Our history.

Where we began

We do not know who founded the Foundation. There is no founder’s portrait in the entrance hall, no anniversary in the calendar, and no year on any document that would let us fix one.

The board has discussed this more than once and each time has concluded that it is appropriate. Charitable work outlives the people who begin it, and an institution that cannot point to a great man at its origin is spared a certain kind of vanity. We have come to think of the gap as the healthiest thing about us.

What we can date

1. Within living memory

   The clinic at Providence is rebuilt for the third time, on the same footprint, to the same plan.

2. Before that

   The Foundation becomes the largest single funder of well maintenance in the world — a distinction it has never publicised, on the grounds that maintenance is not interesting.

3. Before that

   The first children’s homes open. The policy that a child’s address should change as rarely as possible is written in this period and has not been revised since.

4. Before that

   The campus at Providence is established. The Foundation did not build the island’s older structures and has never claimed to.

5. Earlier

   The relief work begins in a form we would recognise: tents, water, blankets, and people who were already there when the need arose.

6. —

   The earliest document the Foundation holds is an inventory. It is undated, it is written in a hand nobody has identified, and it lists this island.

Dates earlier than the clinic rebuild are given in relation to one another rather than to a calendar. The archive supports the order. It has never supported the years.

The inventory

It is a list of buildings and their contents, kept in the reading room, and it is the oldest thing we own. Every attempt to date it has produced a result earlier than the attempt before, which the archivists tell us is a known failure of the method rather than a property of the document.

It is not a mysterious object. It is an inventory. We mention it only because colleagues ask, and because we would rather answer than have people wonder.

What has not changed

The work, the wording of our principles, and the practice of greeting every new colleague personally on their first day. Three things, across a period we cannot measure, in an organisation that has replaced every one of its people many times over.

The newsletter is the longest continuous record we hold. The archive →

What we believe →