Michael Norton, the founder of the Directory of Social Change and architect or founder of untold more civil society organisations and initiatives, was honoured with the Outstanding Achievement Award at The Charity Awards this year.

He accepted the award before an audience of 750 sector figures, dignitaries and celebrities, including his wife Dame Hilary Blume, founder and director of Charities Advisory Trust, and son Toby Blume, former Urban Forum CEO.

In his colourful acceptance speech, Norton said that “something happens in your life that triggers you to go in one direction rather than another, and we need to be offering more people more chances and more trigger points and encouraging them to engage with a an active society”.

He related a story of when he was volunteering for a youth club as a young man and set up a programme where yound people visited old people in their homes.  Two 14-year-old girls arrived in smiles one day with a story about how they had just carried an elderly lady downstairs, put her in a wheelbarrow they had filled with cushions, and taken her for a walk – the first time she had left her flat in three years.

“That is what I call social entrepreneurship,” he said. “It is something anyone anywhere can do – you don’t need to be a special kind of person or an Ashoka fellow.”

He also paid tribute to two women in his life – Erin Pizzey, the founder of Women’s Aid, which he fundraised for at its inception, and Dame Hilary, his wife.

He said that among the lessons he had learned in his life were that “the process is just as important as the product” and that “social change is not ‘to people’ or ‘for people’, it is ‘by people’ or ‘with people’. If we get that right we will be much more impactful.”

He said that behind all of the projects featured in the Charity Awards’ were “an individual whose pride, passion, imagination, ideas and commitment has created something out of nothing.

“So for me the voluntary sector is not about organisations, it’s about individuals with ideas, and investment in individuals with ideas, for me, is the three ‘i’s of social change.”

Norton has been involved in civil society since 1966, when he set up the UK’s first English language teaching course for immigrant families and recruited 250 volunteers to deliver tuition. This experience convinced him of the value of social action and shortly afterwards he left his private sector career and joined the voluntary sector.  

By 1975 he was inspired to create a database of all the new and interesting things people were doing to support disadvantaged groups and the Directory of Social Change was born.  After 20 years at its helm he joined a new venture called Changemakers, and from that a number of projects sprang, including YouthBank UK, MyBnk, Street Children’s Bank and Children’s Helpline India.

Norton created the Centre for Innovation in Voluntary Action as an umbrella for all his activities, and continues to work from that base today.

He was the co-founder of UnLtd, the foundation for social entrepreneurs, which was awarded the £100m Millennium Legacy as an endowment, and still supports 2,000 early-stage entrepreneurs each year.

In 2011 he launched the crowdfunding website Buzzbnk, and two years ago he realised a long-harboured dream to promote effective ways of replicating good ideas, co-founding the International Centre for Social Franchising.

Today he remains involved in numerous different projects with plenty more in the pipeline.

Click here to read Tania Mason’s profile of Michael Norton.