Funder Focus: Graham Hallward and the Alva Foundation
August 5, 2003
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the Alva Foundation,
a private foundation that was established in 1965 to support Canadian
organizations that help children at risk. CharityVillage spoke with
vice president and chair of the donations committee Graham Hallward
about the evolution of this cause, the foundation's approach to
funding, and the innovative projects it is involved in.
CharityVillage: The foundation has been around for almost 40 years. How did it get started? Was its mission always to support organizations that help children at risk?
Graham Hallward: It was originally endowed by a branch of the
Southam family - Southam newspapers - and it started out by supporting
families and children at risk. As the nonprofit sector grew, it became
evident that we had to focus a bit more specifically and be good in
a particular field. So, about 10 or 12 years ago our focus was narrowed
down to children at risk. Then, two years ago, we refocused substantially
into the two funding streams we have now: research into risk factors
in early childhood development, and funding pilot projects or demonstration
programs and new therapies for that same constituency.
In the last few years, with the growth of online databases and directory
services, we were getting a lot of applications that were, unfortunately,
less and less well-targeted. We decided that we should focus and be
good at one thing in particular.
CV: What types of research and pilot projects are you funding now under your new guidelines?
GH: What we have going now is funding for a five-year program with the Montreal Children's Hospital, the Prenatal to Kindergarten Healthy Development Program. This is a program that brings together in one service the four or five practitioners or disciplines that single parents with young babies would need. The challenge was trying to get single mothers to come to many of the services that were available. Instead, what's happening now is that there's a single centre at the Montreal Children's Hospital where all of the services and practitioners are available. It's a one-stop shop for all the services that a single mother needs. That's nutrition, medical, psychological - if there are developmental problems with the child, and introductory services for economic support. It's to make it as easy as possible for a young mother to be a good mother, rather than putting the onus on her to go out and find the four or five different services independently. So, that's a service delivery trial.
We are also funding, for three years, an initiative with the Canadian
Institute for Advanced Research. We are helping to start what is essentially
the successor to the early-years child study that Fraser Mustard and
Margaret McCain published about five years ago. The successor will focus
on experience-based brain development and the concept that, even in
the womb and in the very early years, environmental stimuli actually
contribute to and affect brain development and IQ. Neurological development
in the first 0-18 months has more external factors than we originally
thought. This is a very, very big issue in early childhood development.
CV: Given the foundation's lengthy involvement with the issue
of children at risk, has there been an evolution in this area, or increased
interest in it over the years?
GH: There has certainly been an evolution, and that's been the result of a couple of factors. One is that a lot of government agencies and also not-for-profits have recognized the economic costs of broken families or children with problems that could have been corrected early on. There is an economic cost to not doing something about early childhood development issues and broken family issues. Secondly, as more research goes into these issues, whether it's physical development, neurological development, or family structure, the disciplines start to come together. More and more there is an understanding that by working across what were formerly very strict professional sciences, they are uncovering and coming up with bigger and bigger results. So, the social worker working with the neurologist within a social agency context is a newer issue than it was twenty or thirty years ago when there wasn't much cross-disciplinary work.
A bigger structural issue is that about twenty years ago Baby Boomers
started having babies. So you had a big demographic that was interested
in children's development and children's issues during a relatively
strong economic cycle. In a sense it became a bit of a demand issue.
This large cohort of the population wanted to know more, wanted to be
good parents, and wanted the best for their children. That, I think,
drove both the government agenda and some of the research agendas.
CV: Why did you choose to focus your funding on research, pilot, and demonstration projects? What are the risks and opportunities of getting involved at such an early stage?
GH: Foundations are interesting creatures in that they don't
have any shareholders and they are not publicly funded so their mission,
objectives, and results don't have to be defended in public to taxpayers.
