Have you noticed changes in your clients’ preoccupations over the last year? Are they more focused on effectiveness, making a little go a long way?
It’s a tricky question. We’re always looking for trends, but we work with 15 families and it’s difficult to observe strong trends. What I do observe is that people have much less time – because of the demands of their businesses and other priorities – but no less eagerness to commit. The scarce thing is time rather than financial resources – though financial resources will become an issue if the crisis continues for many years. But philanthropy remains a priority. In fact we’ve been convening people over whole weekends and they’ve all been willing to attend, so there’s a strong commitment and willingness to engage.

On effectiveness, I’d be tempted to answer yes, there has been more emphasis here, but really that would be an exaggeration. There are two sides of the equation: on the one hand there’s the struggle to be good at giving, to find a better project, to be more efficient in using resources. That is continuing but I wouldn’t say I’d seen significant change owing to the crisis. On the other side of the equation, we observe that the motivation for all generations to be involved in family giving remains strong. People are very sensitive not only to what they’re losing but also to what other people are losing. As has been pointed out many times today, the losers are the ones who were not here at the symposium and have no voice. The people we work with are sensitive to that and don’t want to reduce their commitment. They know they may have lost something but many others have lost much more. This is not the moment to give up.