Funder Focus: Helen McLean and the Donner Canadian Foundation
June 7, 2004
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the Donner Canadian Foundation,
which seeks to encourage individual responsibility and private initiative
to help Canadians solve their social and economic problems. CharityVillage
spoke with executive director Helen McLean about the foundation's
contributions in the area of public policy, its well-known award programs,
and its proactive approach to grantmaking.
CharityVillage: The foundation was established by William
H. Donner in 1950 and began grantmaking in 1967. Why was it established
and how involved is the Donner family today?
Helen McLean: William Donner was an American industrialist who
made Montreal his home beginning in the late 1930s. He started the foundation
before his death and when he died he left some of his personal estate
to the foundation as an endowment. The money was well invested and the
capital grew and grew until we began giving grants in 1967. By then
it was a sizable Canadian foundation.
The Donner family is still very much involved with the foundation today.
William Donner's grandchildren became involved in 1967 and members of
the family have served on the board ever since. They take a really active
role in the foundation.
CV: In the 1960s it was decided that the foundation would focus on specific program interests, particularly research on public policy. Is this still your mandate today?
HM: It is only part of our mandate today. In 1999, the grandchildren
and great-grandchildren decided they would like to take a much more
active role in giving and grantmaking, and see the foundation make grants
in a wide variety of areas. We still consider public policy research
as an important granting area, but it's now only one out of a number
of areas in which we grant. But we support entirely the Donner Prize
for the best book on Canadian public policy, and we have the Donner
Lecture Series. Those inform public policy and we do make grants in
the public policy area, both to universities and what might be called
think tanks. It makes up approximately 20% of our grantmaking.
CV: The book prize, valued at $35,000, is now going into its seventh year. How did this award program get started?
HM: There were conversations about a book prize at a time when
Canadian book prizes were emerging in a number of areas. There was no
prize for writing in public policy and the board and staff felt it was
fitting that the foundation should support a prize in that area. Unfortunately,
the introduction of the prize coincided with a lot of negative forces
in the Canadian publishing industry. But it was certainly our hope that
the award would encourage quality research on public policy issues.
CV: You also support organizations delivering social services, international affairs and development projects, and land and wildlife conservation. What types of project and organizations are you supporting?
HM: Social and community benefits receive about 20% of our granting dollars.
Environment and wildlife preservation receives about 20%. International
affairs accounts for about 11% and international development is about
8%. We have had a very good relationship with the Nature Conservancy
of Canada over the last couple of years and habitat preservation and
restoration is very important to the foundation. We have supported bird
corridors and land acquisition from BC to Nova Scotia.
One of the things that we are quite proud of is our award for excellence
in the delivery of social services. It has been going for almost as
long as the book prize, and has created a way of reviewing organizations
in terms of effectiveness - something I think is quite valuable to the
whole sector.
CV: What are some of the outcomes of this program, and what feedback do you hear from organizations that apply for the award and receive a program evaluation?
HM: To date, we have rewarded Canadian nonprofit organizations
with $370,000 in cash awards in recognition of their excellence in social
service delivery. In addition, we have provided 1,613 Canadian nonprofit
social service agencies with confidential program evaluations ranking
their performance relative to their peers in the sector.
For first-time applicants, just completing the application that provides
the basis for the program evaluations is a learning experience. Covering
a broad range of performance indicators, from financial and human resource
management, to board governance, accessibility, and outcome monitoring,
the application asks organizations to measure and track their results
in an objective and systematic way. This encourages them to think critically
about their program management, service delivery, and outcomes.
Organizations use the final program evaluations as evidence of their
commitment to accountability and excellence, which in turn helps them
to leverage support from new donors in their communities. The program
evaluations also help organizations to identify areas of particular
strength and/or weakness. Many now use the evaluations as benchmarks
for improvement in their annual strategic planning processes, targeting
particular areas for improvement each year.
CV: What have you discovered about the delivery of social
services in Canada by conducting these free evaluations for organizations.
