Charity Impact Podcast
Episode keywords:
Innovation, Programme Lifecycle, Impact Evaluation, Partnerships, Social Enterprise, Winning Scotland, Charity, Social Change, Board Champions.
Episode description:
Can you imagine crafting a future where children are not just surviving their circumstances but thriving in them? That’s precisely what Zahra Hedges, the dynamic CEO of Winning Scotland, is striving to achieve. In our engrossing chat, Zahra opens up about the charity’s ambitious mission to revolutionize Scotland’s social fabric, focusing on empowering children and young people to develop resilience and confidence. We dissect their approach and discuss Zahra’s experience of moving from running her own business to supporting social enterprises to being charity CEO. We also discuss the importance of getting the most out of your board of trustees.
Episode transcript:
You can access the transcript for this episode here. It is AI generated and not 100% perfect but I think it is good enough to follow the conversation. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resource to manually make the corrections.
Zahra Hedges
Zahra Hedges is CEO of Winning Scotland. Before that she worked for the Scottish Government in children and young people’s mental health, and the CEIS Group where Zahra supported social enterprises. Zahra is also an advisor to Samtaler, which helps large companies to create social value, a board member of community justice organisation SACRO and a mentor with MCR Pathways and Pilotlight.
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The Charity Impact podcast is brought to you by KEDA Consulting, where we help charities to increase their income and impact.
For feedback and enquiries, you can reach us by e-mail at hello@kedaconsulting.co.uk
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If you are not securing the amount of grant income you think you should be, it is probably not due to a lack of capacity. It might be for a number of more complex reasons, such as organisational issues which require better collaboration with colleagues in other teams such as services, finance, policy and so on; or performance issues, such as ineffective practices within the trust fundraising programme. Or you may have a temporary reduction in capacity due to a trust fundraiser leaving or being on maternity or sick leave.
We have found that charities with small fundraising teams are often failing to maximise grant funding opportunities for one of three reasons:
We find that small charities usually have a history of raising most of their income from either grant funding or community fundraising.
If you lead a small, grant funded charity, you will probably be skilled in bid writing by necessity. You might be a great bid writer. However, we know that this is only one aspect of your role, alongside overseeing your services, managing the team and often everything else from accounting to fixing the printer! If you are stretched thinly, you will be missing out on funding opportunities that could help to grow your charity.
If you lead a small charity that relies on other forms of fundraising, you and your team may have very little experience of identifying and securing grant funding. You might not know where to start in terms of identifying the right funders to apply to, writing a compelling case for support or how to even make time for this amongst everything else.