20 Year Success Story – Marquis Federico Spinola

16 October 2026

Patron of ACTAsia

Marquis Federico Spinola has spent more than three decades deciding where to place his trust. He has backed some of the most respected names in animal welfare — Help in Suffering, the Marwar Trust, the Alliance for Rabies Control and the World Animal Forum, which he helped found. Of all of them, his connection to ACTAsia has lasted the longest, running almost from day one.

A Smaller Ambition

Marquis Federico doesn’t remember the exact first meeting with Pei. What he remembers is a room in the south of the UK, full of people trying to fund ‘Pioneer Training’ something far bigger than the budget could stretch to — fifty or sixty students and ambitions that had outrun the available money.

“We realised we could only help in a very limited way,” he says. So instead of walking away, they scaled it down and ran a smaller training that could actually happen — the first Pioneer Training, held at Banna, Federico’s house near Turin, Italy. Pei Su was pregnant with her daughter Risa at the time.

That instinct — to do the achievable thing rather than the impressive one — is, in Federico’s telling, close to the root of why he stayed involved for twenty years.

A Chinese Story

Not long after Banna, Pei Su made a case in London that struck Federico as unusually ambitious for the time: animal protection societies everywhere needed better-trained managers — not only in China, but in South America and Africa too. Federico’s own working life was in Asia, so that’s where his attention landed.

“It was not so much the animal concept, it was the Chinese concept,” he says of what first hooked him. He had already spent a decade with an animal shelter in India, since 1994, and had watched the same gap play out again and again: passionate managers with no training, or trained outsiders with no understanding of the place they’d landed in.

“They never had an opportunity of doing a training programme somewhere else to learn their trade,” he says, “as it would have been for doctors, or bakers, or whatever job you do. You have to learn somehow.”

Banna, Turin, Italy, 2005 – L to R: Pei Su, Janice Cox, Marquis Federico, Deepa Ballaram, Kim Doyle, Joy Leney

A Chance Meeting

Months after Banna, Federico was in Paris for a preparatory meeting for the World Animal Forum, where he met Jackie Ballard, the former head of the RSPCA. It was Jackie who told him plainly: “I attend the European Animal Forum every day. I don’t attend the World Animal Forum. I’d only be interested in a world animal forum.”

It’s the kind of exacting standard Federico recognises in Pei Su’s own work — the refusal to settle for a smaller, easier version of an idea once you’ve seen what the full version could be.

Federico had seen the alternative up close. The old model of aid was simple and blunt: “This is the way we do it in our country” — faster, clearer, and, in his view, no longer acceptable. He’d watched it build quiet resentment in the people receiving the help, even as they took the money and said nothing.

Pei Su’s approach was different: go in as one of the people, not above it. I’m one of you — let’s recognise where we’ve exaggerated, let’s reconsider parts of how we’ve been doing this. “The fact of proposing it from the inside, and only proposing it — not saying it from a chair, like an instruction — was extremely convincing to me,” Federico says. Having funded a shelter near Geneva for 24 years as its sole backer, he knew from experience how being the only funder can trip into exactly that trap.

ACTAsia’s model, to him, was rarer and more durable.

What Twenty Years Built

Federico points to the scale ACTAsia now operates at: a UK charity that grew into registered entities in the Netherlands, Australia and the US, two offices in mainland China, consultative status at the UN, and a children’s education programme recognised by UNESCO’s Transforming Education initiative — alongside its role as education partner to the World Small Animal Veterinary Association.

But what matters to him isn’t the list itself. It’s the philosophy underneath it: cruelty to animals and cruelty to people share the same root, and addressing one without the other is only half the work.

The Wish for the Next Chapter

Asked what he’d want for ACTAsia’s next twenty years, Federico circles around a term he can’t quite recall — the kind of permanent reserve fund that established museums build: money that isn’t spent, but held, so an organisation can afford to be bolder in its choices. What he’s really describing is stability with room to be brave — something he thinks could take another decade to build, but is worth building anyway.

His clearest, most practical advice is about legacy giving. In his experience, it’s the single most powerful lever a charity like ACTAsia has: a living donor giving money is already generous, but a bequest — a flat, a car, a portion of an estate — moves in a different order of magnitude entirely. “The legacies are the very important part of our fundraising scheme,” he says — and it’s where he’d point anyone still deciding whether to commit to ACTAsia for the long term.

For anyone still weighing their support, Federico’s answer is unambiguous. It’s the same case he’s made to himself for twenty years: a genuine, recognised need in China, met through education rather than instruction — teaching compassion at the root instead of policing its absence at the surface. That approach takes longer than simply telling people what to do, he admits. “But it’s definitely the winning side.”

Marquis Federico Spinola has supported ACTAsia since its earliest Pioneer Training programmes and was instrumental in its founding as a registered UK charity in 2006.

He continues as one of ACTAsia’s longest-standing patrons.

As ACTAsia looks toward its next 20 years, we invite you to be part of the story. Learn how you can get involved and consider donating today. 

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