Special features

‘The glass ceiling for black achievement in the management of charities and trusts is finally beginning to crack open.’ That’s what Brenda Kirsch wrote in an article for the UK Association of Charitable Foundations’ (ACF) house magazine about my appointment in March 1998 as clerk to …

Most grantmaking organizations in India are registered as trusts and their governance is vested in a small group of people who are either friends or family of the founder. To date, this approach has not been contested. There was an underlying acceptance of the fact …

Shouldn’t non-profit boards, registered as public bodies, represent the ‘public’? Shouldn’t they uphold the principle of diversity in board management? We believe they should. When we set up Dalit Foundation, we saw it as important that we didn’t limit support to scheduled castes. We took a broader view of Dalits as those who …

A commitment to diversity that includes race, caste, class, gender and religion is a central part of philanthropic programme effectiveness. With such representational diversity increasingly being used as a reference point, this article suggests that, …

There are at least two good reasons why foundation boards and senior management should be representative of the communities they serve. First, they will naturally produce a greater variety of viewpoints and a wider range of experience, which arguably improves …

Three months ago I had some cursory research done into the educational backgrounds of the chairs of the top UK foundations. Of the 57 people in the sample, seven were educated in normal state schools (non-selective), four in selective grammar schools and the overwhelming majority, 46, were educated in private, fee-paying schools, the most popular of which was …

Despite mandatory requirements for disability employment, employment for people with disability in India remains abysmally low according to the National Centre for the Promotion of Employment of Disabled Persons. Of those who are employed, 70 per cent are physically challenged; …

Gender solidarity, intergenerational solidarity, solidarity with the poor and excluded, solidarity with refugees, solidarity with victims of terror, solidarity with the politically suppressed, solidarity with countries in crisis… solidarity is a widely used term in …

Questions of solidarity go to the heart of the European project. While solidarity implies ties of support and sympathy across national boundaries, notions of EU solidarity have been under strain in recent years. In particular, …

We asked a range of people from across the global philanthropy spectrum what solidarity means to them. Here are their responses. ‘Shared values uniting all classes and groups in society; an essential fairness in the …