PEARS FOUNDATION - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Director
• Member of the Professional Team

I am continually inspired by the Pears family's vision and it has been a privilege to create and nurture the organisational structure to help them realise it. In the years I've worked at Pears we've become one of the largest family foundations in the UK but I hope our partners would agree that we've retained our values and our focus on building true partnerships that go well beyond a standard funder-grantee relationship. The team here is unique and I'm proud of the passion, professionalism and integrity we all bring to our work. Amy has been instrumental in building the professional infrastructure that has enabled the Foundation to increase its annual expenditure from four to over twenty million whilst retaining its strong focus on relationships. She has worked with organisations and chief executives across the voluntary sector from grass-roots start-ups to universities and large charities, building strong relationships and helping them to make a real impact.

Job Titles:

• Deputy Director
• Member of the Professional Team

Bridget joined Pears Foundation in 2013 and, as Deputy Director, holds responsibility for a variety of programmes and partners, alongside supporting the Director and Executive Chair in matters of strategic planning. She is currently leading on the Foundation's work in Youth Social Action and manages key partnerships around the theme of understanding and encouraging philanthropy, including the Association of Charitable Foundations' Foundations Giving Trends series. Bridget's background is in the Heritage sector, graduating with a first-class degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2005 and starting her career at the Horniman Museum. She remains deeply interested in the role our understanding of the past plays in shaping our future. The team views Bridget as highly intelligent, practical and effective. Her good humour and sense of fun are a perfect balance to the focus and efficiency she brings to the projects she manages.

Job Titles:

• Trustee

David was educated at the City of London School for boys and attended Middlesex University before joining the family business in 1987. David was previously in the world of philanthropy chairing Young Jewish Care for a number of years.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Professional Team

Job Titles:

• Member of the Professional Team

Job Titles:

• Trustee
• Chief Executive of the William Pears Group

Mark Pears has been Chief Executive of The William Pears Group since 1984 and is Chairman of Talisman Global Asset Management; an international fund management company. In 2000 he co-founded Telereal, the UK's largest property outsourcing company, notably managing the estates of British Telecom, the Department for Work and Pensions, the DVLA and a portfolio of assets on behalf of Royal Mail. Mark was awarded a CBE for Services to Business and to Charity in 2014. In 2017 he was appointed as a Trustee of The British Museum and in 2018 he was appointed as a trustee of homelessness charity St Mungo's.

Job Titles:

• Consultant
• Management Consultant

Having studied law as an undergraduate, Olivia went on to complete an LLM in International Human Rights Law. She began her career as a policy and campaigns officer at the Consumers Association/Which?, followed by several years managing the University of Nottingham's Human Rights Law Centre. She then joined the management team of the newly formed Social Enterprise UK working to embed social enterprise nationwide. For the past 15 years Olivia has worked as a management consultant supporting socially minded organisations. She primarily works with small organisations helping them to maximise their potential and provides a range of support including organisational reviews, business and budget planning, feasibility studies (including mergers) and acting as a facilitator. Olivia also provides executive and staff team coaching. In particular, she assists senior leaders with their strategic planning and works with them to think through how best to operationalise their plans. Olivia's approach is very practically focused and she acts as a ‘critical friend' to those she supports, analysing decision making and offering an objective perspective which her clients find particularly beneficial. In addition to her own practice, Olivia works with Pears to support a number of its grantees - both newly appointed senior executives and more experienced executives managing organisations in transition.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Professional Team
• Operations Manager

I love working at the Pears Foundation and supporting such a wide variety of grantees. From Place2Be supporting mental health in schools across the country, to Pears Scholars at Hebrew University studying to improve public health across the world, each organisation is different but brought together by the values at the heart of the Foundation's purpose.

