Grace Tame will step down as the CEO of her charitable foundation amid a donor backlash over its questionable governance and a half-hearted leadership style that left a scattered strategy and produced few tangible results for sexual abuse survivors.
Grace Tame Foundation director Michael Salter has been making it known around town that Tame will soon cease in the position and recruitment efforts will begin to identify a successor.
Margin Call understands a job listing will be published soon.
A press release issued on Tuesday afternoon confirmed that Tame would be “transitioning out of the CEO role” and into an “impact and advocacy focused role” with the Foundation.
“I will focus on my role as Founder and work alongside the new CEO, Board and team to deliver on our goals,” Tame said. “My commitment to the success of the Foundation remains, and this new role will align with my energy and skills to maximise my impact. I invite anyone to join us in achieving our critical mission.”
Tame’s inexperience was evident to anyone who dealt with the foundation, its dysfunction well-known in philanthropic circles. Largely a side project between a book deal and speaking gigs, it overflowed with donor funding but largely duplicated the work of established peers.
Within two years it had seemingly run out of goals to pursue. Piles of money sat on its books and it had already achieved modest goals in reforming sexual assault legislation around the country. But the board, flush with cash and under pressure to spend it in meaningful ways, took an ill-advised turn and began funding counselling services and legal fees for sexual abuse survivors, cannibalising existing services and drastically diverging from the foundation’s original purpose.
Donors were never told their money would be used in this way – on lawyers and counselling – and we know some benefactors were left furious about the lack of transparency.
More than half of the donated funds for FY23 – about $170,000 – were used to pay for counselling and legal costs, creating manifold problems in the process.
This column would go on to reveal that every dollar spent on legal services ($107,000) had been channelled into Marque Lawyers, whose managing director, Michael Bradley, sits on the Grace Tame Foundation board.
A perceived conflict of interest, this ought to have ended Bradley’s role as a director or seen his firm removed from the panel of legal providers.
We checked, however, and he’s still on the board, and our attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
The foundation didn’t respond when asked about these developments with Tame.
What never seemed to occur to Tame, or the foundation ’s leadership, is that funding survivors on a discretionary basis, in secret, would advantage a tiny group of people fortunate enough to be aware of the money.
Never mind the absolute lack of transparency around the decision-making – those who truly needed it wouldn’t even know it’s available.
All of which makes for a mess of an organisation which lost its way and is in desperate need of a reboot.
It’s a shame, really. With so much money at her disposal, far more than most volunteer organisations would typically receive, Grace Tame could have achieved something genuinely worthwhile in the survivor space.
Instead, her foundation wasted time, money, potentially the goodwill of donors, and it has probably diverted resources from organisations with clearer purposes.
Something for Tame’s successor to consider closely. Whoever takes over has the benefit of starting from an extremely low bar.
Cue the sounds of The Imperial March.
Distinguished members of the Australian Catholic University’s hallowed Senate filed into what was supposed to be a one-hour meeting on Monday.
This was an unscheduled meeting, called on Friday to address Margin Call’s coverage of the university’s leadership. Sources told us the meeting was still going well past 7pm, as our deadline approached, and one can safely conclude there was much debate among the council’s 30-odd members.
A snippet we were able to gather is that the National Tertiary Education Union – represented in the room by Leah Kaufmann – submitted a letter ahead of the meeting to demand the appointment of an external and independent investigator to probe what’s been raised in this column.
We’ve noted the ACU’s slide from a $50m budget surplus to a deficit in 2023 of $35m, as well as the loss of large numbers of staff through redundancies. Among those gone are COO Stephen Weller, who was abruptly sacked in March, and philosopher Stephen Finlay, former director of the Dianoia Institute. He became formally unemployed as of Monday and posted a call for assistance on Facebook to help him find a job.
“My family and I are now in a dire situation, as the timing of this could hardly be worse,” he wrote a week or so ago.
“I was informed by management on May 30th that my employment at the Australian Catholic University was being terminated, as my continuing position as Professor of Philosophy is ‘no longer required’.
“While I am dying to be able to share more about events at ACU, I cannot say more at present.”
An external review of ACU’s management would make a far better plan than that proposed by Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the corporation that oversees ACU, who disseminated a letter on Thursday offering no meaningful reply to the concerns of many staff, backing Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis, and dismissing the chorus of anger within the university as the makings of a “business gossip column”.
And not a word in Coleridge’s letter, of course, about the extremely unsavoury dealings between the university and Professor Kate Galloway, who was paid more than $1m in March to give up her job as the Dean of Law, largely because she’s an abortion reform advocate. No mention of the gross misuse of taxpayer funds, Galloway’s treatment, or the completely substandard due diligence applied during the selection phase.
How’s that for healthy academic freedom? Hopefully the university regulator TEQSA has pulled its finger out to actually take a look at this Galloway travesty.
Judging by Coleridge’s letter, he clearly isn’t the brightest bulb either. Included was a paragraph inviting corporation members to “join with me in expressing confidence” in Skrbis’s leadership and “offering him and the university community our full support”.
Quite dumb to set a test for Skrbis in that way. Now there’s a means by which support for Skrbis’s leadership can genuinely be gauged among the corporation’s people.
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