Mike Whitlam

Mike Whitlam is a specialist charity sector adviser for the interim management recruitment provider Russam GMS.

He started off his career working as a prison governor in Brixton and joined the voluntary sector with a job at Nacro. He then went on to leadership positions at a number of charities, including as director (UK) of Save the Children and chief executive of the RNID. Throughout the 1990s he was director general of the British Red Cross where he accompanied Princess Diana to Angola as part of a landmine awareness scheme.
From 1999 to 2001 he was the first chief executive of the Mentor Foundation, the only international NGO concerned exclusively with substance misuse and drug prevention. After Mentor he established VISION 2020: the Right to Sight Campaign which aims to draw on global charities and government forces to eliminate avoidable blindness.
He is also a founding member of Acevo, was chief executive of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.