A new breast cancer charity formed from the merger of Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Campaign will launch on 1 April with former RVS chief executive Lynne Berry as its new chair, the two charities said today.
The merger was announced in November 2014. The two charities' most recently filed accounts suggest the new organisation is likely to have a combined income of around £27m. The name of the new organisation and its branding will be announced later this spring.
Berry is currently chair of the Commission to the Voluntary Sector and Ageing, a professor at the Cass Business School and deputy chair of the Canal and River Trust.
She said: “This merger represents a brave and bold move. I feel very privileged to have been appointed chair and I thank the incumbent chairs for granting me this unique opportunity to create an even more powerful force to end breast cancer once and for all.”
She succeeds Stephanie Monk at Breakthrough and Isla Smith at BCC.
One of Berry’s first tasks will be to appoint a chief executive. A professional search agency, Perrett Laver, has been appointed and the role was advertised nationally. The selection panel will include representatives from the trustee boards of both charities.
Chris Askew, chief executive of Breakthrough, and Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive of BCC, are jointly managing the merger preparations, and both were welcome to apply for the top job at the new organisation.
Monk and Smith are currently carrying out a skills audit of existing trustees ahead of appointing the new charity’s board.
Around 200 people will be employed by the new charity. Both organisations have consulted with staff and a small number of redundancies have been made where there was overlap. A spokeswoman said: “Where we found there was duplication, unfortunately we had to make a very small number of redundancies to ensure that we were using our supporters’ money as efficiently as possible.”
Before announcing the merger a new senior management team, made up of directors from both charities, was appointed. Existing directors will continue to hold their posts until the new charity is launched. Both charities have nine directors each while the new charity will have just seven.
The new charity’s senior management team includes:
- Jen Dougan as director of fundraising, who currently holds the same position at BCC
- Fiona Hazell as director of communications and engagement, currently director of comms at BCC
- Elizabeth Robertson as director of research, who holds the same position at Breakthrough
- Justin Parfitt, director of finance and IT, who also holds the same position at Breakthrough
- Catherine Devitt, director of people, organisation and development, who also holds the same position at Breakthrough
- James Jopling, who is director of Scotland at Breakthrough and will continue in the same role.
Last year, both charities published strategies with very similar aims. The charities said they agreed that by joining their organisations they would be able to work faster towards achieving their aims and increase research into treating and preventing breast cancer.
The new charity will have a new headquarters at Ibex House in central London. At the moment Breakthrough is currently based in Holborn while BCC is based near Old Street.
