFT Charitable Trust and Wates Foundation. We find this is a good size for a group of this type, allowing the time and space for us all to contribute. One member’s organisation currently has no paid staff and we have found that having a mixture of paid staff and one trustee has enriched our discussions.

One of the first steps we took was to agree ground rules for the group, including that the same people would attend from each foundation. This has helped to build trust and enable sharing. Meeting regularly (every six to eight weeks) has helped the group to bond. It has also created a sense of accountability, as we update each other on what we said we would aim to achieve at the previous meeting.

The first Stronger Foundations theme that we worked on was Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), as this was the one that we were all finding the most challenging given the nature of family foundations. As an example of how participating in the group has helped us to take action, prompted by the discussions in the group, one of our members has recruited two independent, non-family, trustees to its board for the first time. Although recruiting primarily for key skills, this has also added to the diversity of its board in relation to life experience and age. We have now moved on to the Funding Practices pillars and, perhaps not surprisingly, we are finding we are all scoring more highly here compared to DEI.

But we have also found that we are spending more time in our meetings sharing what we are each working on and discussing wider issues affecting family foundations.

Sharing Learning

We have all taken away different learning from the meetings. However, some issues are common for most of us and, we believe, are particularly or uniquely relevant to family foundations. These include:

• The format, diversity and experience of the board, and the basis on which family and non-family members are involved.

• How diversity and lived experience might be incorporated into the whole organisation.

• How we communicate, get involved, build knowledge and share decisionmaking responsibilities within the wider family.

• How our funding can be independent and potentially take more risks, be flexible in delivery and responsive to emergent issues and grantees’ feedback.

• How we can take a longer-term perspective. This includes the need to evolve as next generations of the family become involved, while honouring the legacy of the founder and responding to today’s needs.

Some of the issues we have shared include:

• The potential for rivalries and conflicts or avoidance of an issue for fear of upsetting other family members.

• The risk of importing behaviours and histories from “the dining room to the boardroom”.

• The need to balance real and perceived conflicts of interest between family and charity.

• A board of family trustees might be more likely to want to safeguard its privacy. This could add to an impression that family foundations do what they want and avoid scrutiny.

• As the foundation grows, knowing when the time is right to transition from an entirely volunteer effort to needing to take on staff, introduce technology and formal systems and procedures – and managing any associated sense of loss of control by the trustees.

• The question of who counts as “family”, as families become more complex and extended, as well as who gets to make decisions and when should the next generation get involved.

• The potential pressure to be involved in the foundation for reasons of family expectation or loyalty, rather than choice.

We have shared many resources (such as grantee survey questions), useful reading, and recommendations (for example, for consultants) in the group. We’ve also shared ideas on actions we can take to improve our Stronger Foundations selfassessment scores.

Particularly during this time of fewer in-person events and networking opportunities, it has been valuable to build virtual relationships with other funders in similar organisations, even though our focus areas are different.

Reflecting On Leadership

As we have continued to meet, and become more aware of the large number of family foundations and the common issues and challenges we face, we have become more curious about this particular type of foundation.

We therefore worked with ACF to design and issue a survey of family foundations to find out more about this large but under-researched group in the UK. We also ran a session at ACF’s annual conference, with the aim of sharing our experience of coming together as a community of practice.

The conference theme was ‘Courage: foundation leadership in the next decade’. Essentially, courage is the willingness to act against, or set aside, our own self-interest – not necessarily just on one occasion, but perhaps repeatedly, persistently, for the long term.

Good leadership requires courage –particularly when it comes to challenging ourselves, and being open to challenge, in relation to the great power we hold and the limited accountability we have in foundations.

For trustees and directors of family foundations, ACF’s Stronger Foundations provides a useful framework to reflect on what courageous leadership might look like for family foundations –particularly in relation to important and challenging issues such as equity, transparency and diversity.

Our conference session provided family foundations with an opportunity to start the discussion on some of these issues. We are keen to create more such opportunities for shared learning and are therefore establishing the ACF Family foundations network in 2023. Do come and join us.

If you are interested in setting up your own learning set, or in joining the Family foundation network, please email Aisling Johnston at LFT Charitable Trust: aisling@ LFTCharitabletrust.com or Daniela Lloyd- Williams at JAC Trust: daniela@jaclarktrust.org