There are the philanthropically dependent medical research institutes, typified by the Garvan Institute (led by veteran director John Schubert), the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (investment banker Matthew Grounds) or the Doherty Institute (Martyn Myer from the retailing family). There are the leading think tanks (Nicholas Moore chairs the Centre for Independent Studies, Lindsay Maxsted is ensconced at the Grattan Institute).

And then, there’s sport, where membership of the Board can be one of the brightest baubles a premier can bestow: think Venues NSW (the renamed Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, where businessman Tony Shepherd recently handed the chairmanship to former NSW premier Morris Iemma) and its Melbourne Cricket Ground equivalent (chaired by former Victorian leader Steve Bracks).

Leadership of the major AFL clubs is technically up to the membership, though boards led by the likes of Andrew Pridham (at the Sydney Swans), the aforementioned Shepherd (the GWS Giants) and Andrew Bassat (St Kilda) show the outcomes are no less rarefied for it.

If you’re from a prominent family, joining such a board can take on the inevitability of gravity. As soon as you express any interest in philanthropy – say by joining a young donors program – the invitations come in thick and fast, according to a 30-something scion from Sydney. He adds that when attending a fundraiser, it’s important to be generous. “It’s why you’ve been invited after all,” he says. But be wary of giving too much, lest it sends off signals that you’re angling for a board seat. Something in the order of $50,000 is about right.

For those of less lofty parentage, breaking into this world can take a more sustained effort. Justin Miller says a key early philanthropic involvement for him was at Taronga Foundation, where in the early 2000s he helped spearhead a matched fundraising drive alongside the likes of Justin Hemmes, Gretel Packer and Tony Kidman.

His day job at Sotheby’s was teaching him many relevant skills. But it was the hefty donations he helped secure for the zoo that led to gigs such as his current role on the Sydney Theatre Company Foundation board, chaired by Packer.

This isn’t uncommon. Foundation boards, which are charged with fundraising, are like the heats to get into the main race. Louise Walsh, a former chief executive of Philanthropy Australia now running her own capital-raising business, describes a fund manager who’d kill for a spot on the board of his AFL club. He’s starting on its foundation board. “If he does a great job there, and he contributes and they see the value of his network, that’d be a great stepping stone on to the main board.”

If he does well on that board, then the next step up is the AFL proper, where its dozen or so committees eventually funnel heavy-hitters to the AFL Commission.

For those keen to start young, some institutions make a point of casting a wide net; like Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), which barely receives a skerrick of government funding. Its Next Gen Program targets teenagers, its MCA Next Program is aimed at 20- to 40-year-olds. Investment banker and MCA chair Lorraine Tarabay hopes the museum’s governance is an “intergenerational affair”, and says it’s far stronger for it.

Knowing just the right person never hurts. Top commercial silk and Bell Shakespeare chairman Philip Crutchfield has been a long-time subscriber to the theatre company. Ilana Atlas, a professional mentor to Crutchfield from his Mallesons Stephen Jaques days, who was then chair of Bell Shakespeare, noted his interest and asked him to join her on the board. Outside his legal work, he says, it takes up most of his time. “You have to watch the plays, over and over again. I’ve watched Macbeth like six times.”

Networks make net worth

Doing well on these boards often requires a broad and well-maintained contact book. But it also helps build it. John Wylie – who’s completed long stints as chairman of the Victorian State Library, the Melbourne Cricket Ground Trust and the Australian Sports Commission – says he’s met amazing people through all three roles. “It’s great for your personal network,” he says, though hastening to add that anyone motivated by this is doing it “for the wrong reasons”.

The NGV’s Janet Whiting describes building your contact base as an inevitable side-product of fully giving oneself to these roles. “If you’re contributing properly, you’re at the galleries, you’re talking to donors, you’re talking to potential donors, artists, sponsors . . . and through that work, you will self-expand your network,” she says. Which, she adds, is a very good and useful thing. “A broad network means you are more likely to be able to make things happen.”

