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.
The Carrington years |
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Previous employment: The Baring Foundation: Director 1992-1998 Housing Associations Charitable Trust: Director 1988-1991 Stonham Housing Association: Housing services manager 1984-1988 Nacro: To assistant director 1972-1982 Current board and committee roles: Big Society Capital Ltd: Non-executive director (paid) from 2011 Bridges Charitable Trust: Trustee and chair from 2008 Centre for Effective Philanthropy Advisory Board: from 2009 Gulan: Trustee from 2008 Inspiring Impact Programme Board: Chair (paid) from 2012 SOFII: Trustee from 2008 Triodos Bank NV: member supervisory board (paid) from 2009 Some recent board and committee volunteer memberships: BBC Appeals Advisory Committee: 1989-1997, chair from 1992 BBC Children in Need: Trustee 1993-1999 Charities Aid Foundation Grants Council: Chair 1997-2001 The Community Channel: Director 2000-2005 London South Bank University: Governor 1998-2006 The Media Trust: Trustee 1994-2005, founding chairman 1994-1995 NCVO Sustainable Funding Project: Advisory group member 2000-2004 National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain: Trustee 1999-2009 New Opportunities Fund: Board member 2001-2004 Social Investment Task Force: member 2000-2010 Youth Music: Trustee 2003-2009 Consultancy projects (a small selection, see davidcarrington.net for the full list): Coutts Bank Philanthropy Services: Adviser to the development of the Philanthropy Knowledge Exchange Project European Venture Philanthropy Association: facilitator or chair at members’ meetings, 2006-2010 Futurebuilders England: various advisory and facilitation roles, 2007-2008 Gatsby Charitable Foundation and other Sainsbury Family Trusts – consultant on social renewal programmes, 2001-2007 NCVO Funding Commission: prepared think-piece paper, 2009 Nesta Innovation in Giving Fund: selection panel member, from 2012 New Economics Foundation: adviser to Mission Connected Investment project, 2007-2008 Samworth Foundation: adviser to trustees, 1995-2013 Shell Foundation: consultancy on developing a social investment policy, 2010. |
“Our job was to persuade other funders to let us take a chunk of their money, add specialist value to it, and package it in ways that made the best of innovative opportunities in housing, special needs and homelessness,” he says. “So the idea of money being recycled was not something that suddenly happened in the ‘90s. In fact I remember we took out a loan in my first job to fix the roof of the barn we worked out of.”
His next job was certainly high-profile, and probably cemented his position among the ‘wise heads’ in the sector. As director of the Baring Foundation, Carrington had to steer the grantmaker through a crisis of colossal proportions when Barings Bank collapsed and the Foundation lost 85 per cent of its funding overnight. “That was a pretty steep learning curve,” he admits.
“At the end of all that they were paying me to run a £15m operation and by then it was a £2m operation. We’d made the changes we needed and it was time I moved on.”
And so in July 1998 he was recruited by PPP Healthcare Medical Trust to set up, from scratch, an endowed foundation with the £560m proceeds of the sale of PPP Healthcare to Guardian Royal Exchange. Carrington admits it was never going to be the easiest of jobs:
“Part of my role was to get the board to think about what it was to be a board in the charity sector rather than a private company in the healthcare sector with a very strong connection to the academic medical world.”
He says that was “never going to be my world” and so he announced at the start he would do it for three years, and true to his word he quit almost three years to the day later. Today the endowment is valued at £657m.
Around that same time he was recruited, with Geraldine Peacock, to represent the voluntary sector on the new Social Investment Task Force chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen. At the time, the group’s agenda was quite different to what it later became, but was nonetheless hugely interesting to Carrington. “Originally it was very focused on how you can create wealth or generate more of an inflow of money to the poorest communities, what we called the underinvested, those places where financial services did not go.
“Our job was to see if there were ways of using public, private and philanthropic money, and of making regulatory or legal or tax changes to create a level playing field within those poorest communities, so the money could be generated within and used within.”
The report was written within six months but thanks to a commitment from the Treasury to keep meeting with the task force twice a year going forward, the group remained intact for nine years until eventually it was superseded by the Commission on Unclaimed Assets. Carrington served on that Commission too and when its progeny, Big Society Capital, was born, he was transplanted onto the board of that as well, where he remains today. This work also led him to the board of Triodos Bank, where he has just landed his second four-year term.
A committed volunteer
Carrington recalls that it was customary in the early stages of his career for employers in the sector to encourage their staff to take up trusteeships or other volunteer posts outside of their day job, and since going freelance he has always made a point of dividing his time more or less equally between paid consultancy work and volunteer trustee or committee work. His list of “recent” past and present board and committee memberships is vast (see CV), ranging from the BBC Appeals Advisory Committee back in 1989 to chair of the Alliance Publishing Trust in 2012 - and another 26 in between. And that’s just the latter half of his career.
He claims he never made a conscious decision to move off the service delivery frontline into the funding arena, but he was always intrigued by the challenge of combining resources in new ways in order to ensure voluntary groups are more financially capable and so have a stronger prospect of survival. For instance, he was in charge at Baring when it became the first foundation to invest in Investors in Society, the CAF loan fund that went on to become Charity Bank.
He also recalls the first time he worked with Andrew Hind, now editor of Charity Finance and a former winner of this award, in a session on reserves. “At that point funders would frown on charities that had reserves, they were seen as a terrible luxury, and we were arguing they were essential. Otherwise charities would never be able to grow or have confidence in their long-term planning if they didn’t develop some working capital and development capital.” Out of that session and others was born the Charity Finance Directors’ Group.
“My default position has always been to work together to see if you could make two plus two equal five,” Carrington says. “It’s the slogan of my life, I suppose.
“One of the reasons I’m enjoying chairing the Inspiring Impact programme board is that we are trying to get people whose starting points may or may not be valid in your terms but nonetheless are there, to engage with each other in a way that the opportunities for change are more likely to be made.
“It’s the same for my work at Big Society Capital, and at Triodos – all the time I am trying to find ways to make two plus two equal five.”
He claims much of his career has come down to luck – to being in the right place at the right time and happening upon opportunities. His conversation is peppered with the names of the sector’s great and good that he has worked with over the years: as well as Hind, Peacock, and Cohen, he mentions Unwin, Mulgan, Burnett, Wyler. His current portfolio of consultancy work, paid non-executive roles at Triodos and Big Society Capital, and trusteeships at four charities take him all over the globe, and he admits it’s not a bad lifestyle, even if squeezing his towering six-feet-eight-inch frame into an aeroplane seat is not easy.
Asked what he feels is his greatest career achievement, Carrington is typically modest. “Survival might be one,” he chuckles. “I’ve made a career out of this sector and so I have survived!
“But seriously, I guess what I’ve strived for is to hopefully create a different attitude to the use of money by the sector. If that works then that is potentially immensely strengthening for the sector as a whole.”
