Dr Frederick Mulder

Dr Frederick Mulder has helped to leverage substantial sums through imaginative risk taking, creative business deals and initiatives to encourage others to become philanthropic themselves. He is an inspiring role model who has made the process of giving both interesting and appealing.

Since the early 1980s Fred has looked for inventive ways to use the funds he was able to contribute from his business as an art dealer. One of his first such ventures involved Greenpeace: after their ship, the Rainbow Warrior, was sunk in Auckland harbour in 1985, Fred suggested that Greenpeace UK, who were then still a small organisation but constantly in the news, use advertising as a means of attracting new members. He took the risk of underwriting an advertising campaign which he insisted be placed on the front pages of newspapers alongside news about the organisation. The ads were extremely successful and Fred subsequently helped others, such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement, fund similar campaigns.

Fred has developed ways of introducing business clients to charitable giving. When negotiations as an art dealer have become stuck, he has often suggested to clients that together they give away the difference between his price and the client's offering price. On a number of occasions he has expanded this idea with his own private collection of art by giving, not selling, a work of art to a client and asking them to give away its value in return. He has even used personal disputes to give creatively. For example, he helped to resolve a dispute over access to land by agreeing to his neighbours' perpetual access in exchange for a donation of £25,000 for a Zambian educational project administered by Oxfam from each neighbour (and contributing the same himself), raising just under £130,000 in total and helping to turn the dispute into a shared enterprise.

Fred has also been involved in the establishment of two institutions, the Network for Social Change (NSC), the first such donor network in the UK, and The Funding Network (TFN), the first public giving circle in the UK, open to all and of which he is the founding Chair. The NSC is a private organisation for individuals who are active in social change giving; established in 1985 it has over 100 members and gives away about £700,000 a year. Launched in 2002, TFN supports social change projects and puts all its information on the web. Working through day and evening funding events at which a group of charities present to anyone who would like to attend, it has already raised over £750,000 for more than 100 small organisations without a public platform. It has brought many people together who are new to philanthropy and is already being replicated in Bristol, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Toronto.

"Fred has introduced people who would never have thought of themselves as philanthropists to a uniquely novel way of giving. In addition, and this cannot be over estimated, Fred has opened up a new opportunity for those with charitable causes, large and small, to interact in the public domain."

Edward Posey, The Gaia Foundation

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