Irish Philanthropist of the Year calls for others to go public with their giving
Howard Lake | 10 February 2017 | News
The winners of the annual Irish Philanthropist of the Year awards have been announced in Dublin, with the top award going to Maurice Healy as National Philanthropist of the Year.
This year’s winners of the awards, held by the Community Foundation of Ireland, are:
- Maurice Healy as National Philanthropist of the Year for his significant support for a number of charities including Social Entrepreneurs Ireland (SEI), An Cosan and Anam Cara.
- Applegreen as Corporate Philanthropist of the Year as they have generated over €1million in support for a number of children’s charities including Barnardos, ISPCC and Debra.
- SAP as International Philanthropist of the Year for their African Coding Week initiative which to date has supported over 400,000 young people in Africa.
Mr Healy said at the awards presentation that wealthy people should go public on charitable donations to help set an example for others to follow.
“I would like people who are giving to stand up and say they are giving,” Mr Healy told the Irish Times.
Mr Healy is the chairman and chief executive of the family business, The Healy Group. He said it was important for the purposes of transparency in the charitable sector and to encourage others that philanthropists should go public on their giving. Mr Healy said the company gives 20 per cent of its profits to the family foundation.
Mr Healy said he understood why some wealthy individuals did not want to go public with their philanthropy but he suggested those reasons were “counterproductive.”
“Vulgarity does come into it, but we need to encourage people who are not giving and the more examples we have of people giving, the better we feel about it,” he said.
Other campaigns to promote individual philanthropy and going public with a commitment to philanthropy include The Giving Pledge.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.