Large charitable foundations have been encouraged to “be braver” and take risks that other organisations cannot, the associate director of strategy at Wellcome has said.
Speaking at an event in central London yesterday, Fraser Simpson said that, due to its £39.9bn endowment, Wellcome is in a “pretty special position as an organisation with a lot of money and the ability to make choices”.
He told the annual Charity Law Association conference that this was in contrast to a general scarcity of funding across the charity sector.
Simpson said larger foundations such as Wellcome, which is the UK’s wealthiest, “can, and therefore should, take risks that others can't, from what we choose to fund”.
“We shouldn't replicate being a government funder because government can do that, we can do other things. We've got other assets to bring,” he said.
“We can take a long-term view. We can back ideas before they're proven. We can use flexible capital to unlock other capital.”
Simpson added that trusts like Wellcome “need to move from that dreadful metric of ‘how much did we spend’ into ‘what did we make possible?’”
He said charitable foundations need to retain and protect their political and financial independence, which other traditional funders like government and industry do not have.
“We can use that to be braver,” he said. “We can use that to be longer term in our thinking. We can use that to be humbler about what we don't know, and I think that's really important.”
