It was my step-mother who suggested we put some of the company money into a perpetual foundation.  So in 2002 we set up a PAF, Diversicon Environment Foundation, dedicated to supporting the environment. The PAF has worked well for us, but it does have some limitations in that if you find someone with a good idea, but they are a small organisation without DGR then we can’t fund them. Sometimes we give them a donation from our private money if we can’t give through the PAF.

I know that’s unusual, as probably only 7% of the philanthropic dollar goes to the environment, but we feel that considering the urgency of environmental problems it should be a bigger slice than that.

Pam: We’ve always lead an outdoors life. Colin’s dad had a peach orchard, I grew up in Canberra when it was a just little village, so we both spent a lot of our childhoods wandering in the bush.   As adults we’ve travelled a lot,  spent many holidays camping and bushwalking, and done lots of long-distance sailing, so we’ve chosen to spend a lot of our time close to nature.

This has clearly influenced our interests and priorities, and how we practice our philanthropy.  Our children now all work in the environmental field, in renewables, waste management and sustainable housing.

Colin: There’s no doubt that experiencing the environment first hand is a pivotal feature of environmental philanthropy, so site visits are especially important.  We visited Arnhem Land a few years ago on an AEGN field trip, it was a revelatory experience, meeting Indigenous people on their land, staying in the community, talking and listening, and having time to get a better feel for their fundamental issues and specific problems.

When we first started our Foundation it was with the simple idea of doing something worthwhile, but looking at it retrospectively it has created many more opportunities for growth and giving than we realised at the time.  You learn such a lot from other donors with whom you collaborate, the scientific experts you meet along the way, and from the recipients doing the work on the ground.  The more you visit and talk to them, the more involved you get in the whole ecological process, which is a very rich experience.  That’s true whether you are a beginning or experienced philanthropist.

Pam: In fact our funding approach has changed over the years as a result. We do our own research into our grants, following our interests, so they have evolved as we’ve learned about various projects. We were involved with Bush Heritage and Australian Wildlife Conservancy in land purchase early on in the life of our Foundation. I was a nice entrée into the environmental area and gets you to travel to various parts of the country to look at the properties, and so you meet people and begin to develop a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

Colin: Ethabuka, a Bush Heritage property in the Simpson Desert, is a great example.  We re-visited it last year, spending 10 days walking around the property with a caravan of camels.  When we first helped with the purchase of Ethabuka  8 or 9 years ago it had about as much vegetation as there is on this table top!  But after a few years of good rain even the cattle yards had thousands of young coolabah trees in them – several metres high – so the place had transformed.

Pam: Over the last five years, having been involved with the AEGN  has made a real difference to our philanthropy:  there are educational offerings, field trips, guest speakers, and we learn so much from the other members we meet, and from our co-funding experiences. So we’ve expanded beyond land purchase now.

Colin: Last year we went to the Hepburn Wind farm and got to understand how a community wind farm operates.  I’ve subsequently learned a lot more about them, and we are coming to believe that the grass-roots issues such as community-owned renewable energy will ultimately be the most politically important.  As they attract community enthusiasm and a public profile, that will influence government thinking.

Pam: We have also been involved in the formation of the South West Marine Protection in the south west of Western Australia, along with PEW and the Nature Conservancy.  We happened to be able to give at a critical time when funding was running a bit short, and we were able to tide them over and maintain momentum in the campaign.  But that wouldn’t have come about if we hadn’t heard about it from the AEGN.

Colin: From a biological survival point of view the sea is more important than the land, but as land dwellers the sea is over there and out of sight. We might go and bathe in its edges from time to time but we don’t have much appreciation of its complexity, and so we need to look after the sea.  Helping with those things is really, really significant.

Pam: As medical physicians we are biologists, to some extent.  Colin has a science background, he’s a researcher, whereas I’m more of a clinician. Some of the first projects we got involved with were research projects helping to identify the changes in the environment that led to species population distribution changes, or the effect of fire on specific plants.  Our funding enabled research projects which then provided a basis for a more rational conservation approach.

Colin: I spent a lot of my research years measuring outcomes. Now outcomes are important, but they are often a long way in the distance and we don’t have the luxury of waiting for unequivocal proof before we act.  As time’s gone on I’ve come to believe that if you are trying to build a robust ecological system, then mother nature – who is pretty good at this stuff – will know best how to do it!

Our science,  and medical research in particular, tends to be reductionist, finding an association between this one gene and that particular trigger.  But increasingly we need to take a big picture view, looking at the association between well-being and health, for example.  We need to address environmental issues like that too, holistically, and ensure our research and our grants take that bigger picture into account.

Once you start to look critically at this big picture and realise where the environment is headed, you can’t help but become concerned and committed to do something about it.    There are a few things we need, but the number of things people want is endless.  Those things we think we want are depriving us of those things we actually need!

Some time this century attitudes will change: the trick is whether or not we can convince people to change before they have to, when the sea level has already risen 3 metres, when the temperature of the earth has gone up 5 degrees. It would be nice to get in before then, but it does require a heavy rethink of our priorities.

Pam: So one of the best things to do is to join the AEGN. We’re all in our apprenticeship and the world is changing very fast, so collaborating and sharing knowledge is one way to try to keep a little bit ahead of the curve.

About 15 years ago, the sister arranged a foundation workshop for all the cousins and partners.  We brainstormed a list of maybe a hundred different causes, and from that we each chose the key issues that were important to us.  The standout issues selected by us all were Children, Indigenous people, Education and the Environment. To this day they remain our key areas.

We love it when projects cross several of these areas, say education, children and environment – that’s a triple tick. One such project we got behind is Jason Kimberley’s website Cool Australia, which is a resource for primary and secondary school students and teachers that links in with the curriculum on environmental issues.  It’s an absolutely brilliant  resource, now getting to the point where it will soon be sustainable and potentially government funded.

Grassroots is our thing, where $5000 can change their world. There’s so many great ideas and people with a burning desire to make a difference, and they just need a small injection of seed funding to get it off the ground.  Our small grants can really make an impact, and sometimes even have unanticipated ripple effects – we  love that.  That first step is often the hardest for community group  and change-makers, but it’s really exciting for us, because you never know with grassroots where it‘s going to go.  We’re prepared to take that risk.

