Lauren: Becky, our dad and I set up The Helvellyn Foundation in 2020. By 2023, our awareness of the environmental crisis had increased to the point that we decided to focus it purely on biodiversity. 

Becky: We felt that while there are so many vital charitable causes you can support, a healthy environment is the foundation they all rely on. It becomes incredibly difficult to solve a crisis like homelessness if the forests around the city are burning or sea levels are rising… It’s the issue that underpins all other causes.

When we set up the foundation, I didn’t really know what a foundation was. I didn’t know what philanthropy was, beyond the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Gates were philanthropists. I had absolutely no exposure to that world, because while we grew up in privilege, we didn’t grow up with the kind of privilege where people give tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity. The whole thing was completely new to us. All the learning we did was through talking to other donors – we spoke to some really impressive people, which I’m forever grateful for because they are why we’re the type of funders we are now.

What got you interested in environmental issues in the first place?

Becky: It goes back to our childhood. We were fortunate that we had very outdoorsy families. One set of grandparents lived in the Lake District – and we would go up there every other weekend and go hiking or play in the garden – and the others lived on the east coast of Scotland. 

Lauren: We had cousins who were similar ages to us. Whenever we were together, we had this whole imaginary world of nature reserves in our family’s gardens. We’d rescue imaginary animals, and do pretend operations to mend their broken legs.

How do you go from that innate love of nature to deciding what to give to? What guides your choices?

Becky: When we first started to look for biodiversity work to fund, I looked at the IUCN Red List and tried to find species that were on the brink of extinction. Once we’d found those species, we searched for charities that worked to protect them. We’d learn all about who those charities work with, who their leaders are, how experienced they are, etc. 

As time has gone on, we have got to know more about the environment sector, and now we can lean into our networks. When we come across a charity, chances are we’ll know someone who knows someone who works there, or has worked with them, or will have an opinion of them. 

We have quite specific things that we look for now. We look really closely at the leadership, at why the organisation exists, what niche they are filling – are they just duplicating stuff that other people are doing? Our understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve has grown. 

Lauren: That’s one of the benefits of specialising: because we focus on biodiversity, we’ve got to know a lot of the people and organisations. We learn a lot from other people too. For example, we fund one of our partners, Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, because I saw them on an EFN webinar, and the fact that EFN was in touch with them and had invited them to speak was a reassurance for us.

To get ideas of who to fund, we’ve looked at – for example – the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s grantee lists, or the organisations raising money through the Big Give’s Earth Raise. We’ve found lots of places where we can go for inspiration and reassurance. We’re relatively small, and we do less due diligence than we did at the beginning now, because we have a really trusted network to refer to.

You’ve both got jobs related to conservation and sustainability: how does that help in your philanthropy?

Becky: Oh, hugely: I know now how to dig past that initial layer of, ‘This is what we do, and it’s all amazing’. I want to know, how do you actually do that? You say you work with local communities. Which communities? How do you work with them? Did they ask for your help? Are you actually being useful? 

We understand that a lot of the funds are going to be used to pay for staff salaries, or electricity; those things are important. You see in the press, ‘This charity is spending 80 percent of their money on staff costs!’ as if that’s a bad thing. But if you take Langland Conservation, where I work, the majority of our money is on staff because we provide intelligence to conservation organisations; that’s what the work is. 

Lauren: Ultimately, charities are organisations, businesses are organisations. Why are charities being held to a completely different standard? That’s why we’ve always been unrestricted funders. If you don’t have good people in the organisation who are looked after, who have the resources that they need, which is all overhead cost, then you’re not going to be able to achieve your mission.

What successes have you seen as a result of your funding, and how do you define success? What do you attribute those successes to?

Lauren: Because we’re unrestricted funders, we don’t ask for a specific report back to us about what our funding has achieved. If the organisation is achieving success towards its mission, then we consider ourselves successful funders, and that can look really different across groups. 

Becky: Every year, all our partners have to do some kind of annual report anyway. I take joy in reading about their progress and knowing that a small part of our funding helped them achieve all of their goals. I find that more satisfying than just being able to put our name to one major thing.

How do your senses of equity, justice and power dynamics relate to your giving?

Lauren: The fact that we even exist and can fund means there is an imbalance in power. Ultimately, we both think that it’s ridiculous that philanthropy is a thing. How do families get to the position where they have so much money that they can just give it away without thinking? It’s absurd that this situation exists, and obviously, there’s lots of structural reasons behind that. 

Becky: When partners thank us, I always find it strange, because they’re the ones doing all the work, we’re just sending the money. In terms of the relationships we have with them, we try to be very open funders. You can see them transition from joining the initial call anticipating that power dynamic, and then over time it becomes like talking to any other colleague or friend. 

Lauren: In the last couple of years, we’ve also asked more questions about how our partners engage with local communities, who’s involved, who’s involved in decision-making on their side. We ask a lot more about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the organisations that we’re funding, to acknowledge the fact that there’s definitely still a big ‘white saviour’ issue in conservation.

In what other ways do you support your partners, beyond money?

Lauren: We try to connect our partners to our network [of potential donors] – although that comes with some caveats: if we shared everything our partners asked us to share, our network would no longer want to be our network! Generally, we advocate for trust-based philanthropy and unrestricted funding more broadly – hopefully there’s a wider impact there, which benefits our partners and others.

Becky: We run occasional webinars where we ask our partners what issues they’re facing. At one point everyone said they were struggling with raising money from major donors, so we got everyone together online and had an open discussion: what have you tried that’s worked really well? What platforms have you used? How do you engage? We try to be mindful of the fact that everyone’s busy so the webinars are totally optional.

Lauren: I do think how we fund is probably one of the biggest, additional benefits. You can share knowledge and networks, but the way you fund is a beyond-money thing that’s super, super valuable. We have a very trust-based relationship so they can ask when they need something; we don’t have a long application form; we don’t ask for reporting, we have catch-up calls – all of those aspects of how we fund are worth a lot.

What does risk mean to you in the environmental work that you do, whether your grants or your investments?

Becky: When it comes to my investments, I’m interested in impact. I’m sure there are many investments I could have made that would be a lot more fruitful, but I am in an incredibly fortunate position where I do not need to focus on growing the money. If the money ends up a little bit below what I put in, that’s not the end of the world, to me. Some people would see that as risky but I’m more interested in having a positive impact with my investments.  

Lauren: We did report back to our financial advisors last year to say, ‘This is what we’ve done with our investments’ because we wanted to show them the impact we could have with the funds. We were doing some things that they’d never heard about before and were really interested in, like making philanthropic loans to Wildlife Trusts to enable them to buy land quickly when parcels came up for sale.

More broadly, I have a much better idea now of how much money I need every year to live my life. I can confidently look at the rest of the money and know I can take much bigger risks and be much more quick-thinking with it. Otherwise, if you look at it all in one go without really knowing what it is you need, you’re going to think, ‘Well, I might need that, or maybe it will be useful for that,’ and you don’t end up doing anything. I think that’s a big reason a lot of people don’t give as much as they could – they haven’t thought about what they need for their lives. We can’t think a whole lifetime ahead, but we can definitely think a year ahead.