Funder Focus: Hugh Arklie and the Thomas Sill Foundation
September 7, 2004
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the Thomas Sill Foundation,
which supports organizations that strive to improve the quality of life
for people living in Manitoba. CharityVillage spoke with executive director
Hugh Arklie about the creation of the foundation and its mandate,
the innovative projects and programs it is involved with, and its commitment
to strengthen the charitable sector in rural Manitoba.
CharityVillage: You worked with Mr. Sill before his death.
Were his business associates aware of his plans to start a charitable
foundation?
Hugh Arklie: Mr. Sill was a very quiet, modest and unassuming man. He had some particular interests that were very special to him. One was curling, another was baseball. His passion, though, was investing in the stock market, and that's how he financed the foundation. He made a good living as a chartered accountant, but he didn't make the $19 million that he eventually left to the foundation in the business of accounting. He did that through the stock market. Even more impressive is that he lost his first fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and then started over again.
Two of his senior partners were also the executors of his will. They knew of his intentions to start the foundation and they tried to encourage him to do so before he died, but he didn't want to, again because he was fairly modest and didn't want to call attention to himself. So the foundation was destined to start upon his death.
CV: Your mission statement says that "financial support is provided
within the context of a limited budget, and in a manner which does not
confuse a reasonable quality of life with a desired standard of living."
Can you elaborate on this? How do you make the distinction?
HA: That's the original mission statement of the foundation,
drafted two or three years after we started. I can't remember us ever
having to debate 'is this necessary or is this a frill?' The charitable
community isn't about to kibitz with funders. We don't get requests
where people are asking for things that are unreasonable or embellishments
to their otherwise effective endeavours. I'm sometimes uncomfortable
with mission statements. A mission statement is one thing, but daily
practice is another for so many organizations. We try to, on that limited
budget, deal with the most pressing issues that people bring to us.
Ninety-five percent of our grantmaking is capital in nature, so we provide
buildings and equipment and vehicles - things that people can see and
touch.
CV: That's interesting because many funders specifically state
that they will not provide capital funding. Was it a deliberate choice
on your part to do this?
HA: It was intentional right from the beginning. Winston Churchill once said, during World War II, 'give us the tools and we'll get the job done.' We have the same attitude. For example, if you don't have a walk-in freezer it's pretty hard to run a food bank.
CV: In 2002-2003 you distributed a total of $1.1 million in cash
grants to Manitoba charities. Do you expect this level of giving to
continue in 2004?
HA: Our investments have leveled off in value because our only
source of income is the stock market, and it's been pretty stagnant
for the past few years. So that budget will stay the same until the
stock market improves.
CV: Approximately 50% of your grants go to rural and northern
Manitoban communities, while the rest stays in Winnipeg. How important
is it to the foundation to support rural areas?
HA: It's absolutely critical, and it's probably the thing that sets us apart from most private foundations in Canada. Most private foundations have an urban constituency, although they don't have to define a constituency the way community foundations have to define a community. Most community foundations embrace a fairly small, usually politically defined boundary. Private foundations don't have to do that. Many of them will describe their constituency, in some cases as national in scope. When you really get down to it, that means Toronto or Ontario.
We take steps to serve the entire province, simply because we don't
see the fairness in restricting grantmaking to the city of Winnipeg.
That's lazy, I think. It assumes that nothing good is happening in rural
Manitoba or in the north. It assumes that there is little in the way
of social issues to address. It assumes that the remote populations
don't need the support and encouragement of the third sector like people
in big cities do. It's all nonsense.
Not to say that I don't have fun working with charities in Winnipeg, I do, but it's a really good day when I can get out on the highway and visit some of the small towns and see what people are doing to maintain the vibrancy of their communities. It's our policy to try and visit all the grant applicants and put a human face to them.
CV: Given your emphasis on benefiting communities, do you work at all in partnership with community foundations?
HA: An outgrowth of our focus on rural Manitoba was our program to help rural communities start their own community foundations. Mr. Sill isn't going to die again and leave us another $19 million, so this foundation isn't growing, except to the extent that the stock market grows. We decided, more than ten years ago, that it's almost like giving a person a fish or teaching him to fish. What's better? All of these communities are coming to us for help but we have limited resources available. And not only that, we have a ceiling on those resources that will never increase in real terms unless the stock market takes off. In real terms the increase in the foundation's value hasn't been all that great, although it's now at $31 million, after having started with $19 million and having given away about $16 million.