One example of the power of small grassroots grants is where we gave $3000 to The Central Highlands Alliance, run by Sarah Rees who was trying to save the Leadbeater’s Possum in the Mount Buffalo area. She had many small projects on the go at the time, one of which was getting together young lawyers who were interested in the environment, and explaining to them the most pressing problems in specific areas, and how lawyers could help.

This initial project grew into an association of engaged legal professionals called Lawyers for Forests.    Sarah then developed a further project, My Environment, which is also focused on saving Victoria’s forests but this time from a policy perspective, creating citizen action and challenging government and forestry industry practices.  She’s achieved all this with a grassroots, community-based approach and minimal funding.

We support Indigenous Land Management too – we funded the Bahmah-Millewa National Park project through Friends of the Earth, where the local Yorta Yorta Indigenous group wanted to take on more responsibility for their land, including water and land management.

We don’t accept unsolicited applications, rather all our submissions come from inside the family. The reason we want submissions from our family is that we want everyone to feel involved.  Any family member can submit an idea for a project or organization to support.  These must fall within our key areas and our guidelines, and the family member putting it forward must be really passionate about it.

We have a staff member assist us one day a fortnight, and it’s made such a difference to us, having professional help. It has elevated our standards, given us better granting criteria and processes – and we’re constantly learning. Because she is from the philanthropic sector she brings a broader knowledge than we have ourselves.

The foundation meets fortnightly with our staff member.  The grant-making takes up half the year, researching and selecting new grants, and the second half of the year is administration and follow-up on our grants, and assessing how successful we’ve been and what we might want to do next year. This works well for us.

We are starting to look at our grants more strategically now, asking – is it sustainable?  Is it replicable?  How else will it make an impact?

We used to have a three-year grants policy, but when you give to grassroots organisations that’s often not long enough. Not every project works, some drop off along the way, and our ability to give can vary, but it’s worthwhile making a commitment to support those organisations you really believe in, as a journey you are going to take together. So that’s where we’re moving  to now.

I remember at school we studied ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’, and one of the themes that came up in that was  ‘There is no such thing as true altruism’. At the time I thought that was wrong, but the more I think about it now there is no such thing as true altruism because it feels great to be able to help others,  and every two weeks I get to hang out with my aunties, cousins and my sister and do something worthwhile together.

Sometimes you might not see a positive impact for years, but when you do it’s fantastic, creates that internal smile. And it doesn’t just have to be in dollars. That’s one of the things we’re teaching the next generation – physical contribution is as important as the dollars, so get out there and get involved. Go and see it, smell it, touch it, feel it, absorb it.

The whole giving trend in our family really started from our grandparents Loti and Victor Smorgon. It was really important to them to give back to the community in the country that gave them so much.  There’s a family story,  where my grandparents were hosting lunch for my parents’ wedding in a hotel, and a man in rags came in selling kippahs. Papa bought one for every man at the table. After he’d gone someone asked ‘why did you buy them, he could be gambling or planning to buy alcohol?” Victor said “But he’s doing something. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and help. What’s 10 kippahs to me?”  So they handed that attitude down to their children, who are in turn handing it down to us, and we are hopefully handing it down to our children.

From the beginning it was clear that I wanted to fund Australian Environmental and Indigenous projects as they are my two main interest areas. I prefer to work with grassroots groups because they often find it harder to get grants.

Right now my focus is on the environment, especially projects that are tackling Climate Change. Over the last two years I’ve funded an Indigenous project that also attracted government co-funding. It is an online museum of the stolen generations Stolen Generations’ Testimonies. Documentary film maker Melanie Hogan, who made ‘Kanyini’, came up with this idea of interviewing the members from the stolen generation and recording their stories on film before it is too late. This generation is dying out, actually very quickly now, which makes the project even more important.

I feel it is important to meet the drivers or coordinators of the projects, and get to know who they are. I believe to a large extent the success or failure of a program is to do with who is running it and who’s involved. And so I have spent a fair bit of time getting to know the people behind these projects.

Maybe people don’t think they are going to make a difference in the environmental grant-making space, but in my experience it’s quite the contrary. It’s a real passion of mine as I feel we are running out of time. The Hunt Foundation has funded a wide variety of projects. The Greenpeace Sydney whaling project, which was a six week demonstration project using a boat out in the harbour with signs and slogans  about ending whaling, and it was highly effective.  We also co-funded  the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) to get up and running in  Australia, which was a an important milestone in sustainable forest management in Australia and has been implemented in the Tasmanian forest agreement.

I’m very passionate about forests, and so I approached Rainforest Rescue about buying old growth forest in Tasmania. Initially they declined, but a few years and discussions later, they found a pocket of ancient and beautiful rain forest in Tasmania that was for sale and was originally owned by Gunns. I proposed a matching grant and put up the first half of the amount needed and they raised the rest of the purchase price. That grant was hugely successful as it not only raised awareness about Tasmanian Forests to their membership it also helped build their membership as well.

I like to network with other funders, that’s why I find the AEGN invaluable. Being a member is great because it connects you with other funders and bigger foundations. You get peace of mind knowing that several bigger foundations have done a fair bit more research on the projects they recommend than I would normally do.

I firmly believe from personal experience that once you do go out into the field to visit whatever project you are funding,  it might be an Indigenous art project in Arnhem Land or it might be an environmental project on Lizard Island, seeing it with your own eyes certainly is a huge motivator and educator. Going down to the Tarkine Forest in Tasmania, stopping by the side of the road and walking  just 100 meters into the forest, and then you see this devastation from logging, just hundreds of thousands of acres of burnt-out barren land. That is such a motivator for me, a terrible eye-opener.  If we could get more people down to Tassie to show them that we may be able to generate the outrage and impetus required to create change.

My husband is on the Foundation board, but I make the day-to-day decisions. Our children are involved in our foundation to some extent too – our son is 18 and the twins are 13. My daughter has a passion for the green turtle, so we’re talking about how the Foundation could possibly help an organization that works with the green turtle.

Legacy was certainly important to me originally, but it’s not so much now. I’ve been talking to other philanthropists and reading about what other grant-makers are doing around the world. There is a school of thought that if you give it all away now you can make a bigger impact than giving it away little by little. Also, I don’t feel my children should have to take responsibility for something that I set up. I’d like to influence people to give away more of their wealth, and I’m also a great advocate of ‘live with a bit less and have a lot more in your life, yes less is definitely more! To me that’s part of the answer to climate change.

