On creating change, not charity

The foundation was founded by my father, Lance, in 1970. He was very generous, and I was an only child, but I think he worried that I wouldn’t use the money to the best of my ability, so he endowed the foundation to the community. This was the greatest gift he could have given me. It’s been my toolkit to bring these amazing people to the table to do this incredible work.

I'm grateful that my father set it up this way, but the foundation grew from a board of all men who knew very little about philanthropy in the not-for-profit sector. As they retired, we started bringing women onto the board like Barbara Spalding, Rhonda Galbally and Winsome McCaughey.

I believe that having great women around the table has given us a creative edge because our trustees have always been prepared to take risks and push the boundaries of what we fund.

Social justice. I want to see people get a fair go. After I graduated Monash University, I was involved in setting up the first women’s refuge in Melbourne. Meriel Wilmot from the Myer Foundation came to the house that had been offered to us in Kew, and she gave us two staff.

That was my light bulb moment because I realised that philanthropy made this happen – and it felt radical. Mary became my mentor, and she told me that it was appropriate for philanthropy to do this kind of work and that I had to seek change. Philanthropy is about creating change.

I believe in systems change and when we give people on the ground the opportunity to have a voice, that’s when change happens. That's why people like Tanya Hosch have been so incredibly important to the work we do because she's that voice. And now we now have a wonderful young indigenous woman, Millie Telford, who heads up Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous Youth Climate Network.

To sit around the boardroom table with a diversity of knowledge, skill and background is really exciting. Often, we’re all on the same page when it comes to the things that we believe are most critical to a project, but when there’s lived experience about a particular issue, or input around connecting with certain people who are doing similar work, it adds so much value.

One of my greatest influences came from a trip to America, when I met Tracy Gary, the heiress to the Pillsbury food industry. She was a great believer in social change philanthropy, and I invited her back to Australia to do a series of workshops with a group of people who wanted to do granting, but didn’t know where to start.

We ran these workshops, not just for our trustees, but for other people in the community who were wanting to become more involved in philanthropy. And as this was all happening, the Australian Communities Foundation (ACF) was getting started and I was on their inaugural board.

A lot of the people who were learning through their engagement with Reichstein, then set up sub-funds with ACF, so there was this period when there was a lot of movement, learning and sharing. And it meant that Reichstein had a greater capacity because a lot of these people were co-funding with us.

And then of course there was the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network (AEGN) which was another unique model that I was on the board of, where we started to post about projects and people would connect through that. And this model was critical for a lot of people, particularly women, who didn't necessarily have the right connections to find the projects but once they were connected through Reichstein and then ACF and AEGN, a lot of these donors went on to became really significant funders in their areas of interest.

Even today at Reichstein, that idea of networking and sharing is important. We’re working to share our projects with other organisations because I believe in connecting with other foundations and funders to see what they're doing so we can all share in what's possible.

It came out of a conversation that I had with Eve Mahlab, who was on the board of a bank at the time, and she said that we needed to bring more women to the table. When I mentioned that there a whole lot of women donors out there, she replied, “yes, but are they funding women?” The answer was sometimes, but not always.

After that we started gathering the women who we knew were already doing great work together every six weeks to have this conversation. Even in the early days there were so many people engaged, and when Julie Reilly joined us as CEO, we built an organisation around these meetings which was originally called the Australian Women Donors Network.

It's not easy to build a big movement when there's a whole range of issues that people are engaged with, but Julie's done a great job of reminding people that having a gender lens is an important part of their thinking. And the more people who are out there shining a light on these issues, the better.

I've seen a lot of change. I've seen the development of amazing organisations, and I’ve watched traditional philanthropy change a lot. In the early days, it was a whole lot of men sitting around the boardroom table at Reichstein smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskeys. And now we’ve got a wonderful group of people who truly represent what our country is, and what our foundation stands for.

It's been a great journey, and I encourage families to develop a foundation and get your kids involved because it means that you are connected to the issues in your society that can be so easy to walk away from. This has been a big lesson for me.

I’ve also learned that it's incredibly important to work with people collectively. We’ve sat around the Reichstein boardroom table with people and introduced them to issues that they've gone on to fund for years. When I see people blossom and set up their own foundations or an organisation they've attached themselves to - I just feel so good that Reichstein has been an entry point for a lot of people to go on and do amazing work.

There are huge opportunities to keep convening people to focus on issues like gender, the economy and environment. The future is challenging on many levels and saving our democracies, and what's going on in America is quite frightening on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to focus right now but at the same time, it’s good for us to stay focused on our four key areas and expand those, especially given the limited amount of money there is to distribute.

I think we've gone through different periods of where women have become involved in philanthropy, and it’s time for another burst. We need to keep using vehicles like She Gives to raise awareness because we’re still not seeing enough dollars going to women's issues. At Reichstein, we have a strong gender focus – we do a lot of work on the ground, and we have fabulous women on the board, but there's never enough to cope with the demand. People need to be reminded that it’s women in our society who often have the least benefits and suffer the most.