Sue Gillie

Sue Gillie joined the Board of the Oxford Research Group in 2007.

"Sue sold her small chain of estate agencies in 1988 and turned entirely to voluntary work in the not-for-profit sector. Past trusteeships include the Friends of Dulwich College (Chair), the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery (devising and organising events for them), the Nationwide Foundation, and the Association of Charitable Foundations. For seven years she ran, was a trustee, and then chaired the Ashoka UK branch of an international development charity. Currently she chairs the New Economics Foundation (nef). Membership since 1989 of the Network for Social Change, a very active private grant making group, led to her becoming a founding director of The Funding Network, a very successful new paradigm for collective giving for social change."

Background

She notes: "I was the first Oxbridge student in 10 years from my distinctly moderate grammar school in South London... I left my first job, as a financial analyst with RTZ (where I met my husband), in 1969 when I was expecting my first child, and soon after we went to Montreal for three years. My first step into the charitable world occurred here, quite by accident: I thought I was volunteering to make sandwiches but found I had been recruited as a counsellor for the Family Planning Association of Montreal and subsequently became its vice-president.

"Back in England in 1982, another chance encounter led me into becoming an estate agent, first as staff and then buying my employer out. I built up a small chain, bringing my husband in as a partner when several branches became too much to manage with two teenage sons, a large house and very big garden. We sold out in 1988, at the peak of the first property boom, and found ourselves with no need for full time jobs but many years before us. It was at this point that we discovered the Network for Social Change, a sort of philanthropic talking shop for people with a certain degree of wealth. NFSC changed my life from the first meeting we attended as I learnt there about Ashoka, an overseas development charity with which I very soon became deeply involved, running the UK branch and chairing the trustee board. Seven years of this opened more doors for me, notably into the New Economics Foundation of which I became a trustee, and which I now chair. I am also a trustee of the Nationwide Foundation, and heavily involved in the promotion of philanthropy, sitting on the board of the Association of Charitable Foundations and being a member of the steering group for their three year Philanthropy UK project. And of course, being in on the founding and growing of TFN has been hugely satisfying."