Bringing a charity back from the brink of collapse is a tricky business – but for Alice Maynard, outgoing chair of Scope, the solution is as much about the human touch as it is about bottom-line financials. Emily Corfe speaks to her about how she did it.
You’ve got to “build trust and create that space”, she told Civil Society News. “As chair, you are there to create the climate and the environment in which people can deliver to their full potential. If the vision is there, just hold your nerve and hang on in there.”
It’s a mantra that has served Maynard well during her six years as chair. She arrived to find Scope on its knees and steered its recovery and growth into a healthy charity with a £100m turnover.
“We were very hand to mouth,” said Maynard of her early days at Scope. “You can’t really be aspirational when you are hand to mouth.”
Maynard was drafted in as part of a new package of trustees and constitutional changes that was presented to Scope’s AGM to shake things up and turn its fortunes around. It wasn’t an easy feat.
“There was blood on the floor,” said Maynard. “There was a bit of a struggle at the AGM - I say the bloody AGM – and the governance review was rejected. That was my first inkling of the rollercoaster ride that I was faced with as chair.”
Maynard and her team set about implementing a long-term strategy that they hoped would set Scope on the right path.
They began with “the basics” – “making sure we invoiced people and got the money in”, said Maynard.
“We used to get a weekly cashflow spreadsheet sent through to us as the finance and sustainability committee of the board. That’s serious stuff when you’re a £100m turnover business. There was a point at which we had to change the pay date. And there was one point at which we were discussing the possibility of having to ask HMRC if we could hold back one of our payments to them. You don’t do that unless you’re serious,” she said.
At its lowest ebb, Scope was having quarterly meetings with the Charity Commission who were keeping a close eye on things.
“They were overseeing our progress, as the polite way of putting it,” says Maynard.
“We were mindful that we needed to be strategic or we’d never get out of the situation.”
That strategy was an overhaul that included top-to-bottom redundancies and the controversial closure of some care homes for financial reasons (unrelated to today’s care home closure programme for ‘strategic’ reasons). But according to Maynard, a tactical approach was essential to turn fortunes around.
“Why did Scope almost go under? Because it wasn’t paying attention to the business. It was doing the social purpose stuff but not paying attention to where the money came from that would fund that. I brought with me the manta, ‘cash, customers and competition – cash in particular’.
“It’s about understanding that Scope is a business and that’s a pretty sensitive thing to say in the charity sector. But if you don’t operate like a business, you can’t do interesting social things that charities do, because you don’t have the money for them.”
Care home closures
Following Maynard’s arrival, the charity made efforts to strategically align itself with an up-to-date concept of disability – which inevitably led to the conclusion that plenty of disabled people would have a better quality of life if they weren't confined to antiquated care homes.
“We are being the change in ourselves that we want to see in the world,” said Maynard of Scope’s care home transformation programme. “There was a generation of people who didn’t want to be taken care of but wanted to have the opportunity to take care of themselves.”
It was an approach that Maynard and the new team at Scope kept at the forefront of their thinking with the repeated question “are we strategically aligned?”
“If you want to be a charity that delivers social change, you’ve got to think in an innovative social-change-style way about how you actually get that money in. And that’s really where we started,” said Maynard.
“Before joining Scope, I was in the disabled people’s movement and observing it from afar… there were issues around the whole fundraising piece because they hadn’t worked out how to raise funds in a way that wasn’t ‘help the spastics’. So the piece that was generating funds and the piece that was spending it – around campaigning, lobbying and allying with disabled people – split off from each other. That’s really where the problems arose. In 2006 it ran up a £9m operating deficit.
“If we wanted to do the things that we really wanted to do, which is about changing society, then we had to build a fund of money with which to do that,” she said.
Innovative funding ideas were brought to the table – Scope was one of the first charities to launch bonds - loans were taken out and philanthropists were encouraged to invest in the retail branch.
“We took out the biggest loan that Futurebuilders had ever given,” said Maynard.
“That was a big deal for us at the time as it was a massive risk to take out such a big loan. It was for £6.5m. And then we had about £650,000 of a grant with that, which was dependent on drawing down the loan. We had a very low interest rate – I think it was 2 per cent in the first couple of years and then went up to 6.5 per cent.”