I can highly recommend philanthropy, it’s a wonderful world to be involved in. What you learn from other people – donors, experts and hands-on grass-roots leaders – is the most valuable information you can get, and the AEGN is really the hub of environmental philanthropy in Australia.

Robin:  We’ve got two arms to our giving: through our company Abergeldie, and through the Jaramas Foundation, which is our family foundation.

Mick: Abergeldie has had a strong community investment philosophy ever since I started it in 1994. We give a percentage of our turnover to charity, regardless of what our profit is, focusing on homelessness and depression.  For the former we sponsor a St Vincent de Paul van which goes to Western Sydney every night, and we and our staff volunteer on the van’s monthly roster. The other charity Abergeldie supports is beyondblue, in honour of one of our employees who committed suicide. It was very traumatic for us all, as you can imagine.

Robin: We set up Jaramas Foundation in 2008 when we had a windfall from the business, and at the beginning our main focus was on the poorest of the poor: in our opinion, refugees. So most of our funds for the first three years went into overseas aid, specifically to Australia for UNHCR and Oxfam.

One amazing experience, in those early days, was when we helped fund a computer training centre in a refugee camp in Uganda. It was ostensibly a training facility to improve the camp inhabitants’ employment opportunities, but in actual fact a lot of them used the internet access to trace their families, lost because of civil war. One man was able to find his brother who was literally flying out of Nairobi the following week to go to Canada, so he was able to link with his brother and escape the refugee camp. I was just blown away by the impact of this project on people’s lives.

Tackling the root problem: The environment

Mick: When we added to our fund in 2010, so had more money for distribution, we decided to extend our giving to the environment and education. Originally we gave to refugees but our thinking changed: there’s not much point trying to save all these people when the environment is not there for them to live in anyway. We’re trying to get to the root problem, in a way, and it comes back to the environment.

So now we have four giving streams – environment, refugees, education, and an annual one-off grant which varies each year, last year going to support the homeless.

In terms of education, we donated $500,000 to establish a perpetual PhD engineering scholarship at the University of Sydney, with a specific environmental focus: looking at engineering solutions to providing sustainable power generation and water supply.

Supporting sustainable farming and food production

With our environmental funding we’ve leaned towards supporting sustainable farming, looking at the importance of food production, so last year we gave to Landcare Australia to support six of their projects in NSW.

Robin:  There was one fantastic project which addressed soil care. The mob we supported, Glen Innes Natural Resource Advisory Committee   organised a seminar in outback NSW and 140 farmers turned up. A number of them then continued with training through TAFE as a result, so we think this is a great outcome. Just to bring those farmers together under the banner of caring for the environment was quite satisfying.

Choosing what to fund

One of the things we’ve learned, in our short time of having our Foundation, is that you’ve almost got to be blinkered about what your chosen cause is, because there are so many competing needs. You’ve just got to narrow it down and focus.

Mick: We believe that in order to improve the environment we need to find a better way of generating electricity and recycling water, and we have to do this for a lot more people, world-wide. We spend a lot of time at work in the water space, building water recycling plants and cleaning water so it can be released back in to the environment.

Philanthropy – an extension of personal and business interests

Robin: Funding environmental programs was an easy decision for us, it’s just part of who we are. My father is a birdwatcher and at 82 and he’s still propagating little gum trees in his back garden! My parents grew up during the war so they are very focused on not wasting anything – we always composted and recycled, long before anyone else was doing it. So looking after the environment just seems normal for me, that’s my perspective.

Mick: And I married you [laughs]. Our philanthropy is another extension of our business and personal interests.  We run an engineering and construction company so we spend a lot of time building infrastructure. We know there are limited resources, but we also know that you can’t take electricity away from people once you’ve given it to them. It has improved people’s lives enormously, so the real challenge is to find a way of providing electricity and water in a sustainable way.  That’s where our focus comes from.

Our kids are still quite young, and it takes a lot of time and energy to run the business. It’s been good to us, and it has generated the money we put into the PAF, but we’re still a long way from being retired so at this stage we haven’t got a lot of time to spend on our giving. We need someone to help us out, and other AEGN members have been really helpful.

Setting up the Foundation

Robin: When we set ours up we didn’t know anyone who had a PAF. We read about them in the newspaper and then approached our own work solicitors, and set it up without knowing anyone who was engaged in philanthropy.

Initially we definitely wanted to go under the radar, and didn’t tell anyone about what we are doing. But we’ve changed our minds on that, becoming  more open about it. Once we joined Philanthropy Australia and began to meet other donors, we realised it is really valuable to talk to others about things like how public you are, and how your foundation going to pass on to the next generation.

Our company became a member of Sustainable Business Australia last year. We got to know Rob Purves and got in touch with AEGN through him, he suggested we go along to an event, which was the launch of the Green Giving Guide. It was perfect timing for us, as we were thinking of increasing our environmental giving, and there we were at a seminar which would teach us how!

We involve our children (currently aged 18, 16, 14 and 10) in the discussion about where we are going to give, so they are very much aware that we’ve got these funds that we have to give responsibly, and they have their input. Having a family wasn’t a key driver of setting up a PAF, but we realised it’s better to give them responsibility than money: inheriting a PAF is probably less of a burden than inheriting wealth.

Mick:  The PAF has worked well for us, but we may not necessarily add more to it. I think that if we are setting more aside in the future we will probably do that outside the PAF. Through it we can only give to DGR 1 organisations, so we feel a little hemmed in. It suits us now because we haven’t got time to be assessing projects ourselves, but down the track it might be nice to have more flexibility.

We’ve met so many interesting people through our giving, clever people doing inspirational things, really passionate people from all walks of life.  That’s been a real bonus that we hadn’t expected. There is nothing more interesting than imagining how the world could be a better place, and how you could possibly help with that.

At the same time we were becoming increasingly concerned about the degradation of the environment and the loss of biodiversity, and we started to think about possibly buying a property for conservation purposes.

