Serve quietly

This is the shortest page on this website, and it is meant to be.

The Foundation’s fourth purpose is to give — substantially, to those with the least — and to do it in the background. Where a gift can be made without a name attached to it, it will be made that way.

There is a reason this sits oddly beside the other three pillars, which are all about making a record and publishing it. Preservation and education only work in public. Charity does not require an audience, and a great deal of charity is diminished by having one. The Foundation intends to keep those two things separate rather than let the second quietly become publicity for the first.

So there will be no running total on this page, no list of grateful recipients, and no photographs of the Foundation handing anything to anyone.

Why it belongs in the charter at all

Because it is the point of the other three.

The men and women this Foundation exists to remember did not go to Europe to be commemorated. They went because something enormous was being done to people who could not stop it. Keeping their uniforms in a case is worth doing. It is not, on its own, an answer to what they were actually for.

The Foundation takes the view that a memorial which spends everything on the memorial has missed its own subject.