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Funder Focus: John Robinson and the Community Foundation of PEI
By Elisa Birnbaum
October 10, 2006
This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the Community Foundation of Prince Edward Island. Established in 1993, it focuses on enhancing the quality of life of communities in the province. Toward that end, it oversees permanent endowment funds set up by members of its community and makes charitable grants to local community organizations. CharityVillage spoke with president John Robinson about the unique challenges and advantages of being the only community foundation in PEI, its leadership role in communities, and its future goals.
Charity Village: As the only community foundation in all of Prince Edward Island, how do you ensure voices are heard throughout the province?
John Robinson: The nonprofit effort in PEI is huge. We represent active communities from one end of PEI to another, and we are trying to get good representation from across the province on our board of directors. We actually cover a large area in that way with a small board of directors that are all volunteers. We have a new director that we are so pleased with and even though he lives far away, we communicate through the Internet and he is very effective with his ears and eyes in the community. He can be aware of people that should be approached in order to stimulate their thinking and make a significant charitable statement.
CV: How does the foundation achieve its mission of enhancing the quality of life of communities in PEI?
JR: In general terms, we try and stimulate giving. You need to have a strong awareness of who to stimulate and how to stimulate them, what appeals to people. That giving then translates into the creation of an endowment fund. It is then invested and that income forever goes to a cause.
CV: How does that general mission translate into your mandate?
JR: The way we paint the picture of the foundation and illustrate how we work is that we look to support the nonprofit effort in PEI. The donor often says, ‘you know where the causes are, you put the money where you think it would have the most benefit.’ So what we’ve done generally is that we place money with other charities in what we call a capacity-building focus. We ask, ‘how can we help a charity beyond giving them bricks and mortar or a computer terminal; how can we help them be a stronger organization and do their job better?'
We helped 20 or 30 organizations on the island in the last three or four years in a number of different ways, such as their recruitment and training of volunteers, development of strategic plans, budgeting and bookkeeping. At the end, the organization should be stronger and better able to do its job.
CV: What type of causes do you support by stimulating that giving?
JR: Well, sometimes the people we stimulate don’t even give money to us; they give elsewhere, like the hospital. But that’s fabulous because we know we’ve done the first thing: we’ve stimulated the giving. But, preferably, they place it with us. Then we ask them whether they have a cause or a vision of how they would like to see the community improved. Some people have very specific ideas; some, for example, want to establish an educational scholarship. And the reason they come to foundations instead of specific universities is because the people qualifying for [the scholarshops] come from a specific area or are wishing to pursue a specific degree, not necessarily at a specific university. Or that student may go to three different places of learning in the completion of their education so the scholarship can follow them around. So there’s one advantage to establishing a scholarship with the foundation.
Other people have thoughts about specific issues, like violence against women, poverty, health, the environment, the landscape, etc. People have ideas and we try to accommodate those ideas into the scheme.
CV: Aside from endowments, there’s another significant role the foundation plays in PEI.
JR: Yes, we perceive ourselves as having a leadership role as well. We look around for opportunities that we can catalyze or make happen, some of which we may or may not be involved in. For example, for three or four years the federal government had an Arts and Heritage Stabilization Program. We were of the belief that a certain amount of that program should come to PEI. So we did some legwork and eventually we were able to bring the PEI Arts and Heritage Stabilization Program to our province.
We found a volunteer to chair the initiative, a retired bank manager, and we raised $800,000 - a quarter of which was from the federal government program. We then challenged the province to match that amount and they accepted. We were able to interest the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Foundation to give another quarter and that left us with the challenge of raising a quarter from the private sector of PEI, which we did. That program is very similar to the capacity-building program. The premise is that this country is full of arts and heritage organizations that, typically in a crisis situation, always need help. We want to stabilize those organizations so that they are better run businesses.
That has been a very successful three-year program and it ends at the end of 2006. I’m fully convinced the arts and heritage sector of PEI has benefited significantly from it. And we are always on the lookout to make things like that happen.
We also do a variety of workshops, such as one that helps charitable organizations fill out applications for funding. We are also conducting one instructing nonprofits on how to complete their charitable returns. So our helping goes well beyond just giving money. And our awareness in the nonprofit sector is high because of such things.
