Director – Rhodri Davies
Rhodri is the founder and Director of Why Philanthropy Matters.
He is a well-known thinker and commentator on philanthropy and civil society issues, and is regularly invited to write and speak about them for a wide range of audiences.
He also hosts the popular Philanthropisms podcast.
As well as running Why Philanthropy Matters, Rhodri is the Philanthropy Expert in Residence at the Pears Foundation, and from May 2026 he will be taking up a new role as Director of Philanthropy Knowledge at Alliance Publishing Trust. From 2021 to 2025, he was a Pears Research Fellow in the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent, and prior to that was Head of Policy at Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), where he created and led the in-house think tank Giving Thought, and also hosted CAF’s popular Giving Thought podcast for over 100 episodes.
Rhodri has published three books: Rich Expectations: Why rich people give (with Beth Breeze & Theresa Lloyd, DSC, 2025) What is Philanthropy For? (Bristol University Press, 2023) and Public Good by Private Means: How philanthropy shapes Britain (Alliance Publishing Trust, 2016)
Rhodri graduated from the University of Oxford with a first-class degree in Mathematics and Philosophy and embarked upon an academic career before migrating into public policy work, where he has spent the last 15 years figuring out how much more he still has to learn about philanthropy.