And then, there’s the lure of the board table itself. The late fashion designer Carla Zampatti was a fixture for years on the Sydney Dance Company board. Ex-chairman Brett Clegg still raves about all he learnt from watching “the natural way she blended governance with advocacy and shared aspiration. It was really inspiring to me.”

Luxury travel entrepreneur Hayley Baillie, who sits on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery, the Australian Ballet and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, is similarly effusive. “Much of the enjoyment I get is because of the people I’m on these boards with,” she says. “You get to be in the room with incredible business leaders with extraordinary minds. It’s a real privilege to get to know them and see how they operate.”

That includes, Baillie adds, people who are difficult to come across otherwise (Baillie is the daughter of iconic electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith, so that’s saying something). Where else can you meet a Myer, a Darling and a Fairfax all in the same room?

Simon Mordant, an investment banker who migrated to Australia from the United Kingdom in his early 20s, agrees that engaging in philanthropy casts a useful web. Asked how much professional networking goes on at donor nights and similar events, he replies: “A huge amount. It’s hard to meet people in a city, particularly when you’re embarking on a career and working really hard.

“I know of several people who found those young patron groups not only valuable concerning their learning but in terms of building deep friendships. Lachlan Murdoch, for example, was heavily involved in the MCA Young Patrons program when he returned to Australia. And he said many of his friends he made through that.”

On a more commercial calculus, it was in the MCA Young Patrons program that Murdoch met a real estate agent by the name of John McGrath, who later asked Murdoch to invest $10 million in REA to save the group from collapse in 2000. News Corp’s early investment turned out to be a spectacularly lucrative one, and remains one of the younger Murdoch’s greatest business triumphs.

But it’s not just celebrity realtors and legal eagles. Knowing gallery directors, AFL coaches, artistic directors and celebrated neuroscientists is, for some people, nothing less than delightful. As is having an excuse to invite them to one’s next party (the guests can’t help but be impressed). Plus there’s the potential for personal growth.

Wylie reflects that “one of the greatest gifts for me in doing these roles was the people I met … with very different life experiences, from very different circles, and who have different ways of thinking about success to the way people in business do”. He cites his involvement with the Paralympic Movement as particularly cherished.

Architect Nick Tobias, who builds houses for rich, arty people, credits his role on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art with nothing less than making him a better person, primarily by requiring him to fully consider minority groups, people with disabilities and the disadvantaged (all of whom the MCA tries to cater to). It’s given him, he says, a far better understanding of his country. “My level of education, compassion and empathy has gone through the roof,” he says.

What makes the world go round

Of course, all these serendipitous, life-changing collisions, not to mention the institution’s more formal functions, require cash. No not-for-profit institution in the nation has enough of that. To grease the wheels, all lean on their boards.

The extent of this is obvious from the donor lists, which is a sensitive topic. Rumours abound of this or that chair having a minimum donation policy, but this was uniformly denied, usually with a reference to the importance of diversity, and of not filling their boards with a coterie of society’s richest.

It’s often a different story overseas, particularly in the United States. “We’re not at the ‘get, give or get off’ stage of things here,” Gabrielle Trainor says. “Though we’re getting there.” Mordant has both chaired and been a major donor to the MCA, as well as a director at Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Garvan Institute.

He’s also a current vice-chair of the Tate’s International Committee in London, deputy chair of MoMA PS1 in New York, and a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome (and a past board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles). He’s thus well placed to share that elsewhere, the financial contribution required for a board role is often explicit.

This isn’t a model Mordant wants to see adopted here, saying it would cruel the diversity of such boards and distance them from the communities they serve.

Glitz, glamour and shakedowns

The differences between philanthropy here and in the United States also engages Craig Carracher, who’s a member of the Gold Dinner committee.
Few have gone down the American route as much as the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation, whose program of annual galas compete to raise millions for the children’s hospital.

The largest of these – the Gold Dinner – is perhaps the closest thing Australia has to the Met Gala, and what it lacks in star wattage it more than makes up for in sheer financial firepower.

