Funder Focus: David Peever and the Nickle Family Foundation
October 3, 2005
By Elisa Birnbaum
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the Nickle Family Foundation, a private charitable foundation that is the culmination of two earlier foundations, one administered by Samuel Clarence Nickle Sr. (1889-1971), and the other by his son, Carl O. Nickle (1914-1990). It is now managed solely by members of the second, third and fourth generations of the extended family as an expression of an ongoing commitment to enhancing the quality of life in the province of Alberta. CharityVillage spoke with executive director David Peever about the foundation's legacy, its mission, and its commitment to the people of Alberta.
CharityVillage: The Nickle Family Foundation has a strong heritage and legacy. Can you please describe its historical origins?
David Peever: The foundation was created by two of the oil pioneers in Alberta, Sam Nickle, senior, who was drilling wells as far back as the thirties, and his son, Carl. Both men came from humble origins and felt that the community had been extremely good to them. Creating the foundation was one of the ways they chose to give back to the community. Effectively, we date from 1962 and though the way we do things has certainly changed over the years, the mission has stayed the same.
CV: What type of funding do you provide and how did that focus evolve over the years?
DP: Typically, when founders are running the show, their preferences determine what you do. For example, when Carl was president, if he saw something on television he would want to help. After 20 years or so, the feeling was we had to focus a bit and it seemed that the niche in the community that wasn't being served was capital grants. Now, we're not thinking so much of the great big huge fundraisers to build new hospitals - they don't have trouble raising money - but little organizations that need a typewriter, those people have a heck of a time finding money. And so that was the niche we felt we could serve.
CV: What regions in Canada are you primarily focused on funding?
DP: As a rule, we like to focus our funding on Calgary and Southern Alberta, though once in a while there's an exception. In part, this is because we don't want to spend a lot of our resources on doing due diligence. One of the things the directors are always looking at is how to keep our administrative costs down. One way of doing so is by staying closer to home. Our grants tend to be smaller. The $100,000 grants are really the exception; it's way more common to give five to ten thousand dollars. And if you're doing that, it's just silly to spend that much money traveling to check things out.
CV: There are many who think you are specifically an arts funder. Do you, in fact, target one community or do you have a more general focus?
DP: A lot of people want to pigeon-hole us by saying we focus on one issue or sector over another, but we don't. We focus on providing capital grants wherever people are best served. It does tend to cycle, though. There was a time when we were known as an arts funder and by the mid-1990s we were really heavy into social services and probably in the last four or five years, healthcare has become one of the larger areas. So it changes over time as our directors perceive changes in the needs of our community.
CV: Having said that, how are the grants broken down across the sector these days?
DP: In 2004, social services received 28% and health and education were each at 23%. In 1999, however social services got 55% of our grants and health was at 17%, so there's been change over the years.
CV: To mark the turn of the third millennium, the Nickle Foundation initiated a very special project. Can you please describe it and why it came about?
DP: Right now the majority of our directors are in the third generation of the Nickle family and we needed to pull in the fourth generation because they have to take over at some point. So, in 1999, we went to the extended family - in particular the fourth generation - and said, "what are the needs in the community that you think are important?" They settled on wanting to make a contribution toward the new Alberta children's hospital that's being built. And that's really what's driven the big increase in health expenditure, what we call the Millennium Initiative. It's a commitment of $100,000 a year for five years from 2001 to 2005.
CV: What would you say are the benefits of being a family foundation?
DP: Obviously, part of the motivation of the people sitting on the board is to honour the wishes of the founders. But by the same token, you have to stay relevant to the community and our structure let's us do that. It gives us the flexibility to meet those differing objectives and we can make changes very quickly without having to go through a long consultation process.
CV: What are the disadvantages?
DP: To the extent that you limit yourself to people who are solely family members, you have the potential to not get as much experience on the board for different points of view. That's something you have to be aware of.
CV: What are your plans for the future?
DP: In the immediate future I don't see any great changes. We tend to be fairly reactive; our granting tends to be driven more by what people ask us for. I suspect that what will happen over time is that we will become a little bit more proactive. My sense of the fourth generation is that they'll be more interested in identifying things that are important to them rather than just sitting back and seeing who mails in an application.
The bottom line is that the money has to be given away every year and that's going to carry on regardless. Since we're done with the Millennium Project this year, the interesting question will be to see how they use the money that's freed up and I have no idea how that's going to go. We may go back to the fourth generation and ask them what they want to do or we may just find some compelling things coming in the door. We haven't really figured that out yet.
David Peever was a practicing economist before joining the Nickle Family Foundation ten years ago. For more information about the foundation, visit: www.nicklefoundation.org.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.
