David Carrington’s 45-year contribution to the sector has stretched across funding, governance, impact, policy, social finance, and more. Tania Mason met him.

One of David Carrington’s many contacts said to him recently: “David, you must know so many secrets in this sector.” To which, of course, David simply smiled – as anyone that knows him will testify, discretion and integrity are ingrained in the DNA of this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award winner.

And there can’t be many people in the sector who don’t know Carrington – he’s been working for and with charities since 1968 and is happy to describe himself in his self-deprecating and softly-spoken manner as a “45-year sector dinosaur”. After two decades in full-time senior posts, three as chief executive of large funders, he deliberately eschewed a full-time role and set about establishing a portfolio career.

Since 2001, Carrington has facilitated, advised, mentored, reviewed, coached, or assisted well over 100 individuals and organisations, both charitable and commercial and sometimes even statutory, on challenges such as organisational strategy, governance, funding, fundraising, impact, grantmaking, social investment – the list is endless. He has been at the forefront of the social finance movement that is beginning to have a serious impact on the sector’s funding landscape. He has spent much of the last 12 years sequestered behind closed doors at powerful organisations, engaged in high-level strategic thinking with senior people, and it has given him a unique, possibly unrivalled wealth of knowledge, experience and insight into the sector and its inhabitants. Not to mention a whole lot of secrets.

After a choral scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied history and social anthropology, Carrington landed his first paid job - two years in Yorkshire working for a charity that looked after delinquent kids. He recalls it with fondness, and a realisation that much of what he learned there has been deployed throughout his career, even to today. The government white paper Children in Trouble introduced the concept of intermediate treatment, which was intended to be somewhere between light-touch supervision in the community and taking a child away from their family to go into residential care. “It was about exploring the middle ground between two poles, which has become something of a theme really,” Carrington says.

Seeking funding, influencing policy

"We were right on the frontline but quite a lot in the policy spotlight too,” he remembers. “So at the age of 22 I was already having to appeal to various funders’ different motivations to persuade them to support us, but also to persuade policy people to think about this area. All of those things I’m still doing.”

He then spent two years as a social worker in Lambeth before rejoining the sector in a training role at the then-embryonic Nacro, the national charity created out of multiple local organisations that looked after newly-discharged prisoners. This post piqued Carrington’s interest in housing and homelessness, and he was instrumental in driving forward the development of special needs housing within housing associations. This path eventually took him to Stonham Housing Association in the mid-80s and then into his first grantmaking and first CEO role, at the Housing Associations Charitable Trust.