Civil Society Media is proud to present the prolific Julia Unwin as the 2010 Charity Awards Outstanding Leadership winner. Tania Mason takes us on a whistlestop tour of Julia's exceptional career.
Reading Julia Unwin’s CV is a bit like watching someone swim the Channel – you feel exhausted just looking on. It’s not only the sheer volume of roles she’s had – I counted 31, and one of those is a 15-year stint as a consultant – but the huge range of causes and issues she’s been involved in, and the variety of roles too.
Between her first paid job as a field worker for Liverpool Council for Voluntary Service and her current instalment as chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Unwin has flitted seamlessly between public sector, voluntary sector, consultancy, government advisory and regulatory roles. Her job titles span commissioner, chair, trustee, board member, director, adviser, author and CEO, in fields as diverse as homelessness, refugees, grantmaking, consumer rights, charity regulation, food standards, social care and governance, to name just a few.
“I’ve always had a real passion for social justice,” Unwin says. “My mother’s family were refugees from Germany, so I was raised to think you had an obligation to give something back. Also I remember watching Cathy Come Home when I was about 10, and I think that stirred something in me. My mother says I was absolutely incensed by it.”
Yet when she graduated with a history degree from Liverpool University in 1977 and landed her first job at the local CVS, she could have had no inkling of the enormous impact she would come to have on social policy in the UK. She did know, though, that she wanted to work in different sectors, because “I never thought a career spent entirely in one sector was enough to understand the world”.
And she maintains she was right: “Having this breadth of experience gives me the confidence to come at things from any angle, so I can be more influential.”
Notable successes
One early success came when she was director of Homeless Network between 1986 and 1992, and led a campaign to badger the government to tackle the growing problem of street homelessness in the capital at the time. Out of that came the Rough Sleepers Initiative, new funding that went directly to voluntary groups working in the homelessness arena, the opening of new hostels and the expansion of private sector leasing. It’s a policy that’s lasted – getting people off the streets remains a central government responsibility to this day.
Another major contribution was Unwin’s position as a Charity Commissioner from 1998 to 2003, where she helped to forge a debate about the role of social enterprise. “Part of what I did was to try to get the Commission to understand that charities have to be risk-takers, to operate as businesses. This required a major culture change, to make this link between two very different worlds. Because I had experience in other sectors it was easier for me to understand the direction that many charities were developing in, than for many others. So we did the work to develop Community Interest Companies, but the Charity Commission itself also became much more responsive to the idea of charities as enterprise organisations, which is a role for huge numbers of charities nowadays.”
Another reason for joining the Charity Commission board was to encourage the regulator to expand its focus beyond financial regulation. “I thought the reputation of charities was the biggest asset that trustees hold. Yet all the regulation seemed to be around finance.”
All of the jobs that Unwin has taken on over the years have been driven by the desire to effect social change. Even her deputy chairmanship of the Food Standards Agency was seen as an opportunity to cajole the food industry into producing healthier foods in order to improve the national diet.
“I’ve always been concerned about people in poverty, and we do have food poverty in this country, the evidence shows that fat children are generally poor children,” Unwin says. “Two things attracted me to that role – I wanted to understand science and its role in the public interest, and also continue to highlight what is happening to people in poverty. Otherwise good food and good health will continue to be the preserve of the better-off.
“You can never change everything but I did change some things to make sure the focus was on people living in poverty. As far as I was concerned it was about holding science to account in the public interest and managing the risks.”
On her ten years on the board of the Housing Corporation, she says: “I was concerned about homelessness and I wanted to understand and influence how capital investment worked, so I could learn how to use it to improve things for the homeless and the destitute.”
Interest in governance
Her participation on all these boards inevitably piqued a serious interest in corporate and social governance, and her 15 years in consultancy honed her expertise in this area. “I served on boards and got interested in how they worked beyond the ‘technical fix’ of creating audit or other committees. How do you create enough challenge and scrutiny to enable the organisation to grow - that seems to me to be the real prize.
“I’m passionate about the independence of the voluntary sector, because it’s that independence that allows you to speak up on behalf of the dispossessed, to speak truth to power. If organisations are independent and strongly governed then that is very powerful.
“But there’s this perception of the sector as a bit random, that it’s led by a bunch of individuals, so you need great governance to exercise what is good about their independence without becoming whimsical.”
As a regulator, Unwin prefers the carrot approach to the stick. “It’s always better to say ‘yes but’, not ‘no because’,” she says. “Of course the state should always have a stick but in a complicated society, the enabling approach is always more likely to be a success than prohibition.”
‘An interpreter’
Yet she wouldn’t describe herself as a campaigner, a policy-maker, a regulator or an author, despite having published three books.
“I’m an interpreter,” she says. “My skill is in helping people make sense of things – I interpret what people that represent different interests mean when they say things so that others can understand it.”
And despite her wide experience of the different sectors, she’s also effectively ‘sector-blind’. “As far as I’m concerned you find any way you can of dealing with a problem, you use different skills at different times. What’s important at the end of the day is that you win. I’ve always been really serious about achieving what I set out to do. I’m very pragmatic – I want to win, not just make a point.”
Latest challenge
Three years ago she landed the top job at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and moved with her husband and two children from London to York. “I knew I wanted to do a big leadership job, I aspired to this,” Unwin says. “I’d worked with JRF many times over the years and I always felt the combination of funding research and delivering services was a very compelling mix. So yes, I’d kept an eye out for this job and always thought I’d go for it if it came up.”
When she accepted the JRF job, she also took on two small local voluntary roles – on the council of York University and as a trustee of the York Museums and Gallery Trust – but gave up all her other paid and voluntary positions. “One thing I have learnt as a chief executive is how to say no,” she says.
What’s left?
So, having chalked up such an impressive track record and already doing her dream job, what lies ahead?
“Oh there’s so much still to do,” she enthuses. “For one thing, we have an obligation to make sure we are bringing up the next generation of leaders. I’m so honoured to be joining this select group of people [who have won the Outstanding Leadership award] but I’m also very aware that I’m joining a club of people who are nearing the end of their careers and we need a way of bringing up the next lot of talent.
“I was lucky enough to be paid for my work, but the vast majority of the voluntary sector works below the radar, and that will only increase. It won’t be so easy to earn money doing this kind of work from now on.
“There are huge challenges ahead for the sector – the barriers to entry are higher when times are hard.”
Yet Unwin’s indomitable spirit and apparently boundless energy is anything but daunted. “You can’t get desperate when we still have within us the capacity to change things. Really good things are being done by people voluntarily all over the place. You can get angry, but not depressed.”
