Funder Focus: Richard Frost and the Winnipeg Foundation
April 7, 2003
By Nicole Zummach
This month, in our Funder Focus we feature the Winnipeg Foundation,
Canada's first community foundation. Today, it is the second-largest
community foundation in the country, and has distributed more than $100
million to charitable organizations in its eighty-two year history.
CharityVillage spoke with executive director Richard Frost about
the community foundation movement, the important and innovative work
the foundation is doing in the Winnipeg community, and how several recent
mega-gifts have impacted that work.
CharityVillage: As Canada's oldest community foundation, would you consider the Winnipeg Foundation to be an active leader in the community foundation movement?
Richard Frost: The community foundation movement has certainly evolved over the years, and has grown a lot, particularly in the last decade or so. I think the Winnipeg Foundation has always played an active leadership role in terms of exploring new areas, encouraging dialogue between partners and other community foundations, and getting involved in the issues of the day. I am always hesitant to ascribe leadership to ourselves. I think it is better to attribute leadership to others, and if someone wants to say good things about you, well that is nice. We are one organization that is probably a little bit modest and not particularly anxious to toot our own horn.
CV: Where do you see the community foundation movement heading in the next few years.
RF: I think there are huge challenges right now because of the
financial climate that we are in. It affects donors and it affects our
own capacity to spend money and to make grants. There are lots of challenges
around that and I think that in the short-term future one of the major
challenges we will have will be in the communications area, making sure
that our activities are very transparent to everyone, that we are seen
to be accountable, accessible, and meeting the highest of standards
in terms of how we do things. As we go forward, I think there is going
to be increasing competition for others getting into the endowment business.
If you go back 10 or 15 years ago, foundations were the only ones really
doing any specific endowment building. Maybe the universities and hospitals
to some extent, but it wasn't commonplace in the broad charitable sector.
Our agency fund area is probably our fastest growing area of funds.
So we do a lot of work with agencies that have decided to work with
us as opposed to setting up their own foundation. Still, it's the same
idea - building endowments, building a sustainable funding base - because
sustainability is the big issue facing the charitable sector. Virtually
everyone has that problem. Endowments are at least part of the answer.
So I think that will be an ongoing issue for us, positioning ourselves,
because we are basically collaborators. A community foundation sees
itself always as operating in a partnership with others. Fundamentally,
we are a funder and we want to provide financial assistance to others.
I think our natural position is to be seen as a collaborator, not a
competitor. And yet, as others move into the area of endowment building,
they are sort of positioning us in more of a competitive position than
would naturally be our choice.
CV: 2001 was a big year for the foundation, with a $10 million gift from Izzy Asper and a $100 million gift from Randy Moffat. How have these unprecedented endowments affected the foundation's plans for the future and the work you are doing?
RF: I don't think you can get gifts like that without it having
an effect on your organization. So obviously it has had a huge impact
on the scale of what we do. Because of its structure, where twelve other
communities are eligible for grants under the Moffat fund, we are doing
some pretty innovative things in terms of working with other communities
across the country. We have to set up structures and new relationships so that we can actually make grants in communities that we are not as familiar with. I think that is interesting and innovative work. In addition to that, speaking directly to the Moffat fund, there was a provision made that we have to undertake some work that we would not have otherwise been doing. We are looking at quite a number of projects very much in the educational or social service area, because the Moffat fund basically benefits children and families in less advantaged communities.
In the case of the Asper family, we are doing some really innovative partnership work on human rights education. We've got a lot of kids who are very active in this area right across the country and we have been very active with them in the city, providing unique educational experiences for grade 9 students in the area of human rights. We are doing some very interesting things as a result of those particular funds. But, the Winnipeg Foundation is always doing interesting things. We just received a challenge grant from the federal government for a literacy fund that we are creating. They have given us a million dollars if we can raise a million dollars for small grants like Mom and Tot reading programs, and basic family literacy programming.
CV: Many of your programs and projects relate to education. Why did you choose this as an area of focus?
RF: Our board has always placed heavy emphasis on education. It is not as big as the community service area where you are talking about youth grants, senior grants, or grants for family services of various types, and all of those things. But education is a very large area, attracting 25% of our total grants. We have a lot of scholarship activity here and we have done a lot of work in terms of trying to help post-secondary education. If you look at education budgets today, it is pretty awesome to see the kind of the money they spend. We certainly try very hard to make sure a good proportion of our money is supporting educational endeavours in our community.
