Shuttleworth Foundation’s Helen Turvey talks philanthropy and the need to change funding models
Helen Turvey King is the CEO of Shuttleworth foundation. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu about her journey to philanthropy and how investing in people is the way to create lasting change.
If you ask Helen Turvey to describe herself, she’ll probably joke that she’s a “frustrated farmer” before giving a serious answer. She wouldn’t be entirely wrong, though, as she’s always had passion for planting and taking care of animals.
But while that part of her story isn’t really known, her proclivity for preserving nature has seen her transfer all that love into philanthropy.
As CEO of the Shuttleworth Foundation, she does her best to provide funding to dynamic leaders who are leading social change.
She’s had some sort of a journeywoman life, having grown up in London, attended school in Kuwait, lived in the Mediterranean, holidayed in Kenya, and travelled around Europe and South America. But these are experiences that have shaped her into the woman she currently is.
Her foray into the philanthropy space was unexpected as, as a girl in her early 20s, all she wanted to do was to travel around the world. However, she fell in love with philanthropy while working for the Dogs Trust, now the UK’s largest dog welfare charity.
“I remember people sitting there talking about actually fundraising to save lives of people who were distressed at sea or animals who were broken. It was mind-blowing to me,” Turvey recalls on the Inspiring Open podcast.
She would later cross paths with the Shuttleworth Foundation while on holiday in South Africa. “I fell in love with the country [South Africa], fell in love with the continent,” admits Turvey. But also, she realised there were problems with philanthropy in the country, where international organisations were parachuting Western perspectives into particular ideals and solutions that didn’t resonate with South African societies.
Turvey believed philanthropy wasn’t being handled right and in a sustainable way, and so she sought to change that. “I knew I want to do something that was different and philanthropic and making a change,” she effuses.
She believes throwing money alone at poverty doesn’t solve anything. “Money hasn’t solved it. We haven’t solved the world’s problems. We still have poverty. We still have diseases. We still have huge inequities. We still have distrust,” she adds.
When Turvey first joined Shuttleworth, the foundation was a South African-specific foundation doing traditional grants. However, she noticed that model wasn’t specific to South Africa.
Her vision is to see investments in philanthropy actually make a difference beyond the investment. So, instead of releasing funds to just anyone with an idea, the Shuttleworth Foundation funds people who have a plan on how to make their ideas work.
“It’s not a Genius Award. It’s not something for something you’ve done. It’s something that you are hopefully going to do and you’re trying to do… we try to understand what it is they need. The deal is, is once they’ve applied and once they’re in, they’re in. There’s no judgement, there’s help. There’s understanding. There’s progress.” Turvey explains.
Turvey and Shuttleworth are changing the face of philanthropy and funding, successfully moving the foundation from traditional funding methods towards a fellowship model of co-investment and collaboration with potential leaders of change.
They have been able to identify where philanthropy goes wrong and a big part of the progress made is adopting openness. Turvey is a strong advocate for open movements and open philosophies and open software.
She believes if the roots of open, which are about sharing and learning communities, are taken seriously, funding can be more deliberate in solving educational and societal problems.
“If we genuinely behaved in open ways, we wouldn’t have the climate disaster that we have on our hands, because we would understand your impacts impact other people,” Turvey said.
She added that at Shuttleworth “when we were really deliberate about open and not just about the license you stick on something but the how of the open, the leaving the breadcrumbs, the ensuring people understand those pieces, things lived on longer.
“And that’s really the gold standard, or should be a gold standard in philanthropy. How can I make my investment actually make a difference beyond the investment?”
Turvey has been with Shuttleworth for about two decades now, but she goes to work every day with the same desire as the first day she stepped foot there.
Turvey loves that many women are getting into leadership positions in the philanthropy space, and her goal remains the same; to make it possible for young people to change the world with their ideas.
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