Greener & Cleaner is a pioneering sustainable living charity supporting individuals and the wider community (including schools, charities, businesses, councils and more), to improve local wellbeing, air quality and biodiversity and reduce the costs of living and of doing business, while reducing carbon emissions.
I joined Comic Relief almost two years ago now, at a moment of great change, joining during the pandemic. It was a great personal change. I'd worked at this other agency for a long time, was quite comfortable and then decided to jump in and work on this side of the fence.
My first leadership experience was when I was quite young. Soon after leaving university, I found myself leading a small grassroots project in South Africa providing training to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS. I knew very little about running a project, and equally little about leadership. I had the job title of a leader and people to be led but really, I didn’t know what to do.
One of the most extraordinary qualities of the 6,000+ environmental charities across the UK is that they are able to bridge the gap between their mission of a greener future and what they do to help make that happen; in short, what they do on a Monday.
It is hard to start a charity, but it is also hard to kill one. This is a resilience, characteristic of charities, that we have a purpose that moves people to act, and we have a culture that allows for different forms of participation. In this post, I want to look at three tips for financial resilience for charities.
A wave of informal volunteering helped charities and community groups to play a critical role for communities over the pandemic. Now that the cost of living crisis is hitting home, the role for the voluntary sector is once more key, but this time it is not clear that volunteering - or emergency funding - will be able to help.
For the last five years, we have run an annual staff survey that is independently evaluated. We have shared the results with the staff and the trustees of Pilotlight and the survey has been invaluable in steering how we operate as a charity.
As our CEO said earlier this month, rebranding is about more than just a new logo. When setting out on our journey to rebrand at the start of this year, I for one didn’t know where the project would take us.
At Pilotlight, we advocate that a CEO is both supported and challenged by their organisations, and that this combination is crucial to the charity’s smooth running.
A secure and diverse set of income streams can look different for every organisation. As a rule of thumb, it could mean that no one income source accounts for more than 25% of an organisation’s income.