Job Titles:

• Consultant
• Expert

Rhodri graduated from the University of Oxford with a first-class degree in Mathematics and Philosophy and embarked upon an academic career before migrating into public policy work, where he has spent over a decade specialising in the policy aspects of philanthropy and charitable giving. He is involved with a number of external projects and steering groups, including the World Economic Forum Technology and Social Justice Initiative, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Better Giving Studio and the Wellcome Trust-funded Border Crossings project (which is exploring the relationship between voluntary action and the NHS since 1948). Rhodri Davies is a widely-respected expert and commentator on philanthropy and civil society issues. He is the author of Public Good by Private Means: How philanthropy shapes Britain, which traces the history of philanthropy in Britain and what it tells us about the modern context. He is currently in the process of establishing (with the support of the Pears Foundation) a new entity that will focus on developing better understanding of and engagement with philanthropy, and also works in-house at the Pears Foundation to help them and their partner organisations think through philanthropy issues. Rhodri is now offering zoom ‘consultations' for grantee CEOs who have a question about philanthropy or who would like to explore how greater engagement with philanthropy might support them in their work. Please email Rachel to schedule a chat. Rhodri also works part-time as a Pears Fellow in the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent. He was formerly Head of Policy at Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), and established and led Giving Thought - CAF's think tank focussing on current and future issues affecting philanthropy and civil society. Rhodri created and hosted CAF's popular bi-weekly Giving Thought podcast -which ran for over 100 episodes between 2017 and 2020. He has researched, written and presented on a wide range of topics - from charity taxation to the civil society applications of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Professional Team
• Director of Leadership and Learning

Shoshana leads on Pears Foundation's international development grants, interfaith projects, and leadership development programmes. As the director of Pears Foundation's professional development she spends a large chunk of her time sharing leadership tools, facilitating team building workshops and offering peer learning opportunities to Pears partners. In addition, her international background and experience in the faith sector allows her to function as a valued Jewish voice both within the British Jewish community and with interfaith leadership initiatives globally. As Vice-President of the Wexner Heritage Foundation in New York, Shoshana ran leadership development programmes for volunteers and professionals. She has also served as CEO of a large faith-based charity in the UK, developing and implementing their strategic planning process. As part of her interfaith work, Shoshana currently serves as a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College and a Visiting Research Fellow at St. Benet's Hall, Oxford University. She is a founding faculty member of Faith in Leadership, providing intensive leadership training to senior Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in the UK. She also liaises with the Vatican as part of IJCIC (the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations). Shoshana is a regular public speaker appearing at TEDx Jerusalem, Jewish Book Week, BBC Radio 2's "Pause for Thought" and Radio 4's "Something Understood". She is also the author of The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales. She was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1993, after graduating magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College. She has two decades of experience in organisational development in the USA and UK and is a certified practitioner of Polarity Management, Myers-Briggs (MBTI) and Belbin.

Job Titles:

• Executive Chair
• Trustee

Sir Trevor Pears is the Foundation's full time Executive Chair; he continues his involvement in the family business but his primary professional role is to lead the Foundation and develop the Pears family's philanthropy. We believe passionately in empowering people, in working with them and helping them on their journeys, whatever it is they need. It is their journey, not ours, but we hope, where possible, to travel together. We're there to help create a space for them to develop and move forward. That's why we regularly get involved in core funding. Projects can be very popular with donors; everyone likes visible progress. Everyone likes to hear good news. It's understandable. But at the end of the day what matters is that we make the most significant contribution that we can to the organisations we fund. Pears Foundation will always seek to be an example to the overall practice of philanthropy, appreciating its difficulties and complexities and pursuing truly effective giving. Along with his brothers Mark and David, Sir Trevor established Pears Foundation. Their purpose was to apply some of the resources of their family's property company, the William Pears Group, to fund organisations and projects working to deliver progress on key issues affecting the wellbeing of people in the UK and all over the world. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2011 for services to UK-Israel relations and in 2017 he was awarded Knighthood for Philanthropy. He has been awarded Fellowships of University College London and Birkbeck, University of London and an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in recognition of his outstanding commitment to social justice.