Part 2

How many Ss spell governance?

This model is designed to help boards decide which mode they are in.  Many of the best boards signal which mode is required for which subject. Good boards are able to readily identify the right mode.  And outstanding boards can move with confidence, and clarity between the modes.

Too many boards behave as if Strategy is the only mode that counts. They risk developing big and irrelevant plans. Others privilege stewardship. They risk protecting and failing to change. Boards which only support are simply cheerleaders, just as perpetual scrutiny is demoralising and nearly always retrospective. Stretching out of context is wasteful.

The challenge for governance is to deploy all five modes, appropriately and with confidence.

Strategy – determining direction, looking five years ahead, shaping the organisation, designing the sort of organisation you want to lead.

  • Is this where we want to be going?
  • Does this direction make sense?
  • Are their alternatives?
  • Have we thought about…?

Stewardship – protecting the assets – including the staff, reputation, capital and investments.

  • What will this do to assets?
  • Does it allow us to serve future generations?
  • What do we risk ?

Support – encouragement, ensuring the right resources are there, enabling, facilitating, problem solving.

  • Is the new system of information management really helping?
  • Is our senior team at risk of burn out?
  • Have we protected them against the attacks and abuse we know they are receiving?

Stretch – being ambitious, encouraging more to be done

  • Can’t we do better than this?
  • Have we registered what X down the road is doing?
  • Is this really as good as we can be?

Scrutiny – checking, assurance, providing external validation.

  • Are really doing this safely enough? What do others say about our performance?

 

 

Part 1

Who’s who on a board
It is very easy to download from the internet, or ask your solicitor, for a list of roles and responsibilities. What does the honorary treasurer do? Should you have a senior independent director? What about the chair and chief executive officer? Does a company secretary serve the board or the organisation? This is all very interesting. But in my observation of boards, both as an adviser and as a member, I have identified a number of different roles, and these all pose different questions:

The Peacemaker asks – can’t we find a common way? Surely there is a different approach?

The Challenger says – can’t we do better? This is simply not good enough for the homeless people in this town. Is it just because it has always been done this way?

But the History Holder says, do remember where we come from. When we started we thought that we could really change opinions about obesity. We need to go back to our roots, and remember what worked in the past.

And the Compliance king or queen will always say, can we afford it? What will the auditors say? Is this legal?

To which the Passionate Advocate will respond, for goodness sake, surely we must take a risk. People are dying of this disease, we must do more.

And the Data Champion says – it is all very well shouting, all the evidence shows that however often we do that, it makes no difference to the outcomes for mentally ill people.

And the Wise Counsellor says, we are not the only people trying to tackle this issue, we need to think carefully, plan properly, and take this step by step.

But the Inspiring Leader will describe her vision, will point to the hills, will enthuse and excite.

While the Fixer says, I think we can get together outside the meeting and sort this out.

And the Risk Taker says, the crisis in Darfur is simply too great. Let’s just spend the money, and it is such a good idea that the funds will flood in.

While the Strategist says, we need to think about what will happen in 2010, and recognise that if the Department of CPT does make the changes that they are planning, then our position will be much stronger and the whole environment will be different.

And the User Champion says, I am worried that we are ignoring the interests of our beneficiaries. We haven’t mentioned their needs all though this meeting.

All those voices, and all those questions, make a really strong board. All good boards hold in balance the entrepreneurialism of the strategist, and the risk taker, along with compliance king or queen, and the data champion. I have seen boards that are entirely entrepreneurial and they are pretty scary. I have also seen boards that are entirely compliance driven, and they are  truly terrifying.

 

The end of a decade is always a time to take stock, but in the UK just now it represents so much more. A General Election outcome, more dramatic than most had predicted, has created some certainty about the way ahead, and for civil society some greater certainty about what we need to do next.

We argued when we launched the final report of Civil Society Futures over a year ago, that we urgently needed a renewed reenergised civil society to meet the challenges ahead. Well those challenges have now only got clearer and sharper.

This second decade of the century is going to be both turbulent, and fast paced. Three things we know we will face
• A constitutional crisis that for all the constituent part of the UK will involve change, attention to the national story that we tell ourselves, and the weaving of a new narrative, along with new structures and accountabilities. And perhaps for England even more than the other nations, an urgent need to develop a new view of nationhood.
• Economic volatility as we settle into new and differently negotiated settlements, and find ourselves more subject perhaps than ever before to global flows of capital. There may well be some sunny economic uplands in prospect, but the route to them will be bumpy and volatile. We know the deep and, lasting damage done in the past by unplanned unconsidered economic transitions.
• Climate emergency having real and daily impacts. The floods of this autumn are now classed as the ‘new normal’ and we can expect throughout the decade to be responding to the desperate damage, largely to the poorest and most disadvantaged communities, brought by climate change.