In May this year, the dinner (spearheaded by mother and son duo Linda and Joshua Penn) raised a record $19.2 million in a single evening, helped along by a $5 million donation from mining billionaire Gina Rinehart. Carracher – who juggles his committee role with his chairmanship of Volleyball Australia, his place on the Australian Olympic Committee and his executive chairmanship of student accommodation provider Scape – first attended the Gold Dinner as a guest in 2007, when he recalls about $100,000 being raised on the night.

The step-change the dinner has achieved is partly the result of the involvement of a series of well-connected benefactors, for years shepherded by society doyen (and publicist) Skye Leckie.

A trained lawyer with experience in hedge funds and the media, Carracher is typical of the type of committee member who’s helped propel such events to ever more lucrative heights. He started his philanthropic career digging holes at the Northern Beaches Volleyball Association, to which he’s still a proud and devoted member.

But now, he figures his skills and networks are more effectively used elsewhere. Like, for example, in inviting Rinehart, who he met a decade ago through their mutual involvement in a Cambodian anti-slavery non-government organisation, to the Gold Dinner. She couldn’t come but sent along daughter Ginia and a $5 million cheque nonetheless.

At the Gold Dinner and similar gala events such as Melbourne’s Million Dollar Lunch, raising a lot of money is the point. Carracher cites as an inspiration the success of Western Australia’s Telethon Ball, where Kerry Stokes, trustee and former chairman of the Telethon Trust, walks from table to table encouraging donations to Perth Children’s Hospital.

Carracher doesn’t disagree when hearing such events described as a “shakedown”. “If you’re there, you’ll have a great night, you’ll have the glamour, but there’s a price for it,” he says. “It’s not quite the American thing, but it is tapping into something similar. And it raises millions for its cause.“

The point is: everyone spends, including the organisers. In their case, it’s primarily their social and political capital, accrued at a genuine cost. This giving is, in Carracher’s view, how society solves the problems neither the government nor the market is capable of addressing.

The solution that many not-for-profits have hit on, though, is not uncommercial. This is a world littered with investment bankers. One can surmise their particular value when listening to Wylie, who corralled $28 million for the State Library’s most recent renovation and says the key to securing donations is a well-honed elevator pitch.

“There are something like 50,000 charitable institutions around Australia,” he says. “If you want to raise money, you need to be able to say in 30 seconds, ‘why does your organisation matter? How are you making the world a better place?’”

Selling the logic of a deal or selling the importance of a state gallery or a medical research institute may not be that different.

‘You’re not there to have a rest’

For this and other reasons, these are not easy jobs. The sector always has at least one board in the midst of some crisis or other. The headlines never really stop, and they never will, reckons former Liberal federal MP Warwick Smith, who has chaired the National Museum of Australia.

“People have to be alert to the issues of the day and the impacts that can flow from management’s inattention,” he says. But that’s to be expected. “You’re not there to have a rest.”

While reporting this feature, a controversy over the provenance of Indigenous artworks selected for a show at the National Gallery of Australia dominates headlines and, in all likelihood, much of chairman Ryan Stokes’ attention.

At the AFL, its handling of racism allegations at the Hawthorn Football Club complicates an already-messy CEO handover, which tarnished the reputation of AFL chair Richard Goyder. And sponsors pull out of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, led by Louise Adler, over its invitation of several Palestinian authors whose tweets offend both Jewish and Ukrainian groups.

One board member of an institution that’s come under fire lays out the risks: abuse from impassioned strangers, months of cancelled weekends (those emergency board meetings have to be scheduled sometime), along with the sadness of witnessing the damage to the organisation they’d worked so hard to build.

And then there’s the personal reputational risks, which tend to stick to whoever’s at the top. When artists began to boycott the Sydney Festival over an act sponsored by the Israeli government last year, the board initially made no public statement, leaving the likes of comedian Judith Lucy to say how “mystified” she was by how it had left artists to fend for themselves. When chairman David Kirk did front the media, he was asked on ABC Radio whether, by his initial silence, he’d failed as a leader. “We’re here now,” he meekly replied.

How do you feel about marrying up your professional reputation with what can be artistically on the edge? These are considerations.

