Lucinda Rouse visits the Dogs Trust’s head office to meet the charity’s chief executive, Owen Sharp.

Owen talks about the recent restructure of Dogs Trust as part of a new strategy and shares some of the lessons he has learned from an ongoing redundancy process involving 300 staff.

He gives his view on ways in which the voluntary sector could be responding differently to current instability, such as taking a less siloed approach to shared challenges.

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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Toby Freeman, chief executive of the Robin Cancer Trust, and the charity finance and governance specialist Pesh Framjee.

Toby shares his experiences of founding a charity to which he has a deep personal connection, and outlines the ways in which he is preparing the organisation for his departure.

Pesh puts forward his view that founder’s syndrome is a relatively uncommon occurrence. He stresses the importance of succession-planning in founder-led charities and the need to nurture future leaders within the existing team.

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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by Nicole Sykes, director of policy, communications and research at the Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales.

They discuss some recent research by Lloyds Banking Group that found charities are the second-most trusted source of financial advice after family members. They consider how charities can best respond to the finding, and why it should be a cause for celebration.

They cover a range of other topical issues affecting the sector, from the emergence of the impact economy to the need for charities to adapt to new ways of finding information with the advent of AI.

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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Natasha Friend and Robin Morgan-Chu, the director and chair respectively of the grantmaker Camden Giving, to discuss the merits and challenges of participatory grantmaking.

Natasha describes how grantmaking decisions at Camden Giving have been devolved to panels of people with first-hand experience of the challenges the funding is seeking to address.

Robin explains how the role of the board differs from more traditional funders, with a strong emphasis on safeguarding to support the frontline nature of the charity’s work and the way it makes decisions.

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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle summarise the contents of the recently-launched Civil Society Covenant between the government and civil society.

They reflect on comments made by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, and consider what’s next for the charity-state relationship.

Read our analysis: What will the Civil Society Covenant mean for charities?

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Lucinda Rouse and Emily Harle are joined by are joined by Dan Lawes, co-chief executive of the youth democracy charity My Life My Say, to consider how charities working in all cause areas can interact effectively with younger people.

Dan explains how My Life My Say engaged with brands including Tinder, Lime and Snapchat to promote its 'Give an X' campaign to encourage young people to vote in the 2024 general election as part of its wider youth outreach activities. 

He also provides his perspective on voluntary sector leadership as a younger-than-average chief executive.

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Lucinda Rouse and Andy Ricketts  are joined by Nihara Krause, chief executive of the youth mental health charity Stem4, to talk about the organisation’s quest for long-term sustainability in the face of falling grant income.

Nihara describes the challenges faced by Stem4 in developing partnership and merger prospects, as the charity has sought to stay afloat since the Covid-19 pandemic.

She outlines the internal changes made to commercialise some of the charity’s products and foster a more entrepreneurial mindset, with a greater focus on profit.

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Lucinda Rouse and Dami Adewale are joined by Gary Laybourne, chief executive of the sports coaching apprenticeship charity Coach Core.

Gary outlines some of the voluntary sector roles that are compatible with existing apprenticeship schemes and explains the practicalities of taking on an apprentice.

He describes ways in which charities can offset the cost and commitments associated with taking on an apprentice, including through corporate partners and sharing a role with another organisation.

Find the government’s guidance on employing an apprentice here and Not Going to Uni resources here. 

Listen to When Charity Goes Wrong.

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Lucinda Rouse hears from some of the speakers at Third Sector: The Conference 2025, which was held at the Barbican Centre in London this week (18 and 19 June).

They are: Sarah Hughes, chief executive of Mind; Duncan Bootland and Ian Howick, medical director and executive director of corporate services at the Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex; Nadia Alomar, chief executive of Clore Social Leadership; Amar Abbas, chief executive of Youth Action; Catherine Johnstone, chief executive of the Royal Voluntary Service; and James Fletcher, chair of the KFC Youth Foundation.

Listen to When Charity Goes Wrong.

Listen back to:

• Nadia Alomar on developing the right leaders for the modern charity sector
• KSS on the importance of building trust
• Sarah Hughes on Mind, mental health and the role of charities
• Catherine Johnstone in: Are we on the brink of a volunteering boom?

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This episode contains a reference to suicide in the first two minutes.

In November 2022, the transgender youth support charity Mermaids was in crisis. Caught up in a media storm over its chest binder service, compounded by internal governance and culture failings, a statutory inquiry was launched.

In the third and final episode of When Charity Goes Wrong, Lucinda Rouse hears from Lauren Stoner, chief executive of Mermaids, about the impact of the 23-month inquiry into the charity.

Mermaids service users Taylor and Oakley describe the realities of growing up as trans young people in a small town and the value to them of the charity’s youth advocacy network, Mango.

Shivaji Shiva, a partner at the law firm VWV, considers the side-effects of being under a regulatory inquiry and the specific challenges encountered by charities working in polarising cause areas. 

And the Charity Commission’s chief executive, David Holdsworth, outlines the role of the regulator when two charities are pitted against each other.

Written and presented by: Lucinda Rouse

Producer: Nav Pal

Executive producer: Ollie Peart

Art director: David Robinson

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