Luke FitzHerbert

Luke FitzHerbert


Mike Eastwood
Wednesday January 10, 2007
SocietyGuardian.co.uk


Luke FitzHerbert

Luke FitzHerbert was an extraordinary individual. Growing up in rural Ireland he went to Oxford to read history, via a spell in the Irish Guards. He worked variously in the print industry, as a skipper on a sailing training scheme and as a teacher in a west London comprehensive school - but it will be for his time at the Directory of Social Change as a writer, campaigner and thinker in the voluntary sector that he will be best remembered.
Luke was a man of principles. The principles weren't always coherent and didn't stem from a single source but with Luke they always made sense and his drive and commitment gave them integrity. He had an unshakeable belief in the power of the local. This meant that he continued to revel in helping small community groups get the funding they need to campaign for and support people who were otherwise neglected and voiceless. He castigated funding bodies for supporting the salaried professional rather than the voluntary activist. He hated the assumption that size equated to legitimacy.

Luke wasn't a man for big monolithic programmes; he believed in the power of the individual and the need for several thousand flowers to bloom. Luke was uncompromising on the probity of charitable activity, especially in the sphere of grant making. Through his many grants guides he fearlessly and remorselessly campaigned for grant-making charities to be regarded as public bodies and therefore deserving of public scrutiny. He was adamant that giving money away is easy; it is giving money away well that presents the real challenge. If he felt that this was being done then he was the first to applaud; if not, then no quarter was given.

Ends never justified the means - rather the means were the ends in the making. And if the ends ever threatened the powerless or the vulnerable they were to be pilloried. This led Luke to an almost puritanical stance on the National Lottery, seemingly at odds with his general liberalism (or anarchism, as he often preferred to style it). If the unfettered deregulation of gambling meant that it was either a means of obtaining middle class pleasures at the expense of the poor - or, more seriously, vulnerable families getting into further debt - then no end of carefully crafted grant-giving could override this fundamental wrong.

Luke was an iconoclast, but only in the best sense. Iconoclasm is sometimes an excuse for sloppy and immature thinking, merely pointing out the wrong rather than engaging in the solution. Luke always took intellectual responsibility for answers as well as questions.

Fundamentally, Luke was about trust. Individuals who were trying to change society were almost innately to be trusted; grant-making bodies who were trying to operate in secrecy or semi-secrecy were not to be. Trust in institutions could not be presumed; it had to be earned. But for those who knew him, trust in Luke the man was never a problem. He was stimulating, inspiring, provocative and engaging in equal measure. Above all, it mattered. In a world of compromise and pragmatism Luke's was a rare and vibrant voice. We may not hear its like again.

Luke is survived by his wonderful and adored wife, Kay, their daughters Kitty and Monica and their grandchildren.

· Mike Eastwood was director of Directory of Social Change, 1996 - 2001

Nigel Siederer writes: Luke FitzHerbert's Guide to the Major Trusts was essential reading in the trust world, and not just for his trenchant forewords. It was easily the best map of the big spending trusts, and their own best way of finding out about each other - especially those who did not join the Association of Charitable Foundations network, formed in 1989. ACF's members broadly supported the move to openness and tacitly welcomed Luke's pressure.

Grant-making trusts that published no guidance for applicants would find this fact exposed in the guide, in stark contrast to those whose information was published verbatim. As transparency gained statutory backing after the Charities Act 1992, the uninformative ones would find Luke drawing inferences from their newly accessible formal accounts. But he would give praise when it was due, and his fairness and integrity meant that his critical shafts found their mark.

His targets soon discovered the obvious - that they would get better applications if they explained what they would and wouldn't fund. Luke would always publish their words, including the excuses of the holdouts. He insisted that the benefits of charitable status brought obligations. The unwise few who tried to silence him with legal action invariably found he had done his homework. Any who pursued complaints to a personal meeting would find themselves utterly disarmed by his charm.

Turning his attention to the National Lottery, he became one of its few independent critics, being neither player nor grant-seeker. He seemed genuinely surprised to be called "respected commentator" - reporting what he found and thoroughly enjoying the kerfuffle that followed. Turning his attention to the major fundraising charities, he voiced previously unaskable questions, prompting outrage - followed by grudging admission that there might be a case to answer, and then some changed behaviour.

It's hard to accept that such a good friend and colleague is gone. He leaves us with a full set of regularly updated trust guides and other publications, plus the array of courses that he and his colleague Michael Norton put together at the Directory of Social Change. These working tools are his lasting memorial. Life in the voluntary sector would be unimaginable without them.

· Nigel Siederer was chief executive of the Association of Charitable Foundations, 1990-2002