Time to childproof your charity?

As the father of a 6-month-old boy, 2014 has been a real eye opener for me personally as I’ve wrestled the new challenges of family and work life during what has been an extremely busy period both professionally and at home. Yet the experience has left me more focused than ever and my child has helped me understand the reasons why. Not in the sentimental “life changing” way you may expect me to articulate, but in a much more practical manner.

Watching a child grow is by far the greatest journey a parent can witness from their first smile to discovering the world around them. But it comes with risk too and with many of the dangers facing children, you are not even aware until a child literally shows you itself. Since my son has started to crawl around in the past few weeks, my lounge has been transformed from a cosy living space to an open plan, soft play area safeguarded by gates, barriers and covers designed to both protect a child from harm and prevent serious damage to the items within.

Many times, I have found myself hearing a noise beneath my feet only to witness William has found the cup I left lying around after my brew, or a small piece of wall paper around the skirting board (which I never knew was loose), being pulled away – much to my wife’s horror. With the winter months creeping in, the fireplace is now fully guarded and screwed into the walls, while the radiator corners have been covered and all crockery placed well above head height in an attempt to prevent disaster.

While all this has been happening at home, I have been leading on a new venture within a charity I co founded in 2010 and serve on as chair of trustees, Ynot Aspire. In August, my professional services were called upon to implement change and work with staff to redefine the charities operations. This work was commissioned following external consultation, which made a number of recommendations to enhance the work of the charity, but also preserve its future beyond the current funding in place.

The charity is in a fortunate position of having secured five years National Lottery funding for staff and overheads. We also have in place local authority contracts, helping young people and their families in the community. A common feature of charity life is ensuring operations remain true to the cause and staying aware of the threats an organisation faces, such as ‘mission creep’ while pursuing new avenues of funding. My initial task has been to consolidate the work of the charity into a clear and logical representation of its objectives, while evaluating the roles of staff in line with a vision for the future.

At first, I found myself slightly lost in a position I hadn’t placed myself into for some years. I was back in the ‘engine room ‘of the charity. I spent the first few weeks wandering around trying to understand my surroundings, figuring out who worked with who and what fit where. At times, I wanted to question or challenge, but wasn’t sure who had the answer. I observed people going about their daily business, but sometimes didn’t understand where they were going or what they were doing. This is no criticism of people, merely a learning process I had to go through in order to establish the new situation I was now in. I found myself seeing the charity from a completely different perspective.

Only now, can I recognise that I had in fact become the baby in the room. I saw everything from the viewpoint of a child scuttling around a new environment searching for anything I could possibly get my hands on, to explore and try to understand. While taking the role of ‘baby’, the other ‘adults’ were happily going about their day-to-day work, assuming I would be ok and that I wouldn’t break anything in the process!

As time went by, I started to ask the questions. Some of the answers made perfect sense, while others needed further analysis. If I can be truly honest, the first reality I learnt was that as trustees, we had lost touch with the operational activities of the charity. Not uncommon in many small charities. While patting ourselves on the back for securing more funding and delivering fantastic outcomes for our funders, we hadn’t considered the impact on our own beneficiaries and the capacity concerns these presented to our staff.

When the time was right, I could start to show the staff and trustees some of what I had found. Communicating this was key to potential achievements and relationships in the future. If I had found that loose piece of wallpaper in the charity office, I could have chosen to tug at the edges until the corners revealed themselves and taken an impulsive rip at the seams, but knowing how I would have reacted had my child done this, I recognised the potential consequences and instead adopted to present my findings in a different way. I found good and I found indifferent, but most importantly, I found opportunity and this was only possible through observing the whole process from the feet up.

At home, I’m happy to report that my little boy has now started to stand on his own two feet. He’s learning his way around the space he has, understanding the word “No” and communicating extremely well when he doesn’t like something in front of him (especially certain foods).

Meanwhile in the charity, the next stage of the journey has just begun. We have installed the rhetorical fireguard to keep us away from getting our fingers burnt. We have softened the edges of the sharp corners that could hurt our drive and we’ve begun to explore new opportunities within an environment we can be sure is safe for everyone. Thankfully, a supportive staff and trustees are making the process much easier. The outlook is very bright and with our beneficiaries still at the heart of our vision for the future, we can move on together. My work at Ynot Aspire is not finished and will continue well into 2015. When I return to my role as ‘just a trustee’, I know there will be even more work to be done.

All charities can learn from this experience of the importance to childproof their own organisation and ask themselves these same questions:

• What must we protect our organisation from?
• Where is the organisation most at risk from harm?
• What blockages are preventing our staff?
• Where are the barriers to accessing our beneficiaries?

The only true way to find the answers to these questions and more is to embrace a different view. Maybe it’s time, trustees stopped parenting for a while and started acting like a baby… But not for too long!