CV: You also deliver a Youth in Philanthropy program. What
is participation like in this program and what results are you seeing?
RF: I think we've got the most unique and exciting program around.
Others have their programs and I am not going to diminish what they
are doing, but ours is a high school based program which makes it quite
different from others that you will hear about. Most community foundations
have a city-wide program and they will have a very knowledgeable youth
committee. We have 18 high schools involved in ours this year and each
school is allocated $5,000 of grantmaking capacity.
They have an exercise where, over a period of a few weeks, they decide
what charities or issues in the city that they care about, that they
want to investigate. Then they go through a process of looking at the
charities that do that work and finally they do site visits and come
back with recommendations about how they would like to spend their $5,000.
So, this year we have in excess of 300 students who are travelling the
streets of Winnipeg and visiting various charities in the city. I am
sure when the dust settles in June we will probably have about 75 different
charities in our city that will receive grants from our Youth in Philanthropy
committees.
The board always enjoys going to the celebration at the end of the year and seeing the cheques being presented, and I always think the charities that do receive the grants from our youth committees feel validated. I mean, it is not the size of the grant particularly, but the fact that you are running an agency and students have decided to give you a grant because they like some aspect of what you are doing.
CV: You gave away $12.8 million in 2002, more than ever before. What do you look for when assessing a grant proposal?
RF: Well, it is fundamentally a competitive process, I want to begin by saying that. We have deadlines; the grant applications come into the system and we never really know what one grant is going to be up against in terms of what else has come in during that cycle. Every cycle has a budget. We obviously have lots of policy and lots of precedents. So if someone says they want to put a commercial dishwasher into a daycare we know what that should cost. You can't ask for $50,000 if we know that it only costs $5,000. So there is a lot of analysis and site visiting that goes on and at the end we are obviously interested in balancing our grants across the community as best we can, and also touching as many charities as we can. About 90% of our grants are less than $30,000, but that doesn't mean to say we don't do some larger ones, but we tend to give a large number of grants and we try very hard to empower as many different organizations as we can.
CV: Do think that your hands-on approach has a positive impact on how grants are used? Do you do evaluations?
RF: We have a very careful analysis piece at the front end, there
is no question about that. All of the grants go to our board with a
recommendation in terms of what we have seen during our site visits
or analysis of the application. Every grant is written up, and a lot
of work does go into the front end as we look at the organization that
made the request. In terms of evaluation after the grant is finished,
it really depends on the type of grant that was requested. If we have
given someone $1,000 to send a child to camp, we are not going to be
doing a lot of evaluation on that. We are going to be much more interested
in the front end, whether the camp is accredited and those kinds of
things, as opposed to what happened when the kid was at camp.
F or other types of grants, where they are trying to do pilot projects
or various types of research, we are very much interested in the evaluation
of what comes out of it. One of the standard questions on our application
is "Have you ever applied for a grant from the Winnipeg Foundation?
And have you ever received one?" If they check "yes", then we ask "Did
you file a report at the end?" If you want to answer "no" to that question,
then don't be expecting anything the next time. So, we are expecting
feedback on how money is used, but again, the level of evaluation we
expect depends very much on the type of grant.
CV: Where would you like to see the foundation in 10 years?
What's next?
RF: I think that the values that we've had, we basically want
to continue. We have about 1,400 endowment funds and they are made up
of gifts from people from all walks of life. People are always interested
in the Moffat gift, but the second fund we ever received was for $15.
It basically says it's not the size of the gift, but the giving that
matters. We want to continue to be an accessible organization. We will
open a named endowment fund with $1,000. So, we see ourselves as being
very much a grassroots organization that tries to support the good work
of other charities in the city.
We always take a lot of pride in the fact that we have tried very hard
to remain a foundation that is for all members of the community, and
obviously that means that we have some wealthy people making some gifts,
but we recognize that we wouldn't have 1,400 funds if it wasn't coming
from people of every walk of life. I think that is the thing we cherish
more than anything else, that we truly are a community foundation.
Richard Frost has been with the Winnipeg Foundation for more than five years. Prior to that he was the chief commissioner of the City of Winnipeg for nine years. For more information about the foundation, visit:
www.wpgfdn.org.
