Board positions - Giving back to Romerike, as a founding board member

Selected to the founding board

Romerike Sparebank received permission from Finanstilsynet to establish Sparebankstiftelsen Romerike Sparebank. This was the bank's initiative, not mine — I was selected as one of the founding board members, which I take as a real vote of confidence and a genuine privilege.

Founding does mean there is no inherited playbook. We are deciding how this foundation works from a blank sheet, and those early decisions tend to outlive everyone who makes them.

The main job: giving back to the community

The point of the whole exercise is the giving. The foundation exists to contribute to Romerike — local sport, culture, volunteer organisations, and the kind of community projects that make a region a good place to live and that rarely find funding anywhere else.

That is the part of this I care most about. A savings bank foundation is one of the few structures in Norwegian finance whose entire reason for existing is to hand money back to the place it came from, and being trusted to help decide where that money goes is a responsibility worth taking seriously.

The mandate that funds it

The giving has to be paid for, and that is the board's other job.

The Norwegian savings bank foundation model is a quietly clever piece of institutional design. The foundation holds equity certificates in the bank, which makes it a long-term, locally anchored owner rather than one looking for a quick exit. The returns on that holding do two things: keep the foundation's capital intact, and fund the gifts.

So we set the investment mandate — the risk we are willing to take, the horizon we manage to, and the balance between preserving capital and generating something to give away. A foundation like this is close to perpetual, so the mandate has to be written for decades rather than for the next quarterly report. Get it right and the giving compounds; get it wrong and there is nothing to give.

Why it matters locally

Romerike Sparebank has roots going back to 1887, when it was founded as Lillestrøm Sparebank. It became Romerike Sparebank in 2021 and merged with Blaker Sparebank in 2022. Being part of establishing the foundation that carries that history forward, in the region I come from, is not something I expected to be asked to do.