Acknowledging that we did not know much about land conservation or how to choose an appropriate property in the first instance we decided to give to some of the big charities like Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) and Bush Heritage that are actively involved in land and biodiversity conservation. Rather than buying a property ourselves we decided to become patrons of the Charles Darwin Reserve, so in a sense we opted for a ‘suck it and see’ approach.  It allows us to get layers of understanding over time of what’s involved in land conservation.

Peter: I wasn’t terribly interested in having investments, but Lynne convinced me that we had investments anyway, in superannuation, but as we didn’t approve of how they were being managed – where those funds were being invested –  we may as well do it ourselves.  So then she found Ethinvest, our financial advisors and philanthropy mentors.  I was very skeptical to begin with, but they’ve won me over completely. Now I’m a complete fan!

Lynne: At the moment we only give to about five groups a year, principally in the environmental space. For us, it’s about protecting environmental biodiversity and trying stave off both environmental degradation caused by man, and also impending degeneration and species extinction imposed by climate change.

We give additional gifts directly to smaller groups like the Lizard Island Reef Research Foundation because we have a particular interest in marine biodiversity and the Great Barrier Reef.  And then we’re also very keen to help protect biodiversity for birds, so we’ve given funds to Bird Life and to Rainforest Rescue.

Peter: Our PAF is very small, and we are in the accumulation phase so disbursing the minimum at the moment.   We give about $15,000 a year, and we’re trying to build that up.

Lynne: Yes, we’re basically working to grow our superannuation and build the foundation.  We’re probably at our maximum earning capacity at the moment, so it’s far more efficient for us to go to work and build the foundation, rather than for us to work voluntarily for a group.   What will take more time is taking the next step, which is volunteering.  I’m a member of the Lizard Island Reef Research Foundation board.

Lynne:  I come from Wollongong, and the bush and the coast featured really strongly in my upbringing.  I think that’s one of the reasons why I feel such dismay, because I can see places that used to be incredibly beautiful and have been cleared for no particular purpose. In fact there are some places I just refuse to go back to now because its so painful to see; it’s easier to visit new places because I don’t know how they’ve changed, what’s been lost.

This is one of the reasons I really enjoy what AWC and Bush Heritage are doing, working on places that are really degraded – the Charles Darwin Reserve for example, you see the ‘before’ photos and it looks appalling!  You wonder how they ever saw any potential there? But now when you visit it it’s terrific.  I find the optimism that goes with turning something around is soothing, to know that you can do something positive to help.

Peter: I was brought up in a country town in northern England, so I did a lot of fell-walking.  I’ve always been interested in the country, but it’s only in the last ten years that I’ve identified as an environmentalist as such.

Whilst we do want to save furry animals  … and whales and spiders and bees … we’re actually both pretty pessimistic about the big picture, about the overall future of the environment. I don’t think we as a species will take the difficult political decisions in the next 20 years that will save us from catastrophic climate change.  But we’re not prepared to give up hope. We can think global, act local.

Lynne:  If you weren’t at least partially optimistic you wouldn’t bother with the foundation.

Peter: Yes, but very few people give to the environment, a much smaller proportion than goes to health and medical research, for example. I think it’s simply not on most people’s radar to give in this area, even though they are aware of animal extinction. They may or may not believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but they don’t think much about the environment as a place to give money.

Lynne: But actually looking after the environment is the greatest piece of preventative health you can do.  Keeping biodiversity intact and the ecosystems healthy will impact on water, air quality, food production and community health, so it is in the end a key preventative strategy in human health.

Peter: What has been really exciting is how warm and values-driven the group of people we now mix with are – they’re very engaging and enabling, curious about what we are doing, and are happy to share stories.

Lynne: It’s been surprisingly easy to move into this group of philanthropists. I don’t think I’ve ever met a group of people who have been more welcoming.  Neither Peter nor I come from families where charitable giving was a strong feature. I don’t know that it’s part of our friends’ lives either, so all these things are completely new for us.  Yet we feel we can trust the AEGN.

We do want to know what impact our grants are making, or at least contributing to.  We come from evidence-based practice, evidence-based care in medicine, so we spend a lot of our day working out if what we did made any difference.  All the groups we give to report on their activities, and are critically appraising if there are better ways to do things. I enjoy reading their reports.

Peter:  But they’ve got to be short!  There are just too many to read them all.

Lynne: These days I even tend to read the donor lists when I go to an event or a public institution, and you see the same names over and over again.  So that’s made me more curious about not just who is there, but how they are doing it.

So it’s a real challenge to see conservation in action.  We don’t get to observe the Warddeken people practising Indigenous conservation, or visit them in Arnhem Land, or Gondwana Link in south-west Western Australia that has something like one in seven of the world’s plants!  What has opened my eyes, when you go to some of these places, is the indescribable beauty of the landscape.  Seeing is believing, and it spurs some people on to action.

I’m a kid from Broken Hill, often called the ‘Near Outback’.  Some people  looked at that arid country and didn’t see beauty, but I felt that beauty.  Many years ago I convinced my wife, who was living in New York, to come back to Australia –  and I had the excitement of having her see the Barrier Ranges, and the Great Anabranch of the Darling River, for the first time.

With all of those experiences there is a link to people. Take the Indigenous Ranger Don Rowlands from the Simpson Desert National Park, for example. Lake Eyre is his country, and listening to him talk about it is so powerful.  Similarly, meeting  conservation expert Keith Bradby at Gondwana Link allows you to see what is there on a whole different level.

As most of our donors aren’t going to get to these places, we have got to find ways of telling the stories of these places and of conservation efforts, and that’s where media, and particularly social media, have become quite important.

My wife Paula, who has a publishing background, came up with the idea of setting up a nature writing prize aimed at encouraging writers to explore the Australian landscape and their response to it—its beauty, fragility and resilience, and sometimes its desecration.  The Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize was launched in 2010 by the celebrated American essayist, Barry Lopez, and Australia’s prize-winning nature writer and poet, Mark Tredinnick.  Two prizes have been awarded to date.  For our foundation, this literary prize complements the normal approach to either funding capacity or funding a project.
“I believe most people learn about nature and the environment by experiencing it and reading about it.  Nature writing, often called the ‘writing of place’, is a powerful genre in helping us to consider our natural environment and think more deeply about the ways we impact on it, positively and negatively.  Having the prize under the umbrella of The Nature Conservancy gave McLean Foundation a way of combining our interest in protecting Australia’s biodiversity, literacy and creative writing.”   Paula McLean, McLean Foundation Trustee

I’ve taken a view for a long time that the best way to get impact is to build capacity. I know that’s not always the conventional view – a lot of people just want to back projects rather than fund overheads, but I feel that’s rather limiting and short-sighted.

