For those who keep count of these things, international best-selling author J.K. Rowling is the UK’s second-most generous benefactor to charities worldwide. Sir Elton John, in case you were wondering, leads the list.

She cuts a divisive figure across society at present. However, depending on your source, she has donated between £150m and £200m to a variety of charities, mostly based around issues from her personal experiences.

Dynamic looks at her philanthropic personality, one which started even before she became such a success...

Joanne Rowling was reading The Sunday Times in 2004 when a photograph stopped her where she sat. There was a small boy, about five years old, pressed against the wire of what looked like a cage. “My initial reaction was to turn the page, but I told myself I had to read the article and, if it was as bad as the photo made it look, I needed to do something about it.”

The story was harrowing. “The screaming starts at 11am sharp each day in the basement of the Raby care home, near Prague.

“That is when a little boy, five years old, is locked in his cage.” For a brief period, the boy, who was disabled — no one knew his real age — was let out to be fed and washed then forced back inside, his wails of anger and despair echoing through the building.

“I know I’m hardly unusual in this, but I have a particularly visceral reaction to seeing children abandoned, abused and alone,” says Rowling, now 59. “The image of that little boy screaming through what looked like chicken wire was so distressing. It remains burnt into my brain.”

She was also partway through writing what would become Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the bestselling series. She lobbied both the Czech ambassador to the UK and the Czech prime minister.

FOUNDING LUMOS

She wrote to the MEP Emma Nicholson, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a former director of fundraising for Save the Children, who had set up a charity to help abandoned children in Romanian orphanages. A year later, they formed the Children’s High Level Group charity together. It was renamed Lumos in 2010, after a charm in her books that illuminates the end of a wand, shining light into the darkest of places.

In the 21 years since the young boy’s story was published, Rowling has donated £63 million to Lumos, either directly or via the Harry Potter franchise, helping more than 280,000 children not just in eastern Europe but also in Haiti, Colombia and Ukraine. It has been calculated that Rowling has donated almost £200 million to three main causes: Lumos, the Volant Charitable Trust and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic. This has happened out of sight.

Visiting institutions around Eastern Europe with Lumos, she saw the need for action in the first year of a child’s life. “When that door closes, it’s very hard for children to develop into emotionally stable, functioning adults,” she says.

“We now have 80 years of meticulous international research to show that institutionalised children have vastly poorer outcomes than children raised in families. So intervention is critical, and the earlier the better. Neglect not only causes cognitive harm, it exposes children to a higher risk of abuse and exploitation.”

She remembers a little girl of about five who sat on her lap during a meeting at a Czech orphanage near Prague and beamed up at her. “A child who has been properly nurtured and is securely attached would never sit in a stranger’s lap. I was emotional and trying to hold it together while talking with experts in the room. I was stuck on the fact that this child was giving me a visceral demonstration of why it’s so easy to abuse — and traffic — an institutionalised child. She had been deprived of every child’s birthright. She was so desperate for love, for attention, that she would have gone home with anyone, no question.”

Rowling came very close to taking a child home. “It was in a unit in Bucharest in 2006, where all these tiny babies were completely silent. I tried to make eye contact with a beautiful little girl who must have been around four or five months old, but there was nothing. She’d learnt that when she cried, no one came, so she’d stopped crying. She was completely shut down. It upset me. I had a powerful impulse to pick up that baby and take her home. I’ve never completely got over that.”

Like 80% of abandoned children, she had a living mother. “The question I’ve met loads of times from westerners and donors is, ‘Why do they abandon them?’” Rowling says. “Social, political and economic upheaval all influence the numbers of children who are put into institutions, but grinding poverty is the number one driver. Lumos has worked hard to establish systems that enable people to care for, feed, and educate their children. Mothers don’t give their children up if they’re in a position to raise them within a family.”

Rowling’s family growing up on the England/Wales border was by no means well-off , though they got by. Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer at Rolls-Royce in Bristol, and made no secret of the fact that he wanted a boy. Her mother, Anne, was a science technician at Rowling’s comprehensive school. At school, though, she met kids who didn’t have everything they needed.

“There were families who couldn’t afford full school uniforms. I saw and hated the kind of caste system that results from those conspicuous differences. I don’t think those things ever leave you. All of that shaped my worldview and informs the kind of causes and issues I want to help.”

However, it was as a woman escaping an abusive, short-lived marriage that Rowling experienced poverty herself. In the noisy frenzy of the culture wars, Rowling’s private pain can be overlooked. She arrived in Edinburgh from Portugal in 1993 when Jessica was four months old, with one suitcase containing the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

In her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, she said that she had been as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless.

“Nobody who hasn’t been poor can understand what it means. I remember it vividly; you never forget it. The poor get talked about, talked down to, and talked over, and all of that happened to me during those years. I literally went hungry at times because I prioritised feeding my daughter, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It’s the daily indignities — overwhelmingly, not being able to give your child the things you’d like.”

Rowling still seems to be confounded by her success. “I’d have had to have psychotic levels of self-belief to imagine my book would be a bestseller.” Her literary agent had warned her to find a job because the story wasn’t commercial enough.

That first book, published by Bloomsbury in June 1997, became one of the bestselling works of fiction of all time. She was 32. However, with sudden fame came the letters, which she found incredibly difficult to handle. Over the years, though, she has learnt to do “due diligence,” ensuring the money she donates reaches the right places.

Many letters were from women trying to escape violent and coercive men, asking for relatively small amounts of money. “All genuine, and I was delighted to be able to help,” she says. Rowling has since donated more than £86 million in grants to projects in Scotland and around the world, focusing on social deprivation with a particular emphasis on women and children who are at risk in their lives or find themselves in situations where there seems to be no way out. Volant, the first charity she set up in 2000, supports services for victims of sexual abuse, rape and domestic violence, as well as isolated and lone parents.

One heart-rending letter from parents asking for money to fund surgery for their child sticks in her mind. She had just met Neil Murray, the doctor she married in 2001. “I was so upset and disturbed by this letter that I showed it to him.

“He said very calmly that the reason UK doctors wouldn’t operate is that it would involve a lot of pain for no gain. He’s a person full of integrity, so that brought my anxiety levels down. And he has continued to be a fantastic support, because it can still feel overwhelming.”

In more mundane situations, she states, “I do buy The Big Issue and I’ve always tipped, but yes, the tips have got bigger!”

In 2020, Rowling donated more than £12 million in royalties from her children’s fairytale, The Ickabog, to Volant, to support vulnerable people impacted by COVID-19. And she donates all royalties from the first of her Cormoran Strike detective series, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, to ABF The Soldiers’ Charity (now called the Army Benevolent Fund).

Rowling is most proud of the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic in Edinburgh, which opened in 2013. Her mother, Anne, who was diagnosed with MS in 1980, died aged 45 of related complications in 1990, when Rowling was 25, reflecting her most profound loss.

“Her disease progressed so fast, she didn’t even know I was writing Harry Potter,” she says. She never saw the later success, the profits of which are, in part, ploughed back into the centre. Rowling’s donations of £27.8 million to date have allowed the clinic to employ the world’s best clinicians and researchers.

“My mother was the most amazing gardener. She had green fingers, which I have not inherited,” Rowling says. “I chose an image of green shoots for the centre’s logo because I wanted that sense of regrowth — we’re looking at whether we can stimulate nerves to grow correctly — but it also felt like a beautiful tribute to her.”

In 2022 she founded Beira’s Place, a women-only rape and sexual assault support centre in Edinburgh. It is named after the Scottish goddess of winter, who represents female wisdom, power and regeneration.

As a survivor of domestic violence and a serious sexual assault she suffered in her twenties, she is particularly proud of it. “There was no such single-sex service before,” she says. “I know that was well worth doing because of the number of women who are coming through our doors.”  Over three years, she has donated £1 million to fund running costs, including a staff of nine counselling support workers who have provided more than 6,000 hours of support to 700 women and girls.

Social services in the Czech Republic have undergone significant transformation. “They stopped using caged beds as a result of our intervention, so that was a triumph,” Rowling says.

An estimated 5.4 million children still live in institutions worldwide. Rowling’s plans for Lumos’s third decade is to do at least twice as much in half the time. “In ten years’ time Lumos aims to have helped enable more than half a million more children and young people to thrive in safe and loving families,” she says.

Coming up to 30 years after Harry Potter changed the face of publishing, she isn’t in the least bit interested in legacy.

“It has always seemed to me to be an entirely futile pursuit, trying to frame the way you’re remembered after you’re dead,” she says. “I care about now and the living. Honestly, all I ever think about with regard to death is that I hope it doesn’t happen too soon because I’d like to stay with my family as long as possible.”