William Berger served his community in various roles, and  latterly his philanthropy was channelled through the two foundations he established, one – the Berger Collection Educational Trust – which has supported the Berger Prize for over 20 years and the other to give young people opportunities to experience the outdoors.

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William Berger discovered British art in the 1990s. With his wife Bernadette Joan Johnson Berger (1940-2015) he began to collect art seriously, their interest sparked by an encounter with the Tudor queen, Elizabeth I, on the cover of an auction catalogue. Profiled in 1998, he explained that collecting is “like looking for companies to invest in. You have to have your antennae way out; you have to go through endless reading, and out of a hundred periodicals you’ll find one little golden needle in those thousands of haystacks.” By that point, the collection was reported to comprise "nearly 400 works of art, more than half of them English, with concentrations of Elizabethan, Renaissance, and late medieval art said to rival those of any collection in the country." (The Art Newspaper, 1 April 1998). For the Bergers, British art "represents a heritage that belongs to all of us today, no matter where our forebears came from.” (600 Years of British Painting: The Berger Collection, 1998). In conversation with the writer Geraldine Norman, William Berger was asked: why British art? His cheerful reply, connecting both his professional and private passions was: “Britain’s where our language comes from, where the computer comes from and – hell! – almost everything else.” (The Independent, 5 July 1999).