CV: With such a small pie of available funding, how do you ensure you’re not competing with the same nonprofits you are meant to be supporting?
JR: Because we are looking to stimulate major gifts and we’re not looking for the fundraising campaign, we’re mostly able to remove the sense of competition that exists between charities. We want to stimulate new giving, the kind of giving that would normally not take place when you get 20 requests in the mail every week. We are quite sensitive in how we present ourselves. We focus down upon [charities], determine how we can help, and which ones we can help most with the limited amount of money that we have.
CV: Despite being a relatively young and small foundation, you have a long list of grantees. Explain how that was possible.
JR: Yes, the list is long because of a wonderful challenge we were given five years ago. A person anonymously challenged us to raise a certain amount of money to put into our permanent endowment. If we met that target, which we did, he would give us $100,000, no questions asked, (with only a few limitations as to where we could and could not grant.) We ran a number of advertisements in the paper saying we were accepting applications until a certain date for capacity-building projects. And most of our grantee list resulted from that challenge.
That challenge helped us achieve two things: it got $100,000 into the organization and it also raised our profile significantly. Now the nonprofit sector in PEI knows of our existence and when they have a special project, they know that they can come to us. Sometimes we have money available, sometimes we don’t, but people know we’re open and that we’re anxious to help.
Of course, now that the challenge is complete, we have less money available. We are now granting according to our granting policies and our endowments and that’s a much smaller number. It’s our granting policy that today determines how much we have available each year to grant.
CV: As a young foundation, what specific challenges or growing pains do you face?
JR: Unless given a huge grant to start off, all small foundations are a labour of love for the first five or six years. There is no significant growth and they are focused on establishing the foundation, building the groundwork. Then, typically, after the first decade you see a growth spurt. I think that’s what we’ve seen. We feel we are now on the threshold of several major initiatives that are very exciting - big projects that are the result of 13 years of laying the groundwork and building links and networking and establishing credibility and so on.
Because so much of the funding that comes to community foundations comes because people have reached a particular milestone in their life or as part of their estate planning, you do a lot of legwork before you start seeing the benefits of working with people who are in that situation. We have yet to receive our first gift that is a result of estate planning, but we know that we will be the recipients of several gifts when people die. There is typically quite a time lag between the start of the foundation and the arrival of the first few significant gifts. That is definitely one of the bigger challenges: how to operate with practically no budget because our operating money has to come from gifts or administration fees that we can charge.
CV: As a community foundation, you need to establish membership in the national umbrella, Community Foundations of Canada. How has that affiliation helped you?
JR: Yes, we are required to be involved in order to maintain the designation of a community foundation. It’s been very important for us since it assures people that we are a credible outfit; we are not just some little organization in the province, we are part of a larger organization. We communicate with CFC a lot via the Internet. CFC has an Atlantic region representative who supports all the foundations in Atlantic Canada. We meet, take part in seminars and the national convention every two years. It’s been very helpful.
CV: As you start gaining a stronger foothold in PEI, what are your plans moving forward? What obstacles do you think you will face toward realizing those goals?
JR: At the start of 2006 we decided to dedicate a third of our contributions toward youth and philanthropy, a third will go to seniors initiatives, and a third to respond to general inquiries.
If our foundation is the same as most, we expect our endowment to be 10 or 20 times the size it is ten years from now. And we also hope to see a large investment growth as a result of gifting that will come to us through estate planning and through the networking we are doing now.
The challenges remain the same as before: we have a lot of communities around PEI and we need to network in those communities and make people aware of the wonderful opportunity that they have. The concept is relatively difficult; it’s a lot harder than knocking on doors. [It] takes a lot longer and a lot more networking to stimulate the thinking and then to carry it through to where people actually do something.
Before joining PEI’s sole community foundation, John Robinson thrived in the private sector - the agricultural industry to be exact. Running his family farm was his labour of love over the years, a passion that has since been passed onto the next generation of Robinsons. Always an active volunteer, Robinson agreed to divest himself of other affiliations aside from church and family in order to throw himself fully into the role of president. For more information about the foundation, visit: www.cfpei.ca.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.
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