Richard Ross and Rosetrees were featured in this week’s Sunday Times (11 December 2011) as Richard is part of a 174-strong club of donors who have given £1m or more to charity in a year according to Coutts annual Million Pound Donors Report. The full article from the Sunday Times is below and to read the Coutts Report click on the link below
http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/cphsj/documents/C000028_A4MPReport_V13_051211.pdf
Coldplay burst into charity chart with £1.2m gift
The rock group Coldplay have emerged as members of the 174-strong club of donors who have given £1m or more to charity in a year
Nicholas Hellen, Social Affairs Editor Published: 11 December 2011
Chris Martin’s band set up a grant-giving foundation in honour of their own children (Getty)
The rock group Coldplay have emerged as members of the 174-strong “club” of donors who have given £1m or more to charity in a year.
Chris Martin’s band, who last night performed a benefit gig at the 02 Arena for the children’s charity Kids Company, jointly handed over £1.2m to their new grant-giving foundation in its first year.
They were advised by the philanthropic arm of Coutts, the private bank, whose annual Million Pound Donors Report revealed that private individuals gave away a total of £782m in the financial year 2009-10.
The band members quietly set up the charitable J Van Mars Foundation to honour their own young children in the summer of 2009. In its first year, to May 2010, it backed 10 good causes including Kids Company (£500,000), Mencap (£40,000) and the Cambodian Children’s Trust (£15,100).
It has gone on to give a further £1.5m to Kids Company, inspired by its founder Camila Batmanghelidjh. The charity, which helps inner-city children, will be hosting a Christmas day party for 3,500.
Coutts persuaded other donors to go public about the motivation for their gifts, in a drive by Maya Prabhu, its head of UK philanthropy, to promote a culture of giving. She said that many kept their donations quiet and few were motivated by the desire to win social recognition by having their name on a plaque.
Richard Ross, chairman of his family’s property financing business, Regentsmead, gave away £1m last year for basic medical research through his family’s charitable foundation, Rosetrees Trust. He told the author of the donors report, Dr Beth Breeze, of the University of Kent, that his co-donor approach to funding — and his willingness not to demand the credit — had resulted in £50m in grants from other donors and could eventually realise an extra £1 billion for medical research.
Another donor, Jimi Heselden, the owner of Segway who died last year when he fell off a cliff while riding one of his two-wheeled vehicles, gave £13m to a local charity, the Leeds Community Foundation, over two years. The head of the charity, Sally-Anne Greenfield, said that he gave a further £10m two weeks before he died.
The report shows a sharp drop in the total value of seven-figure donations from individuals, trusts and corporations, down to £1.31 billion from £1.55 billion — from 201 donations — the previous year. Five of the million-plus gifts were from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a charity set up by the British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn and his wife, Jamie Cooper-Hohn. Nine were from the Wellcome Trust.
Hardest hit were donations to higher education, at £299m, which in the previous year hit £575m. Gifts to the arts halved from £126m to £60m.