— Brett Clegg

Two years earlier, when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra drew critical headlines for standing down its musicians in the early months of the pandemic, it was that organisation’s then-chairman (and major benefactor) Michael Ullmer who publicly backed the decision, even as 8000 people signed a petition deeming the board “unworthy” of the institution and urging its dismissal.

And six years before that, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis’ chairmanship of the Sydney Biennale became untenable after a group of participating artists said they would boycott the event given the chair’s concurrent chairmanship of Transfield Holdings, which profited from the detention of asylum seekers. “I have been personally vilified with insults, which I regard as naive and offensive,” Belgiorno-Nettis said in his resignation statement.

Calamities of this magnitude are usually avoided, but all boards grapple with risk. Those involved in the educational space deal with regulations, laws and societal expectations around the safety of children and young people. Institutions that promote extreme physical endeavours have health and wellbeing dimensions to consider.

Sports boards grapple with drug scandals, coaching issues, poor team performance and drunken off-field antics. Museums deal with issues of authenticity and ownership, including of ancestral remains. And then there’s the issue of challenging artistic work, which tests the limits of public acceptance.

Brett Clegg, who chaired the Sydney Dance Company as it staged a production that aimed to reclaim the swastika as a sacred Hindu symbol, says: “How do you feel about marrying up your professional reputation with what can be artistically on the edge? These are considerations.” (The board stressed the need for extensive engagement with senior members of Sydney’s Jewish community, who took the show in the spirit it was intended.)

For Carracher, this is why passion rather than professional advancement should be a prerequisite for any not-for-profit involvement. “There’s a view that organisations, particularly in sport, should be run by corporate people, disinterested people, non-executive directors,” he notes. “But what happens is, the minute you get one of those scandals, you can watch the ‘independent’ directors jump ship and leave. They only wanted it on their CV, and they’re gone.

“The ones from the sport, or have deep roots into the charity, they stick around. They fight through it. They live for that passion. And whoever’s leading needs it. Because if the risk eventuates, they won’t feel exposed, they’ll feel responsible for fixing it.” Anyway, adds Trainor, “if you’re not actually interested in orchestral music, I don’t think it’d be a real joy to be part of the Sydney Symphony board”.

It’s all about the hustle

This is why some directors, while acknowledging the benefits of such roles in building and repairing reputations, insisted it really wasn’t worth it for this alone.

Take, for instance, Alan Joyce, who became chairman of the Sydney Theatre Company soon after announcing his exit from Qantas, which he led through a decade of turmoil. Becoming a patron of the arts is a way to stay relevant while shaping his reputation in a less combative direction.

A prominent corporate adviser agreed it’s precisely the strategy she would recommend, before hastening to add that she hoped, for his sake, Joyce liked theatre.

Bell Shakespeare’s Crutchfield says board appointments can be “a pretty arduous way to reputation-cleanse . . . If that’s what you’re after, just write a cheque and avoid the board meetings and all the bullshit.”

What makes these roles so time-consuming is that, unlike much of the commercial world, the boards of not-for-profits are the type of place you roll up your sleeves. Whiting describes the individual cost of contributing properly as a director as nothing less than “huge”.

People often answer the “how many hours is it” question with a reductive tally of the board meetings, committees and time spent reading the papers. But that’s not it, she says.

“If you are properly engaged in this at the most senior level, you are giving it a lot of air-time in your head. You are thinking about stuff, you are seeking opportunities, you are thinking about whether the network you’ve got can cross-fertilise and create an opportunity for the gallery.

“The NGV has been going for 162 years. The job of directors in my view . . . is to grow it, elevate it, expand it, support the ambition of the director and senior leadership, give it oxygen, do what you can to assist, lobby whoever you can. Whatever’s needed.”

For Smith, it’s this hustle on behalf of something of societal value that “tells you something about the individual”. “It tells you for what and how they give of themselves, in something greater than their profession. It warrants respect.”

One way or another, for reasons superficial or considered, it tends to get it.

The Fashion issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, August 25 inside The Australian Financial Review.