Wednesday 3rd December 2008, 10:46What you been up to?Getting a bit of grief about lack of Blogs so thought it was time I made