The areas I’ve been most keen to support have been The Land and Its Biodiversity, and Water and River Systems.  It is always a challenge to find the right projects or people, the right opportunity to make an investment in a particular field. We are looking for organisations where we can have a lot of confidence in the people and their staying power and ability to generate results.

Today we are already seeing considerable support for advocacy activities. The question is going to be how much goes to advocacy versus how much to implementation work on the ground.  There will always be a role for advocacy, but my perspective is that others do that well, so I’ve not gotten involved in that way.

I think the most rewarding project I’ve supported was bringing The Nature Conservancy  (TNC) to Australia ten years ago,  which we did from scratch for they had no plans to come here, and seeing the work they have done to protect crucial habitat.

It was a matter of devoting time and money to convince TNC that they should invest and have a presence here. So much has happened through that process.  Over time we’ve raised A$40 million, of which organisations like Bush Heritage and Australian Wildlife Conservancy have each got over $10M.  We’ve arranged 15 fellowships where we’ve brought senior people out to spent time helping with governance, marketing, or fund-raising.  So besides money TNC have provided skills and experience to help local environmental organisations grow and build their capability.

One of the things that has worked extremely well for environmental donors in Australia is the National Reserve System, and the preparedness of the government, where an acquisition will protect biodiversity, to provide two thirds of the funding.   When the Fish River Station in the Northern Territory, was offered for sale, Nature Conservancy was able to put $1 million up towards  acquiring a property for $13 million.  Now we had support from the Indigenous Land Corporation and the Pew Environmental Group – but a very large part of that support came from the National Reserve System.

Similarly, the path-breaking challenge that David Thomas put to TNC in Australia  in 2006 was catalytic, offering to provide matching funding for $10 million.  At the last count that has mobilised A$28 million, so it has matched funds beyond his and my expectations. This is a great illustration of the leverage that can come from philanthropy.

I think the framework AEGN has laid out in Giving Green is a really valuable one, that recognises you can make single or multiple, very small or very large, contributions that all have impact.    There’s an expression that is getting a lot of currency in philanthropy at the moment -‘collective impact’.  It certainly resonates with me because if I am to provide $10,000 to something it may be helpful or it may not, whereas if 50 people each provided $10,000 you can look quite differently at the scope and potential impact of those collective gifts.

Starting small and expanding your commitments based on the results you see is a marvelous way to go.  For example, I asked David Thomas (The Thomas Foundation) if he would support bringing The Nature Conservancy to Australia. He offered $20,000 to do a feasibility study. At the time I said brashly “that’s not nearly enough”, but the irony is that David later provided $100,000, then $1 million, and then $10 million to support this initiative! So he was validating the ability of the organisation to get things done each step of the way. We can all benefit from this lesson.

It fascinates me that scientists now realise, contrary to accepted wisdom a decade ago, that even when you have large protected areas the size of Kakadu, it doesn’t  mean you’re going to be able to lock in protection of the species that live in that area.   What the science tells us now is that the only hope we have is by taking landscape views and dealing with whole ecosystems, and actively reducing the threats, such as invasive species, feral animals and bushfires.

It has become terribly important to look at national parks and land acquisition as a strategic investment in the context of protecting a whole corridor.  The  risk is that if we don’t expand the funding base to make these strategic acquisitions for corridors,  we’ll end up with ‘paper parks’, meaning they are designated protection only on paper because they don’t have adequate resources to address problems and implement solutions.

I don’t think there’s any doubt it’s going to be up to communities and philanthropy to do this work, alongside government.  It’s not just the direct funding that’s crucial, it’s also the enabling factors that play a key role.  We’ve made some great advancements in the ability to put a conservation easement on land in order to protect it. But its still way too costly, compared to what we see in North America.

There you can go along to a local land trust that operates out of a real estate or lawyer’s office, and register a conservation easement on your title for a modest sum, and you have the satisfaction of contributing to conservation in perpetuity.
Here (other than with Trust for Nature in Victoria that operates under a similar model) the path we’ve gone down has been to  have government entities that do it, but at a high cost.  Now if I donate a painting to the  National Portrait Gallery, I give via the Cultural Bequests Program and don’t pay Capital Gains Tax on that gift.  A very simple enabler would be to extend the equivalent of cultural gifts to conservation, which would encourage a lot more people to make gifts of land linked to these corridors.

We are at a point where we recognise that philanthropy, business and government all have crucial roles to play.  Even with the best will in the world in private and non-government organisations,  our conservation objectives are not going to be achieved without government support. So I feel we’ve come to a more mature place in terms of our thinking.

Bruce: Our involvement in philanthropy has come about through our life choices from a young age. We’ve certainly saved hard. I was brought up with that as a family tradition: you don’t waste resources, you save them and use them for useful things, including charity. I learned a lot about business and commerce at school and university, so I’ve applied those lessons throughout my life.

Ann: Some good investments meant that we had the capacity to give money away. We had more than we needed to live on, so we started off as individual donors, giving money through monthly donations to support several organisations. Sometimes we gave to environmental campaigning organisations, or a one-off donation to purchase land for conservation. And then after an inheritance, in 2008 we set up a sub-fund with Australian Communities Foundation.

Bruce: At that time I also changed employment and had 37 years of long service leave, plus accumulated holiday pay, so I put all that money into our fund too. The focus of the Melliodora Fund is environmental grant-making, specifically environmental sustainability, environmental advocacy and nature conservation.

Motivating forces

Ann: We’ve always been involved in the environment, professionally and personally. I studied town and regional planning and then environmental studies, so I’ve been an environmental planner for all of my professional life.

Bruce: My background has been in agricultural science, which is basically environmental studies with a particular application, and I’ve since studied aspects of conservation biology.

I was brought up in the country, which had a big influence on my attitudes and values. I was a Scout and spent a lot of time bushwalking. My father was very interested in Australian plants, and in using Australian plants in his garden.

Ann: My first few years were spent in the country too, and my parents had a weekender in the Dandenong Ranges. I got interested in bird-watching when I was quite young, and still am. All our lives we’ve been very interested in environmental things, been members of environmental groups and kept up to speed with what’s going on. Ever since we moved to the inner city we’ve been very active with our local creek regeneration group, and learned a lot from being local environmental activists. It’s been very rewarding to see our creek transformed from an unloved, weed-infested drain into a native re-vegetated parkland, which both people and wildlife really appreciate.

Bruce: It’s been a lot of work over many years: liaising with local councils and state authorities, establishing dedicated work crews in re-vegetation, promoting litter control in the streets, and public education. Both of us have had a lot of hands-on experience in helping to organise that work, and political lobbying with all levels of government. So we’ve got a reasonably good understanding of what it takes to do this over the long term. There’s a lot of personal investment, more than 30 years of effort. I’ve also been a grant-seeker in my professional role as a research scientist, so I understand what different funding bodies want, and how different ones operate.

Seeking positive opportunities, responding to threats

Ann: When it comes to giving money away, we act from both positive motivations and to oppose threats to the environment. Positive when you see really good opportunities for spending money to achieve good environmental outcomes, but also negative in responding to those big threats to our natural environment, giving money to fight those threats. Supporting Bush Heritage Australia is one of the positive opportunities, contributing to purchasing land for conservation management. In terms of addressing threats, in the 1990s we supported a project to employ an economist to research and document commercial plantations as a potential positive alternative to the logging of native forests.

Bruce: Yes, that was an unusual but good approach, on the edge of advocacy and innovation. That appeals to us, because as professionals in related fields, we understand how research and innovation work, the value of any unexpected benefits or applications that come out of that research, and how it can influence public policy.

In fact the work that we support is not just about the environment, it’s actually about people. Our grants are generally spent in employing people. We are making a social investment for environmental outcomes.

Choosing what to fund

Ann: In terms of choosing what to fund, we operate at the lower end of the grant-making scale. We still give $20 a month to some organisations, and small grants of $5000 which can be really valuable to another group, especially when combined with grants from other funders. Occasionally we give $15,000–25,000 to support an organisation or a project. Because we are not big funders we are looking to be very strategic and catalytic, and we often collaborate with other funders to contribute to bigger projects.

Funding climate change and energy advocacy

Bruce: We focus on nature conservation, and we’re happy to support advocacy. We know that politics is important and people need to be out there interacting with and influencing decision-makers. For example we fund the AYCC (Australian Youth Climate Coalition), which engages young people in the fight against climate change, not just teaching them about the issues, but training them in how to influence the political process. 100 % Renewable (now Solar Citizens) is another example, with a similar public engagement approach but a slightly different target focused on renewable energy. They take risks, and we were happy to help with their establishment phase.

Ann: This has been called the ‘critical decade’ to do something about climate change, or we face climate chaos globally. So it is really important to support the organisations trying to change not only government policy and business practice, but also our economy – we need a fundamental transformation away from fossil fuels, that is what has to happen. There are an awful lot of people with their heads in the sand, saying ‘it’s too disruptive; we can’t afford it’ but it’s really urgent that we try to turn the ship around.

Bruce: When you are young you are full of energy and try to do lots of things. As you get older you’re aware that the clock is ticking and there is lots more that needs to be done, so it is great to empower others to do things. There is a powerful ripple effect – the more people you can support, the bigger the ripples. So if you are seeking change it’s good to know you are helping others to achieve that change – you can sleep well at night.

Gib: My interest in the environment came through my father, Norman. He always had a great love of the outdoors and bushwalking. When he came to sell his natural history book collection, recognised at the time as one of the best private collections in Australia, he decided to set up an environmental foundation from the proceeds. Although in his ‘80s, Norman himself actually did the hard yards in setting it up, and he was there for the first 3 years of its existence.

Why be involved in environmental philanthropy?

If you ask me why people should be involved in environmental philanthropy, it’s because the problems we face can’t be tackled alone. Saving the environment is a collaborative exercise – in any patch of land, however small, there will be a mix of interested parties involved and a mix of social, economic and environmental factors to balance.

This to me is the real challenge – how we get ownership and commitment from the people who live in landscapes, land owners and land managers? I believe the best way is through supporting community groups in rural landscapes who work together to build their own vision for how they operate on their land.

Driving community change

Our niche is driving community change through a bottom up process, which means working with land holders and land managers to determine what can be done to optimise biodiversity and improve habitats.

Beth: At the Norman Wettenhall Foundation we have two specific focus areas – biodiversity conservation and landscape restoration. These are the areas we feel are not only greatly under-funded but have the biggest benefits, and on-the-ground tangible outcomes for species conservation.

Gib: A third element is supporting scientists – we know the importance of working from a good knowledge base, so we put money into conducting base-line inventories of the flora and fauna, and then ongoing monitoring to see if the actions taken are actually having an effect.

Funding applications

Beth: We’re a perpetual charitable trust with DGR and TCC status, and we are named on the Register for Environmental Organisations. This gives us greater flexibility to fund groups regardless of their tax status. Our application process is a simple online one, with two pages of questions and two references, and I am available to help them with it.

A lot of funders I speak to tell me they don’t get the applications they want to fund, but if the application process is too difficult then only the large NGOs with fundraising staff are going to apply and the small groups will struggle on un-aided.

So we  devised a scheme where other philanthropic funders can give money to NWF, and we receive applications and disburse it on their behalf. We distribute funds for The RE Ross Trust, Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, The William Buckland Foundation, The Ian Potter Foundation and now Yugilbar Foundation.

GW: In terms of filtering the applications we have a lot of knowledge and expertise on our Board – which we recently expanded from 5 to 9 – and strong networks, but if we don’t know enough to make a sound decision we ask Beth to do some research.

Supporting research and citizen science

Our approach is to try to influence cultural change by supporting activities like recording and sharing traditional, practical and research knowledge. We also fund capacity building, putting money into skills training and capacity building to enable volunteers to connect with, monitor and improve their landscapes.

We’re keen to encourage citizen science, where volunteers get trained in monitoring or land management techniques and become engaged with conservation projects in their local community. When a group of concerned friends and neighbours undertakes a small project, they’re not just counting Spot-tailed Quoll, for example, but in effect they are engaging in community capacity building – bringing volunteers together, sourcing an experienced conservation expert to help them design their project, getting trained in flora and fauna species recognition. So, whether or not they find a Spot-tailed Quoll, in the end it is the process rather than the result that will make the difference.

Beth: We get lots of applications for people to do plans to protect a certain species but they haven’t actually done any research into whether that species exists on that land.  So we often support groups to go back a step, to do the research to collect the base-line data, which will gives them a strong foundation on which to design their project.

An integrated approach

Gib: At NWF we are working towards a more holistic and integrated approach. We have to stop looking at the environment as completely separate from welfare and the arts. The health of the environment should underpin everything we do, and we know that the ‘ripple-effect’ ramifications of environmental projects can be seen in terms of health, training and jobs, and community development. You can’t look at one element in isolation from the others.

The power of small grants

Beth: There’s a trend for philanthropy, in seeking to achieve social impact, to make fewer small grants, and concentrate on larger grants to the big NGOs, but we can show examples of small grants which have been successful in leveraging larger funding or establishing partnerships. With Connecting Country, one of our first landscape restoration projects, we gave them $80,000 over 2 years, and 6 years on they’ve leveraged at least $4.2 million of other philanthropic and government funding sources.

Even with the smaller grants, a group did some research on bandicoots in a reserve managed by Parks Victoria, who were very impressed by what they had achieved with volunteers and philanthropic money. Now there are stakeholders, including industry, who are going to pay to protect that habitat and those species. We initially gave them $4,800 to do the research, and the end result is that both industry and government are now on board to save that particular place. We have lots of these stories.

Fostering land custodianship

Gib:  We’re now beginning to understand that when Europeans arrived on this land it was in very good hands, there were high levels of custodianship by the Aboriginal land-managers. If they could do it so can we – we’re trying to foster custodianship by today’s land owners and landscape managers.

Working together to create real change

I love the saying – from little things big things grow. Some funders say “come to us with a fully formed idea and then we’ll look at supporting it”, but that’s a ridiculous approach, turning the whole thing upside down. Strong projects and sustainable outcomes come from putting time and collaborative effort to develop, test and refine ideas, and create practical solutions upwards from there.

We donors also need to work together – like the saying it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to save the environment. We’re going to have to be a lot more innovative, flexible and collaborative in the future.

Back in the 1970s Dad and I decided that we should put something back into the rucksack sports – bushwalking, canoeing, climbing, those sorts of things – which provide our customer base. We didn’t set up a foundation, Dad looked at it at the time but it was just too difficult, so instead we announced our grants allocation each year (a percentage of company profits) and asked for applications.

One application, in those early years, was from the Wilderness Society for a projector to show a film on the Franklin River campaign. One of the conditions of our grant was that once the campaign was over the projector would continue to be used for charitable purposes. Anyway, someone rang me about 2 years ago to ask what they should do with it! I suggested giving it to the Powerhouse as an example of antiquated machinery.

From tiny beginnings to $2 million

I grew up in Sydney. Some bushwalker friends of Dad’s, after WWII, bought a property in the Illawarra Escarpment. They ran goats and grew vegies and flowers – selling their flowers to the local pubs at that time – and living a subsistence lifestyle. They originally pitched two army tents and bushwalker friends would come and stay, eventually buying land next door. It was a whole community, and that’s where we used to go for holidays in my childhood. It was a very special place.

After this couple died, a group of 18 of us bought the land and put over 90% of the property into a voluntary conservation agreement. We got a small initial grant from the government for bush regeneration, but there were ongoing costs for managing our land for conservation, so I understood first-hand the real need for funds by those who have taken on voluntary conservation agreements.

So I asked Leonie Gale, then CEO of the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife, if she would be interested in joining me to fund a new program. We embarked together on an effort to source matching funding, and that first year we ended up with $30,000 for a 3 year trial period. National Parks wrote to everyone with conservation agreements and asked for applications. The following year Colin Brown and other donors joined us and we had $100,000 to give away. When the next election came up the NSW Environmental Trust (another hat I wear) put aside a separate amount for voluntary conservation agreements. So there was $2million over 6 years for this purpose, and someone employed to manage it – all from such tiny beginnings!

Setting up the Foundation

We set up the Paddy Pallin Foundation in 2007, just at the time that PPFs (Prescribed Private Funds) were being changed into PAFs (Private Ancillary Funds) when there was considerable uncertainty. Our solicitor said ‘let’s just go for the full thing’, so we established a perpetual foundation which has the freedom to give to a wide variety of organisations.

My wife Nancy and I, and our son Tim, are on the board. There is a management committee, but Nancy and I do all the grants research and decision making. Because we’ve only got a relatively small amount of money – $40,000 to $50,000 per year  – we’ve refined the areas in which we give.

Science and advocacy

As well  as the Private Land Conservation Grants, we have a Science Grants program which last year gave five grants of up to $7000 each to PhD students or early career scientists. Some are designated for marine scientists, and some are terrestrial. Humane Society International and the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife contribute and the program is managed by the Royal Zoological Society of NSW.

We also support advocacy, for I believe that if carefully managed advocacy projects can achieve far-reaching results, such as legislative changes.  We funded the Nature Conservation Council to undertake a review of several  government policies, including the BioBanking program (Biodiversity Banking and Offsets Scheme).

Using technology to crowdsource biodiversity data

In partnership with the National Parks Association, we recently funded a phone app which allows citizen surveys of biodiversity. It’s a simple survey tool to capture photos, use GPS to record the location, collect answers to a few simple questions, and then the data can be uploaded to a spreadsheet later when you get back into a Wifi area. The researcher can cull spurious sightings and upload the findings to the Atlas of Living Australia. Its an exciting application, to which anyone can contribute – bushwalkers, farmers, land managers.

Bush regeneration and biodiversity

The Ku-ring-gai Council named a park after my Dad and we fund a professional team of bush regenerators to regenerate the native vegetation  there too. It’s only a little bit of money, but it’s been 13 years now, and that little bit of bush in Lindfield is looking really superb. We’ve been able to document it and put it on the Paddy Pallin Foundation website and we’ve published the bush regeneration model in Ecological Management and Restoration journal.

My personal conservation efforts tend to focus on bush fire issues. I was really impressed with Australian Wildlife Conservancy up in northern Western Australia where they own very large properties. They think very ‘big picture’, and implemented a fire plan across five properties in conjunction with the neighbours. This enabled them to do broad scale patchy burns which have really increased the biodiversity of the area.

Advice to new donors

My advice to new donors is firstly to do their research: talk to other funders, to the AEGN, to make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Then suck it and see, with small grants within a set time frame – eg. a 3 year trial.

To test out new ideas, donors can co-fund through an established foundation, rather than having to set up their own foundation. We have a few donors who give to us regularly – one donor dislikes her husband buying new cars, so every time he buys a car she gives a donation through us!

Improving donor relations

I know that most philanthropic giving goes to medical research and the arts. Certainly the latter field looks after their donors a lot better than environmental organisations do. I have personal experience of this. I decided to do something different for my 70th birthday, so Nancy and I have commissioned a piece of music for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. We selected a composer and have attended rehearsals, and during this process the ACO has really taken us in as a part of their family. It’s been an interesting lesson in how to really look after those people who have supported you.

If you give to environmental organisations – you donate, they say thank you and you get a report, but they just get on with the job.  It’s no doubt a cultural and economic thing; they are so focused on the work at hand and they don’t have anyone one looking after their relationship with their donors.  But it’s common sense – you need to be in contact with your major donors more often, invite them to events, occasionally have them for drinks and nibbles to hear about what the organisation is doing. The environment movement is heading towards improved donor relations, which will make a big difference.

I describe myself as an environmentalist. I think the term ‘greenie’ is a bit of a misnomer in Australia, being the name for supporters of the Greens political party, as well as those passionate about conservation.

Australia is really at the cross-roads now, in terms of the environment.  The three key environmental issues we face are: the threatened roll-back of federal environmental laws that were 30 years in the making; the urgency to protect the Great Barrier Reef from multiple threats; and dealing with climate change. There’s a call to action so that we don’t allow these disasters to happen.

Whilst I’m passionate about the environment, I had a career in business. I was  fortunate to chair the DCA Group, a large health company, and on the sale of that business I decided to donate not only a lot of time to environmental causes but also a lot of cash. That led to setting up the Purves Environmental Fund in 2004.

Funding approach

The Fund is of a size where we can have more than one focus. Therefore we take a portfolio approach, where we work across a number of organisations and approaches. We focus on landscape management, climate change and capacity building, often helping smaller NGOs in the environmental space to have a more sustainable financial platform.

My choice to fund climate change came about simply because, in my view, unless we address this it won’t be worth addressing anything else! Clearly Australia is also undergoing phenomenal change driven by the mining boom. This is impacting on communities across the country, and having huge environmental impacts too, whether in the Great Barrier Reef or a tin mine in the Tarkine in Tasmania.

How can we get a better balance between development and conservation?  I think communities need to speak up, and it’s also incumbent on science to stand up and be counted. So we need a mixture of increased levels of activism at the local level, and a stronger use of science to get environmental outcomes. Some key scientists, such as those in the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, are speaking out and taking a lot of risks despite facing attack from the shock jocks.

Connection to the land

My connection to the unique Australian landscape is really important to me and I want to help preserve that. My mother’s family is from the land, and at school I used to do a lot of bushwalking.  I was a member of the local conservation group – we used to chop down privet in the Galston Gorge north of Sydney – so I’ve always had an involvement in landscapes, and that motivated me to try to preserve them.

Capacity building for NGOs

A lot of people really care about the environment, it is consistently on the top 10 list of things that Australians are concerned about, but there is a disconnect – it’s not a cause people give money to. Not enough funding goes into environmental NGOs. Because I’ve been involved in the not-for-profit sector I realize that without cash NGOs can’t do anything, so we’ve got to try to assist those who are doing a really good job.

We are particularly interested in the capacity building of NGOs, for example we gave WWF in New Zealand funds to do a big marketing campaign to grow their supporter base. Today they have about 10,000 supporters which gives them about $3M per annum to use to undertake projects to help the environment.

We support the AYCC [Australian Youth Climate Coalition] with matched grants, matching their fund-raising dollar for dollar. Youth has an extremely strong voice when it comes to climate change because it’s probably impacting more on their lifetime more than ours.

The various Conservation Councils in Australia play a really strong role too.  Whilst we have good national environmental NGOs we have, I think, rather weak State-based organisations which are chronically under-funded and rely too heavily on declining government funding.

Advocacy based on evidence

Advocacy is also very important. In every environmental issue that we face in Australia we have an opposing side, and let me tell you these people are really good advocates. The conservation movement hasn’t been able to advocate strongly enough, and that’s why we particularly want to fund it. Using evidence to drive advocacy is essential – we need to argue our case with facts, so it revolves around the science.

A real standout project for us was Tim Flannery’s book, ‘The Weather Makers’. Who would have thought that supporting one of Australia’s leading scientists to travel the world for 6 months would lead to a seminal book that would influence so many people globally. I don’t think many Australians realize how significant ‘The Weather Makers’ was globally. It achieved real leverage in the climate change debate.

Halting land clearing in Queensland

However the greatest environmental gain that I’ve been involved in has, without a doubt, been the halting of broad-acre land clearing in Queensland in 2001. Clearing up to 1 million acres a year brought about major biodiversity loss, so that was a really important win. But unfortunately, and with considerable angst, we’ve just seen the Queensland government reverse its decision and revoke those laws, which is a very sad moment.

Connecting science and public policy

The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, of which I am a member, goes about connecting science and public policy by providing a pathway through some of the thorny environmental issues that communities and government faces.  One highly ambitious work in progress is a new Accounting For Nature measuring system to so we can see to what extent our interventions are improving environmental conditions. It’s getting a lot of interest from state and NGO agencies at the moment.

First-hand experience triggers change

Everyone has a moment that really dictates a change of behavior. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was one of those moments for me, and another was going to Greenland, standing on an ice-sheet two kilometres thick, and realizing that if that ice is released through climate change it would increase the sea level by six metres! That’s a pretty scary. One of the key things for us as environmental supporters is to go out and look at some of these big environmental challenges, because that first-hand experience will trigger some behavioural changes, and help us dig deep to address these urgent issues.