Celebrating a young community charity keeping pace with demands
If you’re looking for a model of healthy governance development, you could do worse than this.
Created as an emergency response during the Covid pandemic, The McCarthy Dixon Foundation was founded by the eponymous Northampton pub landlady and community champion, registering as a charity in mid-2020. Initially focussed on providing a food bank, it soon widened its scope to address the greater needs the Foundation encountered, developing workstreams around poverty, wellbeing and social need. It is now an award-winning community support network, recognised regionally and nationally for the value of its work.
You can see it for yourself in full swing here: mccarthydixon.org.uk
Along the way, it has gained structure and strategy in the form of trustees, a constitution, policies, a logo, a website, focussed key service areas, local Community Foundation support, patrons, annual reports, profile and a volunteer army. This is all a response to its trustees’ awareness and engagement in what they want to do and the way they know they need to do it, for both operational and regulatory purposes.
It is a thriving charity, the infrastructure of which has grown at the same pace as the needs it has taken on. This is such a refreshing good news story, as very often the excellent work charities are set up to do is not matched by a framework that is fit for purpose or keeps pace with the growth in ambition and delivery.
For example, as the charity’s services expanded, the trustees recognised the growth potential and introduced formal policies and procedures for safeguarding, risk management, service delivery and other areas. Thus ensuring operational progress was matched by the charity’s governance scaffolding. Better proactive than reactive.
And as the Charity began to grow and become very successful, its founder stepped down from her role as a trustee and was appointed by the remaining trustees as the Operations Manager which they knew was now required. This created a clear separation between governance oversight and day-to-day management.
The Foundation’s operational development has not been purely strategic, but a combination of responding to need, streamlining services and careful governance. In its early years, it grew by adapting to meet the evolving needs of the community. These are interconnected, as anyone who has experience of such work will know: poverty, diet, poor housing, financial need, loneliness, grief, lack of focus, joblessness, illness, mental health challenges, childcare struggles – the list is endless, with each issue exacerbating others.
The multi-faceted and never-ending aspects will also be very familiar to many. The Foundation recognised the folly of trying to do everything and inevitably spreading its blessing very thinly, so the trustees decided to consolidate services into four key areas, each of which still has many features. In this way, they focus their efforts and maximise impact, whilst still being flexible to respond to need on the ground.
The essentials of the Foundation’s development and the points to celebrate are recorded in the Foundation’s Annual Report, on its website, and recognised by the awards it has received, including The King’s Award for Voluntary Service, equivalent to an MBE, the highest recognition given to volunteer groups.
So what? Well, luckily it’s never a bad time to review governance. Foundation stage, significant change, potential over-reaching, managing future challenges, facing financial difficulty, regulatory developments, celebrating success – all these are excellent opportunities to check the governance framework of a charity is in good order. Maybe you know a charity which would benefit from such a health check.
