Outstanding Leadership Award

Michael Brophy

Awards

Tags: Charity Awards | Leadership and strategy

It is hard to overstate Michael Brophy’s dominance of the voluntary sector agenda during his two decades as chief executive of Charities Aid Foundation.

For someone like me, just starting out in publishing for the sector in the late 1980s, his reputation was enormous and his influence all-pervading. The annual CAF conference at the QEII Conference Centre each November was the major event of the year, attended by getting on for 1,000 sector leaders and always headlined by a major political figure of the day, from John Major to Tony Blair to William Hague. The Arnold Goodman lecture series was another prominent annual fixture instigated by Brophy through the Council for Charitable Support, which he/CAF founded, and at which speakers included the Duke of Edinburgh – memorably figuring on the front page of The Sun the next day as a result – as well as Gordon Brown, Cardinal Basil Hume and Nigel Lawson.

Brophy began his career when he received the Queen's Telescope for passing out top of his year at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, after which he flew as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, from aircraft carriers. Aged 30 he became an account director at advertising agency J Walter Thompson, where he handled a clutch of famous household brands. He followed this with a move to the Spastics Society as director of fundraising where he stayed for seven years, in itself a considerable achievement given that his eight predecessors had accumulated just 11 years between them.

At Scope, as it’s now known, he initiated the Save a Baby campaign, collecting and presenting to 10 Downing Street more than 600,000 signatures and organising a protest in Trafalgar Square against what were then very high rates of perinatal morbidity, while at the same time scaring the pants off a Charity Commission perhaps less used to high-octane campaigning than it is today.

In 1982 he left Scope to become chief executive of what was then a very modest operation called the Charities Aid Foundation and spent the next 20 years developing its enormous potential. During his time at CAF, funds increased from £12m to £1.5bn, much of the latter being in new services including two specialist banks, three investment funds and a venture capital fund. He introduced the CAF ‘cheque book’ which encouraged new supporters.

International expansion

In the international arena CAF opened offices in the US, Russia, South Africa, India, Australia and elsewhere, creating the first system dedicated to transferring donations across borders and tax regimes. The idea was, he says, "that you would be able to transfer funds with safe financial and tax-exempt processes by using the investment funds and banking services that each CAF would have. You would also have advisory services so if you wanted to transfer funds to the poor in Brazil then the CAF in Brazil would know what to avoid and which relatively small organisations could be recipients.” These days Brophy acknowledges this vision has still to be delivered but asserts that it in these days of globalisation there should be a complementary system for international philanthropy to "sit alongside international mega-companies".

During this time, Brophy became ever more widely involved in international affairs. He served as a director of the Standing Committee on International Philanthropy and was first sponsor of the Johns Hopkins series of comparative country statistics about the size and scope of civil society (now adopted by the United Nations). He was also a founding member and chairman of the European Foundation Centre which, he observes, "has become a very significant organisation based in Brussels with almost all the main European, US and Japanese Foundations in membership". He was also chairman of the European Citizens' Advisory Service in Brussels, as well as of Civicus, which speaks for citizens internationally. He worked with the World Bank, the UN Foundation and the UN Foundation for Intermediary Partnerships. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was a partner with the UK government in the Charity Know How Fund for Eastern Europe.

But it is in the UK that Brophy has had the most profound and far-reaching effect. During the 1980s and 1990s CAF became a leading initiator of change in the voluntary sector, being closely involved in establishing a number of tax reliefs on donations including gift aid and payroll deductions, called at CAF, Give As You Earn. Brophy recalls: "It was seven years in succession our major tax proposals were accepted", the first one "to increase the limit for covenants to £5,000". After several years of stepped increases in the level of tax-free giving, Brophy says of Nigel Lawson "we’d been hoping to get a limit of £100,000 or something like that, but he astonished us by simply abolishing the limit altogether". Brophy continues: "The annus mirabilis was 1987 when we had single gifts, payroll deduction and the abolition of an upper limit all together."

Institute of Fundraising and Community Foundation Network

Alongside these lobbying activities, Brophy was also a member of the small group which created the Institute of Fundraising (of which he is a Fellow) and about which he fondly reminisces: "That was a good one – it’s done well." He remembers his contribution stemming from his familiarity with the US scene: "We based it on the two organisations in the US, one was a membership body for the commercial suppliers and the other for individuals and we made it an amalgam of both."

Brophy was also instrumental in establishing the community foundation movement in the UK by creating a partnership between CAF and the US-based Mott Foundation to run a competition for the best three start-up applications for community foundations and matching their initial fundraising efforts as the prize. The winners were Tyne & Wear, Milton Keynes and Bristol with Tyne & Wear remaining by far the biggest Community Foundation to this day and the movement as a whole now covering 96 per cent of the UK.

As well as community foundations, Brophy’s awareness of existing institutions in the US helped establish another of the UK’s infrastructure bodies. With financial support from CAF, the Association of Charitable Foundations came into being and now remains the main membership body for grantmaking trusts in the UK.

Alongside these and many other achievements, Brophy was responsible for establishing the seminal set of statistics for the UK charity sector, Charity Trends, its first specialist magazine, Charity, (which was merged with Charity Finance in the late 1990s) and the first international journal of civil society, Alliance.

Brophy retired from CAF in 2002 and spent two gap years sailing his ketch to the West Indies and back to Newhaven via the Dardenelles.

Advocate for social investment

He has since returned to the charity sector as a trustee of a number of charities including the Capital Community Foundation in London and the Charity Employees' Benevolent Fund. He also sits on the NCVO's Funding Commission where he is a powerful advocate for social investment and the need for new social investment bonds. In Brophy’s mind, these would give investors a modest "coupon" and their capital back but their prospectus would target the funding to specific social needs such as education and could not be hijacked for other government spending.

As one of the greatest architects of the modern voluntary sector, whose creativity spawned much of the infrastructure we take for granted today, it would be foolish to ignore his ideas. After all, 20 years later we so often take them for granted.

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Directory: Charities Aid Foundation | Charity Commission | Community Foundation Network | Institute of Fundraising | National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) | Scope
Who's Who: Michael Brophy