Every year, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation distributes about £29 million. The projects that it supports are intriguingly diverse – from stonework that commemorates poets to community projects, from émigré Polish artists to providing training for Welsh hill farmers. Often the grants are small – £750 to the Mid-Norfolk Railway Preservation Trust. Sometimes the amounts are much more substantial – £440,000 to Forward Thinking to help to improve understanding between British Muslims and the Establishment.

Dawn Austwick is director of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, charged with charting the future for an endowment of more than £900 million. “I love Esmée’s portfolio, the nature of the work, that it is eclectic, that it will take counterintuitive decisions, that it will back things that are unpopular or difficult, which people do not want to talk about,” she says with relish.

Austwick’s career has often been one step ahead of the mainstream. She worked for the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts after graduation, then joined a radical fringe theatre, the Half Moon. She started off working on business development and sponsorship, and ended up as theatre manager. Next she worked for KPMG.

Even though she stayed for eight years at KPMG, Austwick was aware that her CV retained an alternative look. She was increasingly conscious that, as consulting became more sophisticated, she was working with a variety of experts: “I needed to look at my financial literacy. I felt that I could learn about all the different components of what makes a business tick and get an understanding of the different functional areas.” The result was an MBA at London Business School. “The MBA was partly about consolidating,” she says, before admitting that she was not a model student.

“I did the part-time MBA, and all of us were working; so we all had jobs and had made a serious decision to give up some of our time and some of our employers’ time to do this, and we knew it was going to be hard work. It was not like being an undergraduate, when you just concentrate on being a student; it always had to be juggled and balanced. They split the year into groups, so you had a group of eight people who you worked with over the course. The brilliant thing about my group was that we aimed to achieve eight MBAs. We actually had a collective aim. So it was not about, well, I want this and he wants that: it was about what we all wanted to do; it was getting ourselves through the course.”

For Austwick, it was like being back in the theatre. The experience gave her the confidence to be able to work with people with different expertise and not be blinded by their particular science, to be able to understand the value of their expertise and what they can do with it.

After KPMG, Austwick headed the Tate Modern project. “One of the reasons I think Tate Modern succeeded was that there was quality in every area of the team and we moved in formation. It was a fantastic experience. But another reason we succeeded was because we had never done it before; therefore, we did not see the risk of failure. Having done it, everybody looks back and says that was seamless and effortless. Actually, it was very difficult, and I would not do it again. I apply what I learned there to other things, different challenges.” Austwick next became deputy director of the British Museum. The museum was saddled with a £6 million deficit and the hefty baggage of a culture established over 250 years. She says: “You cannot wade in and expect to fix everything swiftly. You cannot issue edicts. You need to know which battles to fight, when to be discreet and when to bide your time.”

While Austwick embraces leadership, she has never been tempted to run her own business: “Wanting the world to be a better place is a much more complicated, intellectual and behavioural proposition than asking whether one can make lots of money.

“That is not to deny the challenge of running complicated businesses because that is also really interesting and lots of people run businesses not just to make a profit. Fundamentally, I am more interested in making a difference.”

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