How is this benefiting the social services community as a whole?
HM: We have learned how diverse and innovative the multitude
of programs delivered by nonprofit social service agencies are! These
agencies are deeply committed and connected to their communities, having
seen - and in many cases, experienced - firsthand the nature of the
social problems they are addressing. This helps them to design programs
targeted to the specific needs of their communities and respond quickly
to changing circumstances.
The award program benefits the social services community as a whole by spreading
best practices beyond the organizations that actually apply to the program. Past award recipients are contacted by other agencies in their community for
mentoring in service provision and funding applications. This helps to raise
standards of performance throughout the sector.
We also profile examples of high performing agencies in our annual Non-Profit
Performance Report, which is distributed broadly throughout the nonprofit
sector. It can also be downloaded free at www.fraserinstitute.ca/donner/nonprofit_evaluation.asp.
This report can be used as a tool to help individual donors identify
the effectiveness of the organizations requesting their support.
CV: You don't accept unsolicited proposals. Why did you decide
to go this route and what are the benefits to the foundation and to
organizations?
HM: That's brand new. It's only been the case for the past month
or so. We were getting a lot of applications and the number we receive
means it is quite a lengthy process to read and evaluate them - so long,
in fact, that it wasn't really fair to the organizations. More and more of our granting is becoming proactive. The board will decide that the foundation should do some work in a specific area and we do research and talk to people. As a result of that, applications weren't getting attended to.
Often you
don't necessarily want to say yes or no. You want to think about it
in the context of the whole year. You either have to go to a yes/no
formula or you have to let people know that it's not an application
process, per se. It's more about acquainting us with your project and
letting us think about it and see how it fits into the objectives and
goals at a given time. You don't want to say no and then have people
think that they can't reapply. I think it's probably a better idea to
establish files of information about organizations to review and consider
as the staff develops grants.
CV: Since its inception, the foundation has distributed more than $100 million. How much did you grant last year? Is this level of giving expected to continue?
HM: We made grants of about $7 million last year and $8 million
the year before. Barring an unbelievably negative stock market, which
I don't think we are going to see, we don't intend to reduce the grants.
There has been a change in the disbursement quota from 4.5% to 3.5%,
but at this point we don't anticipate lowering our disbursements to
meet only the 3.5%.
CV: As the head of a foundation, what do you think about the lowering of the disbursement quota?
HM: I think it will negatively impact a lot of charitable organizations
and an already competitive environment will become more so. It's unfortunate,
in many ways, to lower it at a time when the private sector is being
asked to pick up more and more of the responsibility for funding the
charitable sector. I understand if you were a small foundation that
started two or three years ago, that it would be very concerning to
see your capital being eaten away. On the other hand, to allow all foundations
- some of which have been in existence for more than 50 years, as we
have - to reduce their disbursements immediately is quite a drastic
action. I mean, one percent is actually a fairly substantial amount
of money. So, I feel for new foundations, but I feel even more for the
charitable organizations. I think that most well established charitable
foundations will probably not reduce their grantmaking, or at least
I would hope that they don't.
CV: What's on the horizon for the foundation? How do you see it evolving in the next few years?
HM: Well, one area that people are interested in the foundation
becoming involved in is international development. International development
is very, very challenging because we are here and the projects are there.
But I foresee that we will do more in international development in the
next few years - probably India and specific countries in Africa. I
think we would want to be as strategic as possible in focusing our somewhat
limited resources as best we could.
Like all foundations, we are challenged by supporting some organizations for several years and becoming quite involved with them, and on the other hand, wanting to enable the emergence of new organizations. I think the members of the board - the grandchildren - will become increasingly involved in playing a strong role in the foundation and setting priorities for funding.
Helen McLean has been with the Donner Canadian Foundation for almost
seven years, and has been its executive director for the past year and
a half. For more information about the foundation, visit www.donnerfoundation.org.