That's not to say that foundations can be irresponsible. The vast majority
I know are very responsible and careful to do very strong due diligence
on the projects they fund. But what it means is that foundations can
be risk-takers. They are really only responsible to the board, so foundations
can, if they choose to, look at things that might be very hard to fund
otherwise, things that perhaps a government department or agency might
not want to fund because it was unproven or too off the wall. Or, perhaps
the people who will run the program find it too difficult to get the
government money and it's easier to apply to us. We don't have the same
red tape. So, in many ways, foundations can be very quick and responsive
in facilitating opportunities that might not otherwise get funded by
traditional sources, i.e. government or public sources. We are very
comfortable being "small r" risk-takers.
CV: You tend to favour multi-year grants. Do you feel this is the best way to achieve your mission and help organizations achieve theirs?
GH: Rarely does it take only a year to conceive of a program,
describe it, make sure it fits with your strategic plan, raise the money,
implement it, and evaluate it. Generally speaking, you can't test something
or conduct a piece of research that quickly, in that short a time span.
Multi-year funding really recognizes that the kind of work we're doing
takes time. Charities need a long-term commitment, knowing that they
are going to have funds for three years or five years. Then they can
invest in either the equipment, the training, or the people who are
going to carry out the research or the project. Our funding just makes
sense. You have to make a long-term commitment to get substantial results.
CV: What do you look for when deciding which projects you will fund? What type of follow-up or evaluation do you do?
GH: Initially, or course, projects have to fit our criteria.
In addition, we tend to look for the right kind of people. By that I
mean other credentials and the experience of the senior staff and the
people who are going to carry out the project. Are they appropriate
for what is being attempted? We look at the board structure, which is
tied into financial health. We look at the financial statements of the
organization. Ideally, we don't want to see too much fluctuation from
year to year. We're looking for a little bit of stability and that the
board seems to be large enough and representative enough that it has
a good cross-section of experience and expertise to run the organization.
In checking things out, very often I will call up someone else I know
in a related field and ask, 'does this idea sound right?' I have a handful
of people that serve as an informal advisory committee.
At minimum, we expect an annual report from the organization on the
progress of the project or research that we are funding. The report
should explain how things are going, whether they are on budget, and
whether the results are starting to reflect what the objectives were.
If not, we want to know why. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing.
Some of the best inventions in history were discovered by accident or
were the result of a failure. Mostly, we just want to be informed and
even if there are some surprises, we want to know how the organization
adapts or makes the most of those surprises or changes.
CV: Your organization is volunteer-driven with no paid full-time staff. How does that structure affect the operation of the foundation? Is it a model that you feel could work for other foundations?
GH: There is a loose rule of thumb in the private foundation
sector that if you have assets of less than about $10 million and give
away less than about $500,000 a year, you can probably do it on a volunteer
basis. Once you get above that level it just becomes a matter of scale.
When you get into 20 or 30 grants a year, you need some help to keep
track of all that. Part of narrowing our focus was also to make the
voluntary management of the foundation that much easier. Under our old
criteria we were getting about 250-300 applications a year. It was getting
pretty onerous for me as a volunteer, and even using some of the board
as though they were staff just became too burdensome. Now, we are looking
to make less than ten grants a year, but they are going to be substantial,
$50,000 a year.
CV: What's coming up for the foundation in the next few years?
GH: We are still in the early days of our new criteria. We're
not 100% sure we've quite got it right yet. We thought we would be getting
a few more applications than we have, so we are going to give it another
year and see what the numbers are like, and the quality as well. At
this point, we are happy with what we've seen in the first year, but
we're still feeling it out. I suspect the direction is going to be increasingly
towards research rather than pilot programs. We're getting some applications
for what applicants portray as pilot or demonstration programs but what
they are really looking for is operating funds. Right now, the really
good applications are research-oriented, but we are always open to receiving
applications according to the guidelines on our web site.
Graham Hallward has been with the Alva Foundation since 1996 and
has served on a number of charity boards for the past twelve years.
For more information about the foundation or to find out where to send
a letter of inquiry about funding, visit www.alva.ca.
