Tania Mason, group editor, Civil Society Media; Dame Fiona Reynolds; Jo Coburn, BBC correspondent
The 2012 Charity Awards judges have selected Dame Fiona Reynolds as the winner of this year’s Outstanding Leadership Award. Tania Mason met her.
In a few weeks’ time, Dame Fiona Reynolds will leave the venerated National Trust, the £400m-income charity she has led for the last 12 years, for a new post as Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her departure will draw the curtain on a period of enormous change at the Trust; in many ways the heritage and conservation charity is barely recognisable from the fusty, old-fashioned institution she inherited in 2000.
It now has more than four million members - up from 2.7 million when she took charge - a Facebook page, a virtual farming community, and nearly 67,000 Twitter followers. It operates out of new, ultra-modern, environmentally-friendly headquarters in Swindon. It has a trustee board of 12 – 40 less than when she joined – and a new staffing structure that devolves much more power to local property managers. Dame Fiona sums up the new culture as “open-arms conservation”.
“I hope that the big thing that I’ve been able to bring to the Trust,” she says, “is that as well as being a passionate conservationist, I have a real love of people. When I got here, my analysis was that this organisation is brilliant at conservation, but I questioned whether we really loved people.”
At the time, the Trust’s relationship with its public was totally on its own terms, very much a ‘look but don’t touch, this is hallowed ground’ approach. Most of its 350-plus historic houses seemed to be full of roped-off areas and library-quiet, children weren’t allowed to play, and properties would be closed to the public while restoration took place. But under Reynolds’ leadership, Trust properties have become much more user-friendly and welcoming – families can picnic on the lawns, all restoration work takes place in full view of visitors, and many properties now have rooms where visitors can relax on sofas, read books, perhaps even play billiards. “It’s the difference between closed-arms conservation and open-arms conservation which says ‘this belongs to all of us, not just the organisation’,” says Dame Fiona.