Bob Humphreys, Oxfam’s outgoing director of finance and information services, has told delegates at the Charity Finance Summit 2015 this morning that the risks charities face today are far greater than in previous years.
Speaking at the conference, which is being held at 155 Bishopsgate, he told delegates that charities are now facing external threats that they did not have to deal with in the past.
He said: “Charity used to be synonymous with caring, with philanthropy, and its motives and operations were almost above question.”
Yet he said that today it “does seem that risks for charities are greater than at any time I can think of”.
Humphreys said that what has changed is that the world is “a much less sympathetic place now, and we are facing external threats which could not have been imagined a generation ago”.
He said that this includes the “closing of civil society space in the UK, which we used to only speak about in the context of fragile states overseas”.
He also spoke of how trustees are now “understandably concerned about being branded as political, for activities as dangerous as opposing a badger cull”.
Humphreys said that a “more nuanced and evidence-based approach to managing risks” is needed by charities.
He spoke of how it is the finance director who is “normally a key part of any charity’s risk management framework” and has a “vital role to play in informing the discussion with trustees and external stakeholders, as well as operationalising the processes and controls which are needed”.
Trustees accused of taking ‘their eye of the ball’
Humphreys said that recently charities have been the subject of accusations that trustees have taken “their eye of the ball”, and of charity executives being paid “banker-style bonuses”.
He said charities are a “soft target”, because they don’t need to be “dragged into the courts before we admit our mistakes”. He said that charities embrace transparency, believing at Oxfam that it is best to publish results.
“We really do believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said. And making announcements when things do go wrong helps “create a climate of trust and cooperation with regulators and donors alike”.
Role of the finance director
Humphreys told delegates that the finance director’s role is to be that of the “critical friend” within the management team, and to “ask questions on the basis of evidence, rather than intuition”, as well as to hold colleagues to account “for making genuine changes in approach as a result of learning from the mistakes of the past”.
He added that the role of a finance director is not all about money, but that they are “probably the only person who has an organisation-wide knowledge of the key financial trends and drivers”.
Humphreys announced in the session that when he leaves Oxfam, he will be replaced by Alison Hopkinson, current finance and IT director at Tearfund, who also led a session at the Charity Finance Summit.
