Voluntary sector leaders should sacrifice their own ambitions to help charities improve society, they were told yesterday.
Mark Russell, chief executive of the Children’s Society, said social change was more likely to happen “when leaders don’t care who takes the credit”.
He was speaking at an online event hosted by the Good Agency, a campaigns consultancy.
Russell was joined by three other charity bosses – Sarah Hughes from Mind, Alison Graham from the Child Poverty Action Group and Lindsey MacDonald from Magic Breakfast – all of whom used the panel to call for greater collaboration across the voluntary sector.
Russell said: “As we look ahead, the power of partnership and collaboration is going to be more and more important.
“I have always believed in my heart that social change happens when leaders don’t care who takes the credit.
“And that means we are going to have to be more generous leaders and more sacrificial as leaders and not be so much thinking about ourselves all the time.”
Asked to describe the impact Covid-19 and the financial crisis has had on their charities, Hughes told the event that the past three years “have been on another level of chaos, fear, hopelessness, urgency [and] lack of knowing what to do – all of these things culminating in where we are now”.
Russell, who joined the Children’s Society six months before the start of the pandemic, said that “since then it has been crisis after crisis after crisis”.
Graham said: “I don’t think we have recovered from the pandemic yet. I think we are in a kind of PTSD situation, in that we haven’t properly processed what that was all about.”
Calling on charities to explore new ways of working with politicians, Hughes said the charity sector was “either at a tipping point or a turning point” and would be most effective “if we as a sector work closely together”.
She argued that, amid ongoing political instability, “the traditional ways of influencing policy have died a bit of a death”.
Hughes said most large charities “operate in the middle ground” by working closely with the government while maintaining their independence.
This approach “has been successful for many years”, she added, “but we are now in a time when the role of charities is being challenged by ministers telling the sector not to “dabble in politics”.
“We need to find a way of really harnessing social action and understanding of what the real issues are.”