One of the organisations that I keep coming across during my internet researches is the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, apparently the UK's largest grant-awarding charity.
If you take a look at their database of grants awarded to environmental projects you find, among all the gifts to good causes, lots and lots of gifts to truly bad causes:
The scale of the gifts is extraordinary: some £34m of donations are identified under the Environment heading alone. And I'm certainly intrigued by all this largesse, given what the trust says about the reason it was set up by unit trust pioneer Ian Fairbairn:
He came to believe that one of the causes of inequality was what people did with their savings: those who could buy shares could benefit from the growth of companies and the economy more generally, rather than simply gaining income from interest. This thinking reflected his belief in the power of enterprise to create opportunity and wealth for all...
Ian’s initial intention [in setting up the Trust] was two-fold: to protect [his business] from hostile takeover, and to raise the level of people’s financial understanding.
I struggled to reconcile all these donations to greens with Fairbairn's objectives: environmental organisations hardly have "wider prosperity" as their overriding objective, in fact quite the opposite. As if to emphasise this point, the Trust describes "Resolve", a research project at the University of Surrey that it has funded, as being a project to identify "alternatives to growth". Pretty remarkable use of the moneys left by a man devoted to wider prosperity, don't you think.
But then, reading a little further there is this:
However, the founding trust deed was broadly drafted, to allow for the funding of any charitable activity approved by Trustees.
Including, it seems activities directly opposed to the founder's wishes. I wonder if anyone can lay their hands on a copy.
But in the meantime, I guess the moral of the story is that trust deeds should be drawn very narrowly indeed.