The charity led the sector with implementation of bonds. Launched in 2011, they offered investors a return of 2 per cent and the opportunity to support the charity’s work. Over £2m was raised and used to fund the opening of new charity shops and seek new regular donors.
The retail chain was transformed from a loss-making venture into a financial success story. With 250 high street branches across the UK, it became a sharp marketing tool and an avenue for Scope to reach the public and develop the brand.
“I remember endless discussions with finance and sustainability about ‘why are we doing this?’ Why are we running a shop chain – we aren’t retail people so why run a chain of shops that are losing money?” says Maynard.
“Our retail director had some very difficult experiences with the finance and sustainability committee. He came and he did this strategy and we pulled it to pieces and we put it back together again. And again from my perspective, it was about holding the board’s nerve – ok it’s losing money at the moment but why might we want to do it? If it were making money, what could we do with it?
“Richard Hawkes [Scope chief executive] came along and picked up that notion of how powerful this retail arm could be. It’s not just that it makes a financial contribution. It makes a brand contribution. It makes a service delivery contribution. It makes an attitudinal change contribution and influencing-type contribution. It can make a contribution across all those pieces that we are delivering elsewhere.”
Creating the space for change
Maynard downplays her role in the charity’s turnaround – stressing instead the importance of her role as ‘enabler’.
“It was a great big team of people – board included – who turned Scope around,” she said.
“The role of the chair is to create the enabling framework in which the things that are necessary can take place.
“I was once asked what I did. In the end I said, ‘I didn’t do anything. I’m a non-executive director – I didn’t do anything’. There’s a piece in that. As chair, you don’t do, you create a space in which others do and that’s a really important thing to recognise.
“I created the space and the climate on the board that enabled the organisation to turn itself around – all the people and all the resources in the organisation to be turned around. That’s what I did."
Maynard insists the job of chair is “not to do the techy stuff” or even to “understand the detail of the techy stuff”.
“It’s to know that there is sufficient expertise around the board table and in the organisation to understand and deliver the techy stuff properly,” she said. “My real job is to support the board to examine what we are doing in the light of day openly and not stick your head in the sand… but to look at the things that are going on and be perfectly honest with ourselves and then having made a decision, to hold our nerve.
“The world changes around you as a charity and as board members taking significant responsibility, those changes can create anxiety. And one of the jobs of the chair is to manage that anxiety and ensure that it is appropriately expressed and appropriately dealt with and is used, if at all, positively in support of the organisation’s mission and vision.”
Building trust
One of Maynard’s biggest challenges was to build trust within the organisation. It’s a contribution that she feels has played a significant part in Scope’s recovery.
“One of the biggest things that I needed to do was to put a level of trust back between the board and the executives. Because of the nature of the previous board, there was massive, massive distrust and you can’t pull an organisation together if there is real distrust.
“You can’t have a board like that if the exec doesn’t trust them at all – and thinks they are going to keep diving into the operational detail and in turn goes ‘no I can’t tell you about that’, which was kind of what was happening. So I had a massive job in terms of making sure that really strong barrier between the two was eroded. We had things like board awaydays and sessions about scenarios where execs and non-execs were mixed up. There were different views on this.”
Maynard set about creating an open dialogue throughout every vein of the organisation – bringing trustees and execs together for regular brainstorming sessions. Significantly, she never held a trustee-only session during her six years at Scope, except for exec salary discussions.
“I have never on my board had trustee-only sessions – except when discussing chief execs pay – and that is historical,” she said. “There are a lot of people who say that trustee-only sessions are good practice. Maybe it’s time we had some now. It certainly wasn’t time we had some then. Because what had happened previously was that the trustees said, ‘right, all the execs out’, ‘all the execs in’, ‘all the execs out’ and the meetings went on for two days like this.
“So that was a really big thing - getting people to understand the skills that they brought and the roles of the trustees.”
It’s a journey that Maynard is proud of as her second term at Scope draws to a close.
“If you’re paying attention to the business as a day job then you can be ambitious and strategic. I’m really proud that Scope has got to the point where we can be really ambitious and strategic. We’ve got a really good strong strategic direction. We know what we need to do to make a difference in society
“We have a theory of change that will lead to change. We know that.”