The foundation formula really works. So we've managed to convince about 17 or 18 community foundations in rural and northern Manitoba that the formula will work for them too. We started that in 1993 and included in that list of foundations are some communities that that now have foundations with at least $2 million and growing all the time. Our focus on community foundations has probably been the single most gratifying aspect of my job in the past 17 years. It's really healthy for communities to take care of themselves.
CV: Aside from your more traditional grantmaking, you also support several focus projects. How did these evolve and why?
HA: These projects have been a response to opportunity. People
have had some good ideas and come to us and said 'what about this?'
We've discussed it and thought, 'yes, this is a good idea. Let's help
out.' One example is the Gifts In Kind program. It's been going for
about eight or nine years. Corporations provide surplus goods to us
- sometimes new, sometimes used - and we make sure they get matched
up with charities that need that commodity. It's usually office furniture,
computers, office supplies, and sometimes even things like cosmetics
and toys. We put through a fair volume of that stuff in the course of
a year.
One of the favourite things we've done in the last year is to partner
with the Kaplan Fund from New York for the Prairie Churches program.
Their directors have an interest in architecture, and in particular
prairie architecture. We've done a lot of work with historic resources
in rural Manitoba over the years so we matched the money that Kaplan
was putting forward and doubled the program. The project identifies
unique prairie church architecture, and Manitoba has an incredible wealth
of this because of the different enclaves that settled here. Ukrainians
here, Russians there, Poles there, Icelanders here. So the church architecture
is a reflection of these enclaves that you can find throughout the province,
and many of them are still standing. This project will seek out the
best examples and make sure that the buildings are secure and the historical
architecture is preserved.
Another important project is the Youth in Philanthropy program, which
is really a dividend paid from the community foundation work. It's a
copy of many other foundations across the country that are doing the
same thing. We followed the Winnipeg Foundation formula. I recently
had a call from Brandon, where they have three high schools and they've
signed on to the program for September. So, we'll be starting three
Youth in Philanthropy committees in Brandon when school starts.
CV: Why do you consider youth in philanthropy to be a worthwhile investment? Where do you see the youth in philanthropy movement going?
HA: We see it as another way that the community foundations can establish their credibility in their own communities and attract donors and the support of the nonprofit sector. It is the most photogenic project of the foundations that have it. It's the one that people like to publicize the most and whenever the high school kids get together for a grants evening it's always in the newspaper. It is always talked about in the community. This is significant. When the rural weekly [newspaper] comes out, it's usually devoured by the community. It's used as a very important medium of communication between groups. So the Youth in Philanthropy program has helped raise the profile of community foundations, thereby encouraging people to make gifts to the foundation or remember the foundation in their wills. So that's one benefit.
The other benefit is that it teaches kids about how a community foundation works, legally and technically. These kids are often directors in the making for the foundation sometime in the future. It also teaches them the importance of the nonprofit sector in their communities. Time and time again, when they are looking for grant recipients, one of the things we always hear is, 'we didn't know this was going on in town.' They didn't know these agencies were doing such neat things. So it raises the profile of the whole nonprofit sector.
Three years ago we wanted to have twelve communities involved with twelve
high schools. Now we are well over that. We've expanded beyond our original
intentions, so the uptake has been really good. We only wanted to do
three high schools a year. This year, one city - Brandon - is going
to fill that quota.
CV: As the foundation heads towards its 20th anniversary,
how would you like to see it evolve in the next few years?
HA: I'm trying to encourage other private foundations to look
outside their big urban municipalities. It makes so much sense to focus
on rural areas because invariably those rural areas are the sources
of wealth in the urban areas. In Manitoba it's agriculture, it's forestry,
it's hydro electricity. It's all kinds of major industries that concentrate
their wealth in Winnipeg because that is where the consumers are, it's
where government is, and it's where head offices locate.
It's the same with every big city in the country. Much of the urban
wealth is a result of the concentration of profits generated in the
hinterland. Since World War II, it's also a result of young people moving
to the cities. So rural Manitoba and northern Manitoba give the city
raw materials, profits, and people. And what do we do with it? We keep
the endowments here and we only send 9% back to rural areas. It's not
an exaggeration to say that the rural focus is what sets the Sill Foundation
apart from most private foundations in Canada. I think it would be good
for other foundations to ask themselves the question, 'why are we only
making grants in Toronto?' or 'why are we only making grants in Calgary?'
Hugh Arklie has been executive director of the foundation since it
was established in 1987. Prior to that he was a partner with Mr. Sill
in the firm Sill & Company. For more information about the Thomas Sill
Foundation, visit www.thomassillfoundation.com.
