Understanding place in Australian philanthropic foundations

By Alexandra Williamson

The inspiration for this paper came from an interview with the manager of an Australian foundation that I had undertaken as part of an earlier study on private philanthropic foundations. She discussed the difficulties faced when the founder expressed a not uncommon wish for the foundation to ‘give back’ to a particular place that had been of critical importance in the life journey that had led to the foundation’s establishment. Yet this place no longer existed. A geographic place in the same physical location endured, but the place in the founder’s memory was a combination of the people, the natural and built environment, and the economic conditions that existed during the time she spent there.

As a researcher, I found this narrative fascinating. So when I came to study public foundations (those that must raise funds and accept donations from the public), I included questions about place as part of wider interview discussions about identity and accountability. Answers from participating managers and trustees revealed multiple, complex and nuanced understandings of place(s). This led me to Agnew’s conceptualisation of location, locale and sense of place as a framework to help explain the ways in which place is perceived and conceived in public foundations. In its simplest understanding, location refers to geographic places, locale to social places, and sense of place to emotional places.

Every participating foundation could draw a boundary if given the right map, showing the boundaries of the location within which they would fund. These ranged from national borders, to states and territories, to local shires and postcodes.

Social places or locales were discussed by foundation leaders in terms of groups and associations of people who came together to address identified challenges or take part in activities.
Emotional places or places of the heart were those to which there were strong connections in history, in culture or in the environment, as well as in the lived experiences of individuals. A sense of place so often motivates and informs philanthropy, both by individuals and through structured philanthropy in the form of foundations.

Place-based giving is one factor that shapes and is shaped by a foundation’s identity and felt sense of responsibility to place, and multiple interpretations, dimensions, and confluences of place within public foundations are recognized. Conceptions of place may be a primary or secondary factor in decision-making processes and agenda and go far beyond geographic in nature. Our paper therefore adds to the literature by providing empirical evidence of complex and nuanced understandings of both place and giving that go beyond location or geography. We find location is inextricably entangled with locale and sense of place in ways that are reflexively influenced by a foundation and its founders’ and donors’ identities. The areas of overlap between the three elements of place are more significant than currently recognized in the philanthropic literature, suggesting that appreciating the inter-relationships between the elements is as relevant for public foundations as distinguishing between them.

For the founder mentioned at the beginning, difficult choices and what felt like compromises had to be made. Should the foundation give to the same geographic place, or work to identify other geographic places that currently had similar characteristics to those of the place in the founder’s memory? Or should the foundation ‘let go’ of place and instead focus on funding issues and causes close to the founder’s heart, regardless of the place(s) in which they occurred?

For all foundations, their staff, managers and trustees, place has come to the forefront in 2020 as the global pandemic has forced our social and emotional places to overlap with our physical places to a greater degree through lockdowns and travel restrictions. Home, perhaps the strongest manifestation for many of sense of place, or an emotional place, was explored and experienced in new ways.

For researchers and practitioners of philanthropy, as well as for philanthropists themselves, this paper offers a timely focus of the importance of the local and familiar, often in tension with the global forces influencing and driving philanthropy. It will be intriguing to watch the impacts in many fields of a potential new hyper-localism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read this Article

Article details:
Perceptions and Conceptions of “Place” in Australian Public FoundationsAlexandra Williamson, Belinda Luke, Craig Furneaux
First Published March 15, 2021 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0899764021998461
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

About the Author

Featured

Alexandra Williamson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies (ACPNS) in the QUT Business School at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She holds a PhD and a Master of Business (Research) from QUT, and a Master of Business (Philanthropy and Social Investment) from Swinburne University of Technology.

Her research is focused on philanthropic foundations, accountability and place-based giving, contributing to theoretical understandings of how foundations engage with stakeholders in community and institutional settings. Prior to commencing in academia in 2011, she had 14 years involvement in philanthropic foundations and grantmaking, in roles which involved researching and implementing grantmaking strategies.