A lottery winner who scooped $155 million has given roughly half of it away, and says the example she was following came from Dolly Parton.
Frances Connolly and her husband Paddy won £115 million on Britain’s National Lottery in 2019. Her first instinct was to make sure the family was taken care of, and after that the couple set up a charity trust and started handing the rest out.
The PFC Trust has since distributed roughly half the winnings to nonprofit organizations across the north of England, funding scholarships, emergency food deliveries, projects that tackle loneliness and defibrillators for local sports clubs.
Frances grew up around country music, and her father was a big fan of Dolly Parton, who died in August. Frances has described the singer as “an inspiration” for her own giving.
“I think it’s in mankind to share when you get to a level where you’ve got enough,” Frances told the BBC.
What counts as enough differs from person to person, and she has said she might have kept more of it had she won younger.
“As long as the kids are sorted and they had enough to live comfortable, nice lives, I didn’t see the point,” she said.
The couple have taken good holidays and have a large house. They also buy their watches and their cars secondhand.
Frances worked as a social worker and a teacher before the win, and Paddy still works for a plastics business. The pair are originally from Northern Ireland and moved to Hartlepool in the north of England for work in 1990, planning to stay a few years. They have now been there for 25 of them.
Their daughter Fiona now helps run the trust, which still fundraises on top of the lottery money to widen the grants it can make. For Frances’s 60th birthday, seven athletes are running, swimming and cycling a combined 60 miles to raise more for it.
She is careful about how much one person can fix.
“I am at pains to explain to people that despite being a millionaire, I can’t cure poverty, and I certainly can’t do everything that’s needed to be done on my own,” she told the BBC.
“We have a lovely life. I always tell people, we have the same life, we just live it bigger.”
