After 37 years as The Dunhill Medical Trust, we have changed our name and will now be known as the Vivensa Foundation. Having refined our focus and made substantial changes to the way we go about our work in recent years, we wanted a new name that better reflects our work as both a funder and as an impact-intentional investor.
As you might expect, this decision was not made lightly. Our broader history spans seven decades and, in its early years, certainly, was deeply tied to the Dunhill family.
I’ve thought a lot about this history and made many decisions based on the solid foundations that have been built and the knowledge generated over that time. So I want to share a few reflections on why we’ve made this change now and why we’re looking forward to writing the next chapter as the Vivensa Foundation.
Common challenges with family foundations
While every family trust or foundation is unique, a number share similar elements in their financial and governance background that to 21st century eyes might feel a little uncomfortable — for example, a lack of diversity in their governance and decision-making practices, or sources of wealth that are at odds with the organisation’s charitable mission.
We acknowledge that Herbert E. Dunhill, our benefactor, derived his wealth from his directorship of a company which, while known for its broad range of luxury goods and accessories, derived substantial profit from the sale of tobacco and smoking-related products.
As an organisation that serves a community of clinicians and scientists, we are deeply aware of the damage to health caused by tobacco — something that has been known unequivocally since the early 1950s, with warning signs emerging even earlier.
In going through our archives to better understand our history, I found no evidence that the charity was established as a mechanism for the company Alfred Dunhill Ltd to make medical research donations or to fund research to disprove that tobacco was harmful.
There seems to have been some motivation to put Herbert’s personal shareholding in trust to maintain family ownership and control of the Dunhill business after his death. However, his philanthropic intent was also clear — he wanted to support medical research, influenced by his personal experience of ill health from tuberculosis.
Since 1963, the charity has funded a broad range of medical research, and in 1986, added ageing and supporting older people to its objectives. It’s also helped launch the careers of many talented new scientists and clinicians through its studentships and fellowships.
Changing attitudes towards responsible investment
The ability to make these grants over the years has been the result of the ownership of investments which have performed extremely well from a financial perspective. Expectations around how trusts and foundations invest, and the power of Trustees to manage these investments are, however, changing.
In 1992, the Bishop of Oxford challenged the Church Commissioners over their investment policy (Harries v The Church Commissioners for England, 1992). The Bishop of Oxford claimed that the Church Commissioners, whose purpose is to promote the Christian faith through the Church of England, should not select investments in a manner incompatible with that purpose, even if this involved a risk of significant financial detriment.
The ruling, however, held that the purposes of a charity are usually best served by the Trustees seeking to obtain the maximum return on investments, whether by way of income or capital growth: “most charities need money; and the more of it there is available, the more the trustees can seek to accomplish.”
At the time, it was believed that Trustees should rarely depart from this principle. While the exception of a cancer research charity investing in tobacco shares was given as one example, it came with the caveat that divestment should not cause significant financial detriment to the charity. This became the main guidance for charity Trustees on their investment responsibilities.
Then, in 2022, with lots of charitable organisations becoming more conscious of their sources of wealth and wishing to take more responsible approaches to their investments, the Butler-Sloss and Others v Charity Commission case was brought to clarify the earlier Bishop of Oxford case. This judgement confirms that Trustees have considerably wider scope in determining a suitable investment policy for their charities. Alongside the subsequent Charity Commission guidance for Trustees, the ruling gives Trustees the discretion to exclude investments that conflict with their charity’s mission.
Moving towards impact-intentional investing
Returning to our own history, in 1988 the new charity — The Dunhill Medical Trust — was formed into which the assets of the Will Trust of Herbert E. Dunhill were transferred. In 1989, the Trustees made the decision to start diversifying the investment portfolio and began disposing of the endowment of shares in Dunhill Holdings Plc. By 1998, these had been disposed of in their entirety and no new direct investments have been made since.
I speculate that the Trustees at the time chose to dispose of the shares in tranches to minimise financial impact, in the spirit of protecting the endowment’s value. This enabled them to continue supporting their charitable grant-making objectives, and is what the later guidance derived from the Bishop of Oxford case confirmed was a reasonable thing for Trustees to do.
In 2019, our Board of Trustees, increasingly concerned by the conflict with the charity’s mission, went on to explicitly exclude any indirect investments in tobacco stocks that can be present in collective funds, having begun the process of reducing this relatively small exposure in 2013. Our investment portfolio has been free from indirect tobacco exposure since March 2020.
Following the Butler-Sloss decision and the revised Charity Commission guidance, our Board has continued to refine our Investment Policy Statement. For example, we have now excluded investments in fossil fuel producers owing to their links to climate change and its impact on the health of vulnerable people.
We are learning from our history and are committed to using our endowment to further our mission. That’s why we are openly sharing the history of our endowment, acknowledging the investments we’ve had in the past and staying accountable for what we invest in now and in the future.
A new name for our next chapter
In reviewing our archives, I discovered that the Trustees debated renaming the Dunhill Medical Trust around the time that they disposed of the remaining Dunhill-related shares, given that the name was still attached to a brand of cigarettes. At that time, they decided to keep it, but in recent years, we have begun to feel that the name no longer reflects who we are.
We’re not alone in this view. Our award-holders, collaborators and other stakeholders have told us that the Dunhill Medical Trust name was proving to be increasingly unhelpful — even off-putting — to those who might benefit from our funding or wish to collaborate with us. In today’s world, where sources of wealth and corporate governance are, rightly, scrutinised carefully, and the harm caused by tobacco is well-known and accepted, we feel now is the right time for a new chapter.
We honour Herbert E. Dunhill’s philanthropic legacy and his family members who helped shape it. But as we look ahead, our mission is clear: to drive meaningful impact through responsible investing and bold grant-making.
With our new name, the Vivensa Foundation, and a refreshed 2025-2030 strategic framework, we are stepping into the future with purpose. We are committed to learning from our past while pushing forward — ensuring that every decision we make best serves our mission and the communities we support.
This is just the beginning of our next chapter.
Join us on this journey, and learn more about what we fund and how we like to work, by signing up to our newsletter or following us on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Susan Kay
Chief Executive