St. James's Palace on Sunday
confirmed that Kate — now formally known as Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge —
is spending the next few months exploring the charitable sector as she mulls
what to make of her position at the top of British society. The move shows that
Princess Kate is following a family tradition championed by the late Princess
Diana, her mother-in-law.
The idea is "to get to
know a number of charitable and other causes better, so she can make
well-informed decisions about her future role," her spokesman said,
declining to elaborate. "The duchess plans to meet a wide range of people
and make private visits."
He spoke on condition of
anonymity, as required by palace policy.
The Sunday Times said the
29-year-old princess had already begun making under-the-radar trips to various
unnamed UK institutions.
Running or founding charities
has long been a favored pastime for Britain's royals. Prince Charles, Kate's
father-in-law, is the patron or president of no fewer than 20.
But it was Charles' former
wife, Princess Diana, whose hands-on approach set the bar for future royal
charity work.
Diana was famously
photographed crossing an Angolan minefield, and a 1987 picture of her holding
the hand of an AIDS patient helped change public attitudes toward the disease
at a time when many wrongly thought that HIV could be spread by touch.
Prince William, Diana's son
and Kate's husband, has pulled occasional publicity stunts in the same vein. In
2009, he spent one December night out on the streets near London's Blackfriars
bridge with the chief executive of a homelessness charity that his mother used
to support, in a bid to raise awareness of the issue.
On a
recent visit to California, both William and Kate visited an arts center in
Skid Row, where some 4,000 homeless people live in downtown Los Angeles.
