David Philpott outlines his typical week as a charity consultant.
It’s a funny old life being an adviser to different types of charities. One minute you are dealing with the complexities of non-medical trustees having to sign off clinical governance policies and the next you are required to ponder the impacts of a government consultation on charity (society) lotteries and how this might make start-up’s nigh on impossible.
My week started in a Kentish Town where Britain’s oldest brewer produces fine ales and ends in Andalucía, but not an hour has passed (excepting of course the few hours of slumber) when some challenging conundrum has not been exercising what Monsieur Poirot himself would describe as ’the little grey cells’.
It was, I suspect, the longest board meeting I have ever attended, but when after nearly five hours on Monday night, I had to excuse myself, I did so in the knowledge that I had a three-hour drive ahead of me. Only the prospect of arriving at the glamorously named Hinckley Island Hotel gladdened my soul a little – and seasoned traveller that I am - I was acutely aware that this Island would perhaps boast no palm trees or sandy beach. (I learned that lesson when first I stayed last year at the Gracious Palace Hotel ensconced on another continent, for it was neither gracious nor a palace.) And why so long a meeting? Because we have a Victorian system of charity governance in this country which means that not-for-profits that are delivering highly complex contracts on behalf of the government, need to appraise all of their tired and weary unpaid trustees on nearly every risk and responsibility – they the board, usually having all put in a full day already at their London office.
I digress! Next stop Hinckley Island Hotel, where I had come to the annual Lotteries Council Conference to meet with friends old and new and place my fingers on the metaphorical pulse of raffle and lottery regulation. Session breaks were spent securing deals for clients.
A bit of a 'skive'
I skived a bit on Friday because we had to catch our plane to Belfast early in the morning and having arrived at the gorgeous La Mon Country House Hotel and Spa mid-afternoon, wiled away the time in front of an open fire. The Charity Ball we had all come to attend was a run-away success – yet another reflection on the unfathomed generosity of the people of Ulster. This time, all 500 tickets having been sold and sufficient funds raised in a single evening to build a school in Rwanda – a school that will transform a community that has known nothing but hopelessness and despair hitherto.
It was only on the following night, as we sat listening to live music in the Dark Horse pub in Belfast’s thriving Cathedral Quarter, that I allowed myself to bathe in the afterglow of my small part in that success – several English entrepreneurs and two further education colleges having invested either time or people in these amazing projects which the Irish charity Fields of Life is delivering so successfully in post conflict East Africa.
A few hours’ sleep on Sunday night and then a morning with the amazing Fredericks Foundation. It was my privilege to be on a panel awarding business loans to people with ideas that would never secure a bank loan and whose previous history or CV might not suggest that they were ripe or indeed safe for investment. The fact that someone with ambitions in the entertainment industry and another who has dreams of owning his own property maintenance business were successful in securing said loans meant that my colleagues and I became dream-makers for a morning (and perhaps for the rest of their lives for the two successful applicants).
Another evening board meeting with a youth charity that night – this time with me in the chair - at which an agreement was made to invest up to £1m in a new hub. This decision lifted the spirits of each and every one of my co-trustees, especially the one who had just joined the board following our merger with another charity and another, a university lecturer, whose role it will be to challenge and strengthen our finance and governance processes.
And so to Andalusia – well the hills above Malaga to be precise. This afternoon, the sun has baked our backs and our eyes have squinted in the bright reflected light of the countless mountainside fincas. This was a board meeting of a very different type. As friends in the sector we have been meeting quarterly like this since God was a boy, and this time – for once - we thought we would do it in the sun, at our own expense (flights an’ all) over lunch outside a restaurant in Competa. It is for fellowship, encouragement and a bit of reminiscing about the good old days when the air ambulance industry was in its infancy and we believed that everything was possible. We are older now and wiser.
And as we walked down a steep hill to the car, nothing more to add under Any Other Business, I turned to Lyn, Agatha and Lucinda and said, “That ladies, is why I will never again want to have a proper job”. And as I think about it, there could never have been a better reflection on the week that was than that little whimsical aside.
