Funder Focus: Peter Warrian and the Lupina Foundation
November 7, 2005
By Elisa Birnbaum
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the Lupina
Foundation, a private, Canadian charitable foundation
established in April 2000 by Peter Warrian, PhD and his wife Margret
Hovanec, PhD. The foundation is committed to research and innovation
related to health and society issues. Its grantmaking is directed at
educational and other charitable organizations in Canada.
CharityVillage spoke with managing director Peter
Warrian about the foundation's mission, its projects, and
its ongoing commitment to health and society.
CharityVillage: With many foundations today focused on
health issues, what specific and unique gaps is the Lupina Foundation
trying to fill? What motivated you and your wife to create this
foundation?
Peter Warrian: The issues of health and society were strong
motivators by themselves. A lot of attention is paid to the social
determinants of health, but in recent years much of the policy area
was directed toward early childhood development. But children go on
to become adults and that part of the issue, we felt, was not pursued
as it might have been. And the whole area of health anxiety was
something that not as much attention was brought to that we thought
should have been.
CV: You have a pretty extensive and varied background. Can you
explain how you and your wife's work experiences have helped you in
your new role as a funder and, more specifically, how they inspired
the type of projects you fund?
PW: For about ten years I was research director of United
Steelworkers of America and then I did lots of consulting and labour
management in the steel industry. I was also chief economist for the
Rae Government [of Ontario] and started a software company that we
sold to Microsoft. Then I came to the University of Toronto to teach
part-time. That type of experience has helped me. I have worked on
the nonprofit side, the community side, government side, and the
business side.
My wife has worked for years as a clinical psychologist. So she's
worked in the areas that we are involved with now. She had a
particular background in trauma victims and also designed the torture
classification system for Amnesty International.
CV: The Lupina Foundation is focused on three main areas:
health anxiety, social factors in health risk, and access to health
services. With those goals in mind, what type of projects do you
fund?
PW: We do a variety of things. Part of our funding is
university-based research. We have a project in Toronto called the
Comparative Program on Health and Society where we have six doctoral
students and two post-doctoral students working on a range of issues,
including health reform in China, pharmaceutical drug pricing
practices, and the impact of health on immigrant women. Then there is
a project at the University of Guelph on the health of farmers and
rural women. There are two projects at the University of Alberta with
four post-doctorates that are directed at the aged population and the
assessment of their capabilities - their own assessment versus the
systems' assessment. Another developing project is on reform of the
health care system in rural China.
Outside of that, we've done a project in Hamilton - a travelling
museum on the history of women's workplace health and safety issues.
Another project we are working on is on women's health in mining
communities in Northern Canada, Latin America, and in Africa.
We also have a project on the victims of bombings. My wife Margret
developed a protocol for how to deal with post-traumatic stress in
mass community situations. She came up with a certain model for doing
that. Now we're supporting a network of eight trauma clinics: one in
Northern Ireland; one in London; two in Israel; one in Palestine; two
in South Africa; and two in Sri Lanka.
So we think that all of these are things that maybe not everybody
else would fund, but they are things that we think are innovative.
CV: How do you decide how many charities to fund? What's
your funding style?
PW: We manage a relatively small portfolio with very
ambitious projects and resource those relatively well. We don't have
to have 60 projects; we would sooner find six innovative projects and
resource those well rather than 60 with five thousand dollars each.
Frankly, we're also a family foundation and we like to do this around
the kitchen table.
CV: What is Lupina's reach?
PW: We're primarily a domestic funder. That's who most of
our agreements are with, where our money goes, though some of them
may indeed engage in activities that stand outside Canada. Some
people's shtick is international development - that's not us.
CV: When do you accept applications?
PW: Our financial year runs July 1st to June 30th and we
make our funding decisions in mid-September, so we encourage people
to get things to us by September 1st. But we don't take a long time
so by October 1st we'll often have made a decision. In the New Year
we'll look around because there's always some slippage of some kind.
So, our big look is in September, we'll give a second look to any
mid-course corrections in the New Year, and then we manage our
projects through until the end of the year and then we look again for
next year.
CV: What were some of the challenges of launching a new
foundation and what advice would you give others who are thinking of
doing the same?
PW: Well, first off, if you're in a position to put the
resources out there, the real delight is that you get to work with a
whole lot of really bright terrific young people. That's a great
motivator.
Also, you want to be as clear as you can about your objectives. What
charter do you want to give yourself? There's an incredible range of
foundations - there's 300 just in Toronto - so think closely about
what you want to do and also how you want to do it. You want to find
a few projects to start off with, do them well and if you succeed at
that, that will inform your granting practice going forward.
CV: Your flagship project has been the Comparative Program for
Health and Society, a collaboration with the University of Toronto.
Have you found any other associations helpful?
PW: We launched in April of 2000 and in the fall of 2000 we
joined Philanthropic Foundations Canada. We found that very helpful.
You can pay a lot of money to lawyers and accountants and that's
necessary for regulatory purposes, but you'll learn from your peers.
We found the connection with the PFC to be very beneficial in
everything from investment philosophies to granting practices.
CV: As you review the successes and challenges of the Lupina
Foundation since its inception five years ago, what are your plans
for the next five?
PW: Well, where we are right now is two-thirds of our
projects are based in university/research and one-third is in the
community. In general terms, success for us would be if about
one-third of our projects were based in university/research and
two-thirds were in the community. Now, we won't reduce what we're
doing with the university, but we will expand what we're doing in the
community. We started at around $200,000-$300,000 per year. We'll be
at $700,000 this year, and we're marching up toward giving out one
million a year.
Peter Warrian has spent 20 years working as an economic
consultant, is a former research director of the United Steelworkers
of America, and was chief economist of Ontario Premier Bob Rae's
government before running a software company that he later sold to
Microsoft. He then decided - with the help and inspiration of his
wife, a clinical psychologist - to start a foundation. For more
information about the foundation, visit: www.lupina.ca.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist
living in Toronto.
