Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Ian Marks, CBE, DL

Oration given on 14 July 2004

Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon IAN MARKS

Charity, they say, begins at home. It’s a rather hackneyed phrase, used too often in a mean spirited way to justify not being charitable at all.

And it is in fact less and less true. Anyone involved in a local charity knows how hard it is in modern times to sustain, let alone set up, local charities. Finding volunteers, whether it is to fund raise or help others, is ever more difficult. People are busier, more mobile, less rooted in their communities. Women, the traditional mainstay of local voluntary groups, increasingly have their own careers. Local businesses, which did so much for philanthropy in Victorian and Edwardian times, are nowadays likely to be branches of a multi-national company, whose headquarters in London or abroad has replaced charitable donations with more glamorous sponsorship. And rattling tins and organising jumble sales cannot compete with the professionally organised campaigns of national and international charities.

We honour Ian Marks this afternoon for breathing new life into the idea that charity begins, even though it does not end, at home.

Ian Marks is an Essex man. He was born in South Woodford and apart from his national service has worked and live in the county. On graduating from Cambridge, he joined the family confectionary firm of Trebor, that is the same Trebor whose mints you suck, which relocated to Colchester in 1979. He rose to become its Managing Director and then, in 1980, its Chairman. A highly successful career in business but you might conclude nothing truly remarkable except that there were already signs that Ian Marks was no ordinary businessman. When the Medical Research Council undertook a major research programme on shop floor attitudes it found that Trebor staff were the highest motivated staff that they had ever researched. And the reason was that Ian Marks had pioneered a new approach to management, which relied on leaderless, democratic, shop floor work groups to solve problems, set standards and improve productivity. Trusting those on the ground to know best is a theme that recurred in his later ventures.

In 1989 Ian Marks sold Trebor to Cadbury, since when he has devoted much of his life to philanthropy. But he is not the kind of philanthropist who from time to time writes out cheques on a whim for his pet charities and leaves it at that. He backs bright new ideas for charities. What kind of ideas? Strategic ideas; new ways of increasing the capacity of the voluntary sector, new ways of developing the charity infrastructure, new ideas for sustainable social improvement.

He began by setting up his own family charitable trust, the AIM Foundation, which pro-actively takes initiatives to stimulate sustainable social change, at home and abroad. Its projects range from the integration of orthodox and complementary medicine, to the provision of a national bicycle network and cycle routes, to the development of long term policies for addressing crippling Third World Debt. What all these projects shared in common was strategic intervention to help an existing charity develop experimental and embryonic projects.

His biggest and most ambitious venture has been the Essex Community Foundation which he established in 1996. A Community Foundation is a meta-charity, a charity for charities. It manages donations on behalf of individuals, companies and local and central government for the benefit of the whole of the county. It distributes small but critical grants from its general fund to a wide range of small, sometimes very small, local voluntary groups across the county, who don’t have the capacity to raise funds themselves. Typically these groups serve a local social need that the statutory services cannot reach, or are simply unaware of.

Most good ideas look so simple and obvious that one wonders why nobody thought of them much earlier. But in 1996, there were few community foundations in the country, even though they had a long and successful history in the United States. Being a new notion, it was greeted with some natural local scepticism and inertia. The local authorities, health trusts and other statutory agencies worried that a Community Foundation would duplicate or get in the way of their responsibilities. Existing charities worried that a Foundation would siphon away donations that they would have otherwise received and there were local rivalries to overcome.

Essex is an unusually large, diverse and dynamic county. Prosperity and success co-exist with substantial pockets of poverty and despair, some of it hidden. The needs of rural communities in the north are very different from those of, say, Harlow and Basildon in the south; the needs of the elderly in the coastal towns are in marked contrast to those of young people on the Colchester and Chelmsford estates. Local communities, each with their own needs, were wary that they would lose much needed resource to other local areas.

So it takes someone of unusual drive, energy and vision to overcome parochial and institutional suspicion. By sheer quiet persistence Ian Marks did precisely that. Sometimes his approach was unorthodox. Early in his campaign he persuaded various leaders in the county to meet for a whole weekend at Danbury to discuss Essex’s social needs. He decided that they needed to think out of their official roles, to stop being stuffy and to relate to one another. They were instructed to get in touch with their inner feelings, reflect on their vision for Essex in silence and, as a form of county-wide bonding, hold each other’s hands. Many have not forgotten the sight of the Chief Constable, the High Sheriff, the Chief Executive of the County Council and the Bishop holding hands. Cynics even suggest that it was Ian’s proposal for a second such weekend meeting that persuaded them then and there to support an Essex Community Foundation if that was the price for not having to hold hands again.

Since its beginning eight years ago the Essex Community Foundation has gone from strength to strength. Its endowment is steadily accumulating as individual benefactors, companies and trusts – many of them originally approached by Ian Marks – recognise the Foundation’s capacity to support local volunteers. The endowment enabled it to distribute about £750,000 last year, mainly in small amounts, to nearly 200 local voluntary groups right across the county. The figure will go up again this year. In addition, because of its track record in allocating grants to effective local volunteers it manages the small grants programme of the Government’s child poverty eradication programme and the European Union’s social fund.

To read through the list of voluntary groups helped by the Essex Community Foundation is a sobering and humbling experience: Alzheimer societies, battered women refuges, re-training centres for those with brain injuries, independent living counselling for the disabled, addiction clinics, drop-in counselling centres for ex-offenders to name but a tiny sample. In another sense, the long list is exhilarating, because it reminds us of the extraordinary volume and range of local voluntary work undertaken in the county. No welfare state, however well funded, could reach so many groups or do so with such dedicated helpers, and no community in a rural community could flourish without them. The Essex Community Foundation has given local volunteers a new lease of life and thereby given the county a renewed sense of its shared community interests.

Ian Marks is not one to cling on. Having set up and secured the future of the Essex Community Foundation, he has now relinquished control while remaining President, and moves on to a new philanthropic project, involving young offenders. His fertile mind and persistent, practical energy does not rest for long.

In Ian Marks we honour not only a philanthropic entrepreneur but also an entrepreneurial philanthropist of vision and generosity.

Chancellor, I present to you IAN MARKS

Orator: Professor Ivor Crewe