Penny Wilkinson, CEO Northern Rock Foundation
Penny noted she used to work for MLA NE until her present job and her career had been in the cultural sector.
She started discussing the Big Society. She noted no one seems precisely agreed or sure what it means. This was illustrated by giving two quotes. The first one from the Cabinet Office website which said it was about helping people to come together to improve their own lives and empowering localism at decision-making level. The second one from the Archbishop of Canterbury which said it was aspirational waffle and abdicating responsibility. However what everyone does agree on is that it is bringing about huge changes.
She then went on to give some background to the North East as a locality and also to its cultural sector. The NE was in need of a modern economy, there had been a lot of changes in the region with the decline of traditional industries and modernisation programmes, but not everyone had benefited from them. There was lots of statistics to back this up e.g. unemployment is almost at 11%, 24% of children and young people are classified as living in poverty.
The Northern Rock Foundation had been set up in 1997, it funded projects for the disadvantaged, the vulnerable, victims. It will give out nine million this year. Penny talked us through types of projects e.g. credit unions, and other work of the Foundation e.g. providing grants, training support, agenda influencing.
She talked about her own career and how it had started very differently but assisted her to get her present role. Her cultural sector career skills had been transferred to charity sector. She noted she’d been a Saturday shelver in her own local public library back in the 70s, but had become a museum curator by profession, gradually moved into jobs that involved front end service delivery and overall management. In order to get a strategic role with a bigger impact she had moved to a strategy role in what became NEMLAC and then became MLA NE responsible not only for museums, but also libraries and archives regionally. Whole new areas to her. Having to learn new areas was very good preparation for later changing sectors and proving she could do that successfully. She also noted that MLA NE had illustrated that a lot of issues, concerns, agendas were shared ones, things like inclusion and engagement. So it was useful in the cultural sector to work together on common concerns and focus on them and what could be achieved together, rather than focus on differences between jobs.
When NLA NE was closed down she was made redundant. The Foundation role came up, she wasn’t a grantmaker and she didn’t know the voluntary sector. However she could prove she had worked at regional strategic level, knew the NE, the key people and organsations, and had led her own organisation through difficult times. She knew how to work across sectors, she knew she could learn another sector because she’d done it before.
She noted that learning a new sector took time, there was a huge and varied charity sector in the NE, obvious players and not so obvious ones. The voluntary sector was going through a lot of changes, professional management and governance was needed, a lot of focus was going on attempts to accurately measure intangibles from well-being to self-esteem as success indicators. There has been huge changes in policy.
She noted that a charity can be doing all the right things but still have far less income in the current environment. The pressure is to be more and more efficient when the people delivering are already very tired.
She asked how that can be managed. She suggested clarity of purpose and focus on outcomes and the bigger picture. She discussed the need to be flexible, to find new ways of achieving things, to talk to others, take and manage risks, be positive about the organisation.
Just doing the above in itself is not enough however. The current environment is the new normal, funding will not switch back on.
Therefore partnership working is required within and outwith sectors. This already happens, but it needs to go to a whole new level. She talked about the usefulness of participating in mixed sector action learning sets, collaboration to find commonalities and deliver shared outcomes. There is a need for leadership that is collaborative and facilitative, not just charismatic solos, though there are still a lot of those about in the charity sector. Skills were also needed in tenacity, conflict management, patience, fostering relationships. Silo thinking and silo working was a key problem, had to work with other organisations.
She noted in her career she had changed jobs, regions, sectors, roles, but what was important to her was to have the impact that made a difference.
In her own current organisation it was five years on since the initial financial crisis in Northern Rock (their funder), in the aftermath the staff had been reduced by half, projects cancelled. Her job when she came in had been to steady the organisation and build trust within it, to then make changes, move forward, look to outcomes, be positive.
She saw her own professional journey and experience as a window in to the Big Society, it is actually everyone, we all need to think what difference we might make that we would be proud of.
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