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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Leicia Feare, associate director of communications and campaigns at the youth empowerment charity Mission 44.
Leicia talks about the charity’s first campaign, Nothing Happens in Isolation, which aims to promote inclusion in schools. She describes how Mission 44 convened partners to formulate a list of recommendations that the charity’s founder, the motor racing driver Sir Lewis Hamilton, presented to the Prime Minister.
She outlines the measures taken by the charity to incorporate the views and priorities of young people who have experienced exclusion from school and explains how it has avoided tokenism in the process.
She reflects on the value of having a popular figurehead at the top of the organisation while acknowledging the difficulty of developing a stand-alone profile for Mission 44 when media interest is invariably focused on its central personality.
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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts are joined by Ruth Hollis, chief executive of the Olympic legacy charity Spirit of 2012.
Ruth reflects on the responsibility of being a funder approaching close-out as Spirit of 2012 prepares to wind up in early 2026.
She acknowledges the difficulties for charities seeking to ensure the sustainability of their programmes in the absence of long-term funding and suggests ways in which grantmakers can work together to reduce the occurrence of funding cliff-edges.
She stresses the importance of built-in time for reflection during the course of a programme and explains how Spirit of 2012 is taking a different approach to its final report.
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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts share their thoughts on the announcement this week that Dame Julia Unwin has been named the preferred candidate to be the new chair of the Charity Commission.
Andy explains the role of the chair, suggests how Unwin might be different to her predecessors and provides a summary of reactions from sector leaders to the prospect of her appointment.
An excellent choice’ – sector leaders react to Charity Commission chair announcement.
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Lucinda Rouse, Emily Harle, Emily Burt and Dami Adewale reflect on some of the top sector stories from the past month.
Emily Burt gives her thoughts on the state of the sector in 2025 following her recent return from maternity leave.
Lucinda shares snippets from an interview with Peter Sparkes, chief executive of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, in which they discuss a new five-year plan that aims to improve engagement with the charity’s fundraising and volunteering communities.
Dami explores conflicting narratives on the health of volunteering more broadly and the key motivators for people signing up to volunteer roles.
And Emily Harle reflects on what the recent closure of Manchester Pride says about how charities communicate financial difficulty.
Listen back to Janet Thorne on the Third Sector Podcast: Cultivating a more flexible volunteering offer.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle discuss snippets from a recent interview Emily conducted with Andy Fletcher, chief executive of Muscular Dystrophy UK.
As Andy enters his second year in post, they reflect on his ambitions to almost double the charity’s income by 2035, raise awareness for the organisation among people living with muscle-wasting and weakening conditions and cultivate a sharper strategic focus.
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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts are joined by Laura Kerby, chief executive of Prostate Cancer UK.
Laura outlines the due diligence conducted by the charity to try to alleviate concerns about its partnership with the gambling company Paddy Power, which has allowed it to deliver live-saving interventions to men at risk of prostate cancer.
She describes the complexities of engaging with political parties such as Reform UK, whose policies are often at odds with the charity’s priorities but who nonetheless need to be factored into its influencing work.
She explains how Prostate Cancer UK is working to keep prostate cancer in the spotlight, through bold and ambitious programming, working with celebrity ambassadors and clearly demonstrating its impact.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Burt are joined by the civil society consultant Alex Evans to talk about the role of freelancers in the charity workforce.
They discuss the findings of a survey by the freelancer platform Blume, from the pros of flexibility and autonomy reported by self-employed workers, to feelings of uncertainty and the fact that more than a fifth of respondents began freelancing as a result of redundancy.
Alex shares his perspective on the push and pull factors that lead charity professionals to leave full-time employment, including his view that some people are forced to take on uncertainty because of structural inequalities, including the gender pay gap.
They also hear from Georgie Moseley, chief executive of the cancer charity Help Harry Help Others, about why her organisation has opted to contract a majority of its workers on a freelance basis.
Read Alex’s blog, Barely Civil Society.
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Lucinda Rouse, Andy Ricketts, Emily Harle and Dami Adewale reflect on some recent voluntary sector news.
Emily shares snippets from an interview with Breast Cancer Now’s chief executive Claire Rowney, in which she articulates her vision to shift the organisation from a medium to a large charity mindset, accompanied by a £40m annual revenue uplift.
Dami asks what the move by several charities to distance themselves from the Duchess of York in the light of Jeffrey Epstein-related revelations says about royal patronages.
And Lucinda talks about some of the different ways that charities are approaching enterprise in a bid to diversify their income streams and utilise their assets in new ways.
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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Helen McShane, director of research, innovation and systems change at Young Lives vs Cancer.
Helen explains how Young Lives vs Cancer came to launch an innovation lab, with the aim of using its assets as a trusted charity brand to support the development of early stage business ventures that align with its mission of supporting children and young people with cancer.
She describes the challenges associated with carving out time and space to work on long-term innovative solutions as a charity supporting the immediate and urgent needs of people in crisis.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Paul Winyard, head of policy at the Fundraising Regulator.
Paul provides insight into the new Code of Fundraising Practice, which will take effect from 1 November. He explains how a more prescriptive set of rules has been replaced by a principles-based approach to regulation.
He describes how the Fundraising Regulator is working to overcome the reputational risks that unscrupulous street fundraisers from community interest companies pose to wider charitable fundraising.
They also discuss the regulator’s approach to artificial intelligence and new considerations around commission-based payments.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Manny Amadi, chief executive of C&E Advisory, to talk about the firm’s Corporate-Non-Profit Partnerships Barometer 2025.
Manny provides context to the finding that corporate partnerships remain a resilient and effective mechanism for driving societal change, in spite of concerns that businesses are reneging on their environmental, social and governance commitments.
He explains how aid cuts have affected cross-sector collaborations and puts forward his predictions for the likely trajectory in the year ahead.
Access the 2025 barometer here.
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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts are joined by Mark Russell, chief executive of The Children’s Society.
Mark speaks openly about the challenges of leading a major charity through half a decade of polycrisis and the toll it has taken on his mental health.
He stresses the need for chief executives to act as role models in maintaining boundaries between work and personal life, and the critical role of boards in supporting exhausted charity bosses.
He explains how The Children’s Society’s biggest ever fundraising appeal, which will launch in the spring and aims to raise £100m by 2030, is grounded in its conviction that every child deserves a good childhood.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Stuart Pearson, head of innovation at Citizens Advice Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford, and Zoe Amar, founder of the digital consultancy Zoe Amar Digital.
Stuart explains how Citizens Advice developed Caddy, an internal-facing AI-powered chatbot that provides information to the charity’s advisers and eases demand on supervisors fielding high volumes of requests.
Zoe sheds light on the skills gap preventing some charities from progressing with AI adoption. She outlines the principles of using AI responsibly and ensuring its roll-out is consistent with organisational values.
They both stress the importance of continuing human involvement, from the development to the implementation of AI tools to support the delivery of charitable services.
Further reading
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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Emma Revie, co-chief executive of Trussell, and the strategy and change management specialist Martyn Drake.
Emma explains why Trussell’s mission statement has been altered to place the provision of food aid second to its aim of eliminating the need for food banks.
She stresses the need to work with others to drive systems change and shares her belief that resources should never be taken away from long-term solutions in order to provide a temporary fix.
Martyn shares examples of other charities that have recognised the need to change strategic direction to avoid being enablers of the problems they are trying to solve.
He describes the importance of granting staff at all levels of an organisation the autonomy to work flexibly with other partners in order to achieve shared goals.
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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts are joined by Ruth Marvel, chief executive of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, to talk about the charity’s new impact measurement framework.
Ruth describes the importance of a theory of change to guide DofE’s activities and inform the development of its measurement framework to test assumptions.
She explains how using national open data sets for comparison purposes has helped make the process meaningful and cost-effective.
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Lucinda Rouse visits the Dogs Trust’s head office to meet the charity’s chief executive, Owen Sharp.
Owen talks about the recent restructure of Dogs Trust as part of a new strategy and shares some of the lessons he has learned from an ongoing redundancy process involving 300 staff.
He gives his view on ways in which the voluntary sector could be responding differently to current instability, such as taking a less siloed approach to shared challenges.
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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Toby Freeman, chief executive of the Robin Cancer Trust, and the charity finance and governance specialist Pesh Framjee.
Toby shares his experiences of founding a charity to which he has a deep personal connection, and outlines the ways in which he is preparing the organisation for his departure.
Pesh puts forward his view that founder’s syndrome is a relatively uncommon occurrence. He stresses the importance of succession-planning in founder-led charities and the need to nurture future leaders within the existing team.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Nicole Sykes, director of policy, communications and research at the Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales.
They discuss some recent research by Lloyds Banking Group that found charities are the second-most trusted source of financial advice after family members. They consider how charities can best respond to the finding, and why it should be a cause for celebration.
They cover a range of other topical issues affecting the sector, from the emergence of the impact economy to the need for charities to adapt to new ways of finding information with the advent of AI.
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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Natasha Friend and Robin Morgan-Chu, the director and chair respectively of the grantmaker Camden Giving, to discuss the merits and challenges of participatory grantmaking.
Natasha describes how grantmaking decisions at Camden Giving have been devolved to panels of people with first-hand experience of the challenges the funding is seeking to address.
Robin explains how the role of the board differs from more traditional funders, with a strong emphasis on safeguarding to support the frontline nature of the charity’s work and the way it makes decisions.
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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle summarise the contents of the recently-launched Civil Society Covenant between the government and civil society.
They reflect on comments made by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, and consider what’s next for the charity-state relationship.
Read our analysis: What will the Civil Society Covenant mean for charities?
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