There’s lots we don’t know, but it’s always worth articulating what we do know.

And we do know that civil society at its best, brings a number of vital things.
It brings –

  •  The ability to shape and develop a story that helps us understand and live through change. That’s what creative and artistic organisations do at their best, working closely with communities to articulate a new purpose, and renewed sense of belonging. It’s what churches, mosques, tempLes and synagogues do, bringing people together from different backgrounds and ages to think about how they want to live. It’s how universities, those anchor institutions with deep roots in a place can help to bring people together to tell their own story.
  • We’re good in a crisis – it is community organisations and neighbourhood groups that are first on the ground in a crisis, helping to plan, bringing emergency help, supporting and galvanising the helpers.
  • Our roots are in rights and resistance. We know that major change can have intolerable costs – we know how to organise to demand better, and to seek redress when those demands fail. We know how to intervene in fragile economies, how to develop skills and capabilities, how to assert repeatedly and skilfully the damage done most particularly to those who are too easily marginalised. We know  what is happening at the margins.
  • Much of civil society is in a place – both the big asset holders like universities and housing associations, the long-established local charities and so many others. And one thing we all now know is that place really matters, not in some sentimental way, but in a powerful and defining way it shapes who we are and what we care about.

And there are things we’re not so good at.

  • We’re too divided within civil society with vanishingly low levels of trust between small and large organisations, with too little money flowing from the large well endowed bodies, and too little sense that bigger charities will support their smaller colleagues.
  • We’re bad at collaborating, still too frequently worrying about brand, looking to funders, and government for approval, rather than focusing on our purpose.
  •  We’re still too timid about saying loudly what we know and what real experience looks like. This means we can look detached and far away from the communities we serve.

To be at our best we need to change. And in Civil Society Futures we were explicit about the strategic and organisational changes needed – across the country we see evidence of all sorts of organisations, taking this challenge seriously and making real and deliberate changes.

But times have changed.

In this new and exceptionally challenging decade, we will need new forms of focused accessible help.

This is not the moment for those with assets to sit on the sidelines and lament the lack of action in civil society. A few months ago I suggested three roles for funders in our troubled times, but things have got even more serious and much more urgent. this is not just about the funders – though they have an enormous role to play – its about all of those with power within civil society – universities, housing associations, richer organisations.

So just to start with a few suggestions, how about –

  •  A designated fund, available – without judgement and endless appraisal – across civil society to enable legal challenge to injustice, to allow for review of cases, to protect those organisations threatened with gagging. A fund, and expert resource,  that is as comfortable supporting necessary judicial review as it is in meeting the costs of a small organisation penalised for speaking out.
  •  A mechanism for responding to crisis. Moving money from the big organisation to the front line at the moment of emergency, not months later. We seem to have learnt how to do this after the major national emergencies. Isn’t it time we came to do this when there is flooding in a remote village
  •  Investment in the painstaking influencing of the endless trade negotiations on which we are about to embark – influence to protect and enhance environmental, consumer and workers rights at every step of the way. The costs of the deeply technical interventions might be large, but the value could be huge.

If this is to be the decade of deep connection, we need to start connecting the resource and the power to where it is most needed.

Nobody doubts that we are entering a turbulent and damaging decade. The deep social divisions which have grown in the last decade seem likely to fester and wreak even more havoc and the volatility expected of both the economy and the climate are going to bring massive risks to us all. As we argued in Civil Society Futures  a year ago, we need a renewed and re-energised civil society to step into its historic role : to help heal our dented democracy by enabling participation and deliberation, to stitch together our torn social fabric, and to enable us to respond to the devastation and challenge of the climate emergency.
To do this we need leaders who are different from the leaders of the past. We need people who are deeply connected to communities, who can work nimbly across institutional boundaries, and who are not afraid of their own vulnerability. We need leaders who are, as I said when I launched the Inquiry, both humble and bold. We need to encourage and enable a whole new generation of people who will almost certainly  not look like the leaders of the past. People who will bring different styles and approaches. And we will need to change our mental picture of leadership away from the all- singing, all-dancing heroic figure, to people who can both challenge and support, build a team, bring different approaches to the task of what we loosely call leadership.
This new and different kind of leadership will be about how we thrive in the next perilous and frightening new decade. It will be about fairness, and about diversity – of course. But is also about our futures – and the risks of failing in this challenge are massive.
Are our current practices for designing roles encouraging applications and making appointments up to this challenge?
It seems to me that they are not.
We have had decades worrying about where the supply of new leaders will come from. There have been programmes to support women, and people from black and ethnic minority communities in their quest to develop as leaders. (As if there weren’t thousands of already brilliant and experienced black and female leaders). And we’ve had decades of fretting about the demand side – do our boards really have the intent and the courage to appoint people who break the mould?
And yet, too often senior roles are described exactly as they might have been thirty years ago. The same sets of words – about gravitas (a quality that I’ve never understood, and have always associated with a certain sort of rather pompous entitlement), about administrative and financial acumen, (even though these skills need to be throughout the organisation) about deep and wide networks, (meaning particular and recognised ones) about inspirational leadership, about intellectual prowess – appear with monotonous regularity to describe exactly the sort of person who might have been ideal for the organisation of the past. And then, after the role has been described, we ask professional recruiters, or our own networks, to find someone who fits the bill. And we put them through a selection process that asks the same sorts of questions, makes a judgement about their performance on the day, and, with the same monotonous regularity, fails to really change the nature of leadership.
Now of course there are excellent leaders throughout civil society. There are people – paid and unpaid, acknowledged or not – who are leading complex and contradictory organisations with skill and flair. And they report, privately, that their roles are increasingly challenging, hard to get right and are stretching the very competence that they once presented so beautifully to a selection panel.
But the times are too dangerous for us to simply do what we’ve always done. That way lies real, and I think, existential risk. If we are to thrive in the second decade of the 21st century, we need different approaches to leadership – to job design, to selection, to appointment.
How would it be if we did things differently? Could boards of trustees invite tenders from possible leaders – propositions of what they could achieve for the organisation, but also what they would need? Could assessment criteria include the depths of connections? the personal experience? Could boards bring in people to help the identify the potential, not just the reputation, of those in front  of them? could boards themselves learn to evaluate beliefs and values as much as they value track record? Could we start to see tenders coming from teams of people who describe what they offer collectively? Could the interview process include you-tube videos of work in a particularly challenging situation ? Could we devise more inter active ways of thinking about organisational fit and challenge? Could appointment negotiations include a discussion about who else is needed on the top team, and what external support is required? Could we, in short, revolutionise the process of appointing leaders, and build the sort of flexible, deeply connected, agile teams that we always say we want?
The skills and behaviour many of us learned as we progressed through our careers are turning out not to be the skills that are needed. Isn’t it time we re-thought how we go about finding the people who will help civil society make its historic contribution in the hazardous times ahead?
. If we don’t, we will fail in our historic role to contribute most when times are hardest. And that would really be unforgivable.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the purpose of grant making, the role of endowed foundations and the relationship between what goes on in broader civil society and the organisations that support and fuel it. There have been critiques from the USA – from Anand Giridharadas   arguing that philanthropy is another tool for the powerful rich, from Edgar Villanueva  describing the damaging colonial underbelly of philanthropy, and from Robert Reich  questioning the impact of philanthropy on our democracy. Each of these critiques has been discussed in the UK, and while the criticisms don’t land as powerfully as they do in the USA, there has inevitably been some greater sense of self-reflection in the UK. But there would have been reflection anyway – people running foundations as staff or as trustees are reflective people, liable to consider what their place is in the world and what difference they can make. And as they survey our deeply divided society, the sense of desolation in so many parts of the UK, and the democratic crisis we face, it would be odd indeed if they were not thinking about how they can do what they do even better.

Over fifteen years  ago in the Grant Making Tango  I argued that anyone wanting to make a grant needed to decide if the purpose of the grant was to change  the world, build an organisation, or keep good stuff going. Not to know, I argued, risked disappointment at best, and massive waste at worst. Too many funders were paying for projects, and then being disappointed that the organisation wasn’t stronger and more effective. Or they were paying to strengthen organisations, and surprised that they hadn’t achieved the large-scale systems change that was then desired.

But preparing for another discussion this week about the role and purpose of foundations – those wonderfully privileged endowed organisations, withe independence hard wired, and the choice to set their own course – I thought rather differently about what foundations can do in these, very much more troubled and troubling times.

  • They can be stabilisers and stewards– supporting important organisations and groups in times of massive turbulence. They can protect knowledge, support the institutions and organisations with deep roots in communities and in our world. Just as  the medieval monasteries protected the illuminated manuscripts during the years of plague – so too we have organisations that need security and stability through troubled times.
  • They can be disrupters and agitators, making change happen, supporting the new and the challenging, avoiding the status quo, recognising the need for new and different ways of doing things. They can take risks, challenge the existing order, support the challengers against the incumbents.
  • They can be the reliable suppliers of money, support and help– keeping good things going, working with humility to support that which works and is good, valuing the deep connections that exist within civil society, and making sure that organisations across the country are able to thrive.

All three of these sets of purpose seem to me to be worthwhile, important and timely. Each of them has massive value at this difficult time in our country’s history. Each of them can be pursued by foundations – but I’m not really sure that anyone foundation can do all three. If I’m right there are choices to be made – and in difficult times, foundations know they need to make choices. That will help them – perhaps even more importantly it will help the bodies that rely on them to know what  it is that the grant maker wants to do.

 

Every few years a minor argument breaks out in civil society about whether or not we should allow trustees to be paid. Every few years, someone laments the fact that it’s hard to attract people to trustee roles and every few years someone else says that public trust is helped by voluntary trusteeship, that the voluntary principle is at the heart of who we are and that it would make no difference to the number and quality of trustees anyway. And at some stage we point smugly at the FTSE companies and the NHS trusts that do pay, and tell ourselves that they don’t have inclusive boards either.
And every few years after the row subsides again, I’m left feeling deeply uncomfortable. Partly because I know how hugely I have personally benefited from being a trustee. (I will always treasure the memory of a Very Important Person in the charity world portentously reminding me that no-one should ever benefit from their trust, while I reflect on the personal, professional and generally life enhancing benefits I have received from trusteeship).
But also because the voices of those saying that payment for trusteeship is wrong nearly always come from people who are already trustees. It’s a bit like those people who have already easily negotiated the rickety stairs and narrow doors of a meeting room describing the room as absolutely accessible. Those of us lucky enough to have salaried roles which allow time for trusteeship, or those who earn enough to enable them to give their time, need to be very cautious about advocating a model that may not always work for everyone.

I’m interested in hearing from someone on very insecure earnings, who loses pay every time she goes to a trustee meeting. And yes, advocating for time off (as NCVO does), is important, but it only seems to apply for those in secure, salaried work. I’m interested in hearing from the many people I have met who wanted to join a housing association board but knew that it might imperil their benefit payments because they were no longer deemed available for work. I’d like to hear from young people, scrabbling to piece together an income in really difficult times who would like to take on a role – and are so desperately needed by charity boards – but cannot risk the possibility that they thereby miss out on a shift or a freelance contract that takes them out of town.

I’m not comfortable with a debate that doesn’t ask the views of people who are currently not sitting round the trustee table.
Are we content for our trustee boards to be staffed by people who are either salaried, or on a final salary pension schemes or who otherwise have sufficient income to allow them to make what is in effect a substantial donation to their charity of choice? It’s also worth remembering that many of the same arguments were used to justify MPs not being paid, a stance which ensured that people were only represented by ‘men of means.’

Now I actually believe that on balance there are really strong – indeed compelling – arguments for keeping trusteeship voluntary. Theoretically, it allows trustees to demonstrate some necessary independence, knowing that their income is not on the line if they present a dissenting view. Non-payment of trustees is still a distinguishing feature of the sector, which recognises the voluntary impulse at the heart of voluntary action. It’s important that people who can afford to, can give back in this way. What is more, for the largest charities which don’t seem to have any challenge recruiting trustees, it’s simply not necessary. And of course the vast majority of charities are not paying anyone anyway. Some would also point out that payment of trustees is a poor use of charitable money, (although if you think good governance is central to the success of the charity it seems odd that this is the one thing we can’t justify paying.)
But we should recognise that all of this does come at a cost. It does restrict the pool of people who can afford to do it. And the price we pay as a sector may be having governing bodies which are less inclusive than they might be. That’s quite a price.

But if we are going to reaffirm, yet again, the voluntary principle, then there are things we ought to do much more seriously . We ought to be much more explicit and much less embarrassed about the benefits received from trusteeship. How about recognised professional accreditation? We ought to be much more open about payment for loss of earnings. (And I don’t mean barristers having their fees reimbursed. I do mean the barista having her wages replaced). We definitely ought to be arguing forcibly for time off, but in an increasingly freelance economy perhaps we ought to also be asking for tax relief on time given.
And perhaps we need to think more about the future pool of trustees. As the ‘job for life’ disappears, we cannot expect employers to continue to release people for trustee duties as part of their development programmes not because they can’t but because they won’t have the same investment. And as the last generation of recipients of final salary pension schemes hang up their trustee boots, and as demands on trustees get ever greater, are there new and better ways of making sure that a charity set up today will be able to recruit a diverse, knowledgeable, supportive group of people to steer the next generation of charities?
Just arguing that non-payment of trustees is a system that has served us well for the last century may not be the best possible answer for the next one.

From a talk and conversation at Northern PlaceShapers, April 10th 2019

A large part of public policy is concerned with where people live: are there enough houses? Are we maintaining them well enough? Are they secure, affordable and decent? And whose living in them?

We know that housing matters enormously. It’s a huge source of the generational tension we face as a country. It should be an integral part of the infrastructure, enabling growth and mobility. It’s a political hot-button issue. And there’s no shortage of reports and policy recommendations about it. In fact, Housing Report Bingo is a parlour game in many circles, as report after report makes the crystal-clear case: we need more housing for everyone, the current arrangements are broken, there needs to be grater sustained investment. It’s obvious.

And yet we fail to cut through, either with government, or too often with the people who need housing, and those who live in our homes.

Is this another blind spot in public policy? Professionals and board members, ministers and regulators happily talk about supply, and units. We spend millions of pounds and in conferences, round tables and seminars we agonise about the differences between affordable and social and council and private housing. We know all about scheduled repairs, pipelines and managing demand, and we can even talk the language of allocation and support. We dabble happily in the KPIs and the league tables.

But nearly three years after a slogan called Bring Back Control changed the course of British history; we seem to be very poor at identifying why where we live matters so much. For all of us our home is the most precious thing we hold, and our emotions about home are only matched by the love we have for those who are most close to us. Home is the place of intimacy and warmth. It’s the place where our most precious inter actions take place. Its the place we raise our children. The place we go to when we need to feel safe. Its where we are ill and hope to die. It’s a place for times of vulnerability. It’s the place where our memories are born and where they grow. and Home provides our identity and our sense of who we are. Home provides nurture and security. It is in our homes that we most need control.

That’s why things going wrong in a home are so horrific. Its why domestic violence is rightly seen as the most hideous crime – the betrayal of the safety of home. Its why burglary can be so catastrophic and why its occasional dismissal as not really bad because it wasn’t violent, fails to recognise the violation it represents. Its why internal sewage flooding is such a tragedy and why floods and fire still touch our deepest emotions.

Home matters to us.

It’s not a coincidence that moving to a new house ranks up there on the scale of stress with bereavement and divorce.

It’s also why people get so angry when things go wrong. Its why the twitter messages to so many chief executives feel so aggressive. No wonder people are angry – that failing boiler, that damp patch, that botched repair is affecting them in their most important place. It’s not a late train, it’s not an incident or a scheduling issue – its damage to them in the place they need to feel most safe.

Its why people are so angry when their right of quiet enjoyment, so beautifully described in otherwise dull legislation, is threatened, as it so often is.
Public policy is beginning to talk about trauma: its time that housing policy thought about how it causes trauma.

Our home is what we own, regardless of housing tenure. Our home belongs to us in ways that resist metrics and legal title. Housing associations and local authorities may have housing on their balance sheets: but the homes they support are only held in trust for the community – for today’s generation and for ones not yet born.
And if this is true, shouldn’t public policy change too? What would housing policy look like if it recognised the central importance of a home to the people who live in it, and the lack of one to people who are homeless? What would housing management look like?

And perhaps far more importantly, what would our political discussion look like? That might really start a different conversation.

In the last  two years I have been privileged to have a Fellowship with Carnegie UK Trust. This has allowed me to explore a long-held interest of one in kindness and emotional intelligence – and how  this fits into public policy.

This short blog, written for the publication date, was first  published on the Carnegie UK Trust website.

We all want to be kind and calls for kindness in public services are everywhere. Who wouldn’t want to be kind?

But we also want services to be fair. We want them to be accountable and run by professionals with a strong sense of boundaries. We want to scrutinise and understand decisions.

Public policy is about relationships and it is about emotions. It’s about how we love and how we care. It’s about where we live and where we feel we belong. It’s about how we change and grow. It’s always and at all times about emotions. And yet talking about emotions in public policy is embarrassing and uncomfortable.

That’s because kindness in public policy is a deeply disruptive concept. It recognises the emotions at the heart of what we do and gives them the status normally reserved for KPIs, risk registers and metrics of things that can be readily enumerated. Its difficult, and it challenges our deepest beliefs. But a recognition of the need for kindness is essential if we are to build trust, enable people to change their behaviour, and secure the outcomes that all the rest of the apparatus is designed to deliver.

Read the new report, Kindness, emotions and human relationships: The blind spot in public policy here.

When I first heard about framing I heard spin. I thought that it was all about identifying  the prejudice of the public and then pandering to it. I thought it was better suited to advertising and the dark arts of politics than the much more complex world of policy development and communication. I thought it was a way of putting a coat of shiny paint on the crumbling edifice of some of our services.

I was so very wrong.

I learned through early exposure to the framing thinking on issues as different as children’s nutrition, housing and poverty that framing is a technique that is genuinely disruptive, hugely challenging to those of us who think we know best, and is a way of rethinking and challenging the fundamentals of some of the rather weary positions that we are all so ready to recycle.

I learned five things that have changed the way I think about public policy, not just what I say.

  1. I’ve learned something I should have known all along :  how we feel about something is as important as what we know. That old campaigning question – do you know, think or feel?  – needs to be relearned. How we feel really matters and this is true of the people who view an issue from afar, those who are personally and intimately involved and those of us with a professional label.
  2. I’ve learned that everything is  always framed. The question is how it is framed. If you describe your services in terms of pity and distance, than that’s how it will be experienced. If you talk about housing in terms of desperation and  need, then you can’t be surprised if it becomes an emergency service. The question is framing it accurately in ways that are completely authentic.
  3. I’ve learned that if you talk in the way that makes you feel comfortable, you’re probably not listening. And not listening probably means that you’ll never be heard by anyone except people like you. And that reciting  data and research evidence in the way I have been trained, may be easy, but probably means that you’re not being heard.
  4. But I’ve also learned that it’s always about us, not about them. I’ve learned that when I think about  ageing I need to think about what I want as I age, that when I think about poverty I need to recognise that the existence of poverty affects us all, and that the things that matter to me – security, home, love, friendship – are almost certainly  the same things that matter to everyone else.
  5. And I’ve learned that when you talk so that people can hear you, extraordinary things happen. It’s not that’s magically public opinion shifts, but it is that the way in which we all think about an issue shifts, and that shifts what we do, as much as how we describe it.

Framing allows us to challenge our deepest pre conceptions, to understand the ‘received wisdom’ , to interrogate all of our own baggage and to start to do things differently. Mostly I’ve learned that framing isn’t about communications. It’s about everything we do. It’s not a silver bullet, but what it does is challenge professionals, systems and all of us who think we know the answer to think a lot more deeply, and then behave so much more intelligently.

first published for #socialcarefutures @neilmcrowther

 

Over the last decade our institutions and industries have been rocked by accusations of sexual abuse and harm. From the Church through the BBC  to Hollywood and to some of our most precious charities we have heard stories about behaviour that has no place in the 21st century. And we’ve heard about harm done, hurt experienced and the terrible work of both repairing the damage, and atoning for the grief caused.

Most of us have been challenged to think about our past behaviour – not just the abusers, but those of us who fear we may have been carelessly complicit. The averted eye, the nervousness about intervention, the embarrassment when we  knew things were not quite right. And all of us, whether accusers, survivors, perpetrators and institutions have known that there needs to be a better way. We need to find ways of being together  that enable fellowship and friendship but avoid causing such devastating sexual harm and degradation.

I believe this strongly. That’s why I’ve signed up to support #preventsexualharm. Supported by an impressive coalition of organisations including the NSCPCC, NCVO, NOTA, Crimestoppers and powered by Re-shape, this coalition challenges us to think about what we can do to prevent sexual harm in our communities, in our networks and our  organisations. .

This doesn’t feel easy or safe. But I do think it’s a really important way of taking back some control. And a chance for all of us to get the confidence to stop sexual harm – and that should mean that at the very least in ten years’ time we’re not looking back with embarrassment at things going on that we really should have been able to stop. After all, that certainly  doesn’t feel easy or safe .