Funder Focus: Charles Pascal and the Atkinson Charitable Foundation
September 3, 2002
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our continuing series of interviews with some of Canada's leading
funders, we feature the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, which was established
in 1948 by Joseph E. Atkinson, former publisher of The Toronto Star newspaper.
CharityVillage spoke with executive director Charles E. Pascal, about
the foundation's commitment to early childhood development and economic justice,
its support of innovative thinking and new approaches, and its involvement
in public policy issues.
CharityVillage: Your main areas of focus are the promotion of social
and economic justice and early childhood education and development. How do
these focus areas reflect the values and interests of the foundation's founder,
Joseph E. Atkinson?
Charles Pascal: Everything we do is infused with Atkinson's kind of
twentieth century vision around a safer, healthier, more just and comfortable
society for everyone. For the first half of the twentieth century he was probably
the most influential Canadian when it came to the kind of post war social
contract that we had in Canada. He was fifty or sixty years ahead of his time
on issues like childcare and collective bargaining for workers, and was an
unrelenting advocate for universal health care. He is an extraordinary Canadian
but very few Canadians know about him, which is why, right now, we are commissioning
a documentary that brings his life and ideas to the public eye.
To give you another example of how farsighted, how radical this guy was, the
headline of his first editorial on December 1, 1899 was 'Stop the racial cry'.
It was an anti-racism editorial. In the year 2002 when racism in Canada is
on the rise and is moving from our polite, implicit, unintrusive version to
more explicit homophobia, sexism, and racism, this guy was writing about this
and writing against these things in 1899. So it's his spirit and his beliefs
that infuse everything we do at the foundation.
CV: Does the foundation still have any ties to The Toronto Star?
CP: When Mr. Atkinson passed away in 1948, his intention - what he
had in his will, was that the foundation that he had established legally in
1942 was going to own the Toronto Star and profits of the Star would then
all go to charity. A pretty radical idea. The government of the day, a Conservative
government, was not very comfortable with Mr. Atkinson's editorial and progressive
ideas and they passed the Ontario Charitable Donations Act with the precise
objective of making it illegal for a charity to own more than 10% of a business.
There was only one entity in all of Ontario that was affected by it, which
was the Star and the foundation. Around 1949-1950 the foundation and the Star
became legally separate. So, we are independent of the Star but we have a
close moral and philosophical relationship.
CV: Unlike many other funders, you encourage and seek out projects
that are radical and innovative. Is this 'risk' paying off?
CP: There is a risk in not being innovative. A private family foundation
in Canada that does not understand that its resources should be seen as risk
capital isn't going to make a difference. One of Atkinson's very strong beliefs
was the importance of the role of government. In Canada today there are a
lot of forces, including well-heeled resources, that are in the business of
trying to encourage government to get out of the business of governing. However,
it is not our job to provide resources for agencies to run themselves. Social
service agencies should be well funded by government right across the country.
They haven't been and they are under duress.
Our job is to try to support ideas that hold promise for a different way of
doing something important. So we do take chances on projects that have some
promising ideas. We are in the business of supporting people who really want
to think in new and different ways. If it doesn't work out, hey, it was a
risk well worth taking. On the other hand, just generally speaking it would
be risky, given the legacy we have, for us not to think of our money as risk
capital, because all we would be doing is applying Band-Aids here and there
and maintaining the status quo while the gap between rich and poor in this
country continues to expand.
CV: In 2000 you launched the $1 million Early Years Challenge to
support Ontario community-based projects that demonstrate the benefits of
seamless, integrated, early years programs. What results are you seeing so
far?
CP: While we are in the business of fostering creative and innovative
ideas that hold promise for a better tomorrow for all Canadians, we are also
in the business of communications. Everything we do is designed to ensure
that the good ideas that come from our partners are heard about and discussed.
If funders don't emphasize communications and dissemination in their work,
then there is a lot of dust that can gather around some otherwise helpful
reports and ideas. Even crafting the phrase 'Million Dollar Challenge', there
is a lot of meaning behind those words. One million dollars, that sounds like
a lot of money. The word 'challenge', well, who are we challenging? We were
challenging communities to come up with some interesting ideas that could
point the way for policy makers and governments to imagine how to integrate
childcare, the early years in elementary school, and children's service agencies,
because there isn't really a true integration taking place anywhere in Canada.
There is a lot of good coordination, but not total integration. So the challenge
was to the creative minds of wonderful partners in communities around Ontario.
As a result of that challenge, the city of Toronto came in with another $3
million dollars and became a partner. The CAW and the three large automakers
came in with $100,000. The federal government just contributed several hundred
thousand dollars for research and development. So that was the initial response.
Lots of good people and organizations did come to the table and form partnerships
with us. We now have, with the city of Toronto, local school boards and these
other players, a bunch of projects called First Duty. There are about five
projects underway and they all hold great promise to show the way.
CV: Last year you funded a project called Canadian Democracy and Corporate
Accountability. Tell me a bit about this initiative and how these two concepts
fit together?
CP: Yes, that's the Broadbent/Bennett commission. That project continues
to have seriousness because of the timing of it. It raised questions about
whether or not there is enough transparency regarding how corporations act.
Did we know then that Enron would break? Did we know then about the amount
of corporate misdeeds that are cropping up in the United States and causing
havoc in the stock markets all over the world? Did we know that would happen?
No, we didn't predict that but there was a sense in the public at large, even
before these scandals hit, that something is wrong here. There is an awful
lot of influence on the part of corporations. A lot of corporate money is
used to convince governments to reduce taxes before reducing the debt, to
reduce taxes before reengineering universal healthcare, to reduce taxes before
we ensure that proper social service for disadvantaged people properly exist
in communities. I am not saying that individual corporate leaders engage in
that, but certainly representatives of corporations do. So there was the sense
that the power of corporations was so great that there has to be a bit more
transparency about who's doing what. This project was launched more than a
year and a half ago, well before this stuff broke. Now it is going to get
even more attention than when it was first released.
CV: How does this project relate to current trends in corporate
social responsibility (CSR)?
CP: It's all connected. It's all part of the same interest in ensuring
transparency, authenticity, and responsibility regarding the behaviour of
a company in its own backyard - not only what it does for shareholders, but
what it does for stakeholders. On the granting side we are quite active in
research designed to look at issues of corporate responsibility and corporate
accountability and we have been pleased with the response of some corporate
leaders and business people. However, about four years ago we realized that
we talk a good game in respect to our grantmaking side, but what are we doing
with our own money in the marketplace? So we set about to research what we
should do, and at the last board meeting in June the board approved a mission
based investment policy.
I think it is a foundation's responsibility to ensure that the relationship
between what it does in the markets to generate interest for its grantmaking
side doesn't get in the way or abrogate the mission. If through our investments,
we are doing things that contradict that, we think that there is a potential
liability there. There are a lot foundations, we are told, that are looking
at what we are doing. I think they are looking for a foundation to put its
toe in the wa ter, and we are going to put more than our toe in and see what
happens.
CV: Do you do any evaluation of the projects and initiatives you
fund?
CP: In this age of accountability a lot of people and a lot of governments
misuse the word. They use it as a bit of a shell game and smoke and mirrors,
but accountability is important. What we try to do is understand that number
one, you can't fund projects, meaningful projects, one year at a time. You
have to engage in medium to long range kinds of projects. If something is
a really critical, interesting project it may take two or three years. With
respect to outcomes, there are a lot of funders out there who are asking for
'rigorous evaluations'. I am here to say that the easily measured is trivial
stuff. If you can measure it easily, it probably isn't worth doing in the
first place. That doesn't mean to say that we shouldn't invest in how to take
the more complicated things that are of interest and figure out multiple ways
of measuring them.
We need to invest more money in sophisticated evaluation rather than forcing
individual agencies into recording information that is narrow and trivial,
but easy to gather. We conduct what we called 'so what?' evaluations. What
we do is three to five years after our funding is gone we have independent
evaluators who go back to the project. They talk to the leadership; they talk
to others who had been in a position where they could observe what the project
was supposed to accomplish. We found these very valuable because some of the
projects that look like gangbusters in the moment, later actually fizzled
out. By the same token, project X might have looked like it was a write off.
Then, five years after the fact somebody has picked up the report for that
project and developed it into a framework for a major community-based anti-poverty
strategy.
We also ask the independent evaluators to ask grant recipients about what
kind of partner we were, because we are an active partner. We are not a passive
funder. We are very proactive. We don't sit back and wait for people to approach
us. And if folks are looking for a cheque and a 'see you later', then we are
not the funder for them. When they bring those evaluations to the board for
us all to learn from, they will not report on what each individual grantee
thought of us as a partner. They will take all of that particular information
and put it into a separate report. If the person who is evaluating us as a
funder knows they will be associated with that specific project, in spite
of the fact that we say 'we really are a learning organization', we are still
a funder and they may not want to say anything negative. So we want to make
it completely safe for them to tell it like it is.
CV: What is next for the Atkinson Foundation?
CP: Because we are in the business of trying to catch people who are
doing things right, we've come up with a new program that is simply called
the Atkinson Economic Justice Award. We will be announcing our first recipient
in mid September. It is just there as a vehicle; it is not something people
can apply for, and it is not something we will hand out every year. When the
board or a member of the board sees a person who is doing really interesting
things and could use some sustained support over a number of years, we'll
tap them on the shoulder and say, 'if you had a hundred thousand dollars a
year for three years - a $75,000 stipend and $25,000 for expenses - what could
you do with it?'
We are living in a time where the great social experiment called Canada is
really under attack. There are so many issues out there. Let me give you one
thing that preoccupies me as of late. Since September 11, there has been a
lot of talk of security. I, myself, would like people who worry about the
kind of perimeter security regarding terror to be in a room with people who
face the awful prospects of not being able to feed their children. What about
the right of security of the person? There is so much out there that needs
addressing. There is no time to rest. We may not have any silver bullets but
we do have lots of extremely creative and innovative people in communities
around Ontario and beyond who need support to do the work they do.
Charles Pascal has been executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation
for more than six years, and prior to that, was a Deputy Minister for the
Government of Ontario. For more information about the foundation, visit: atkinsonfdn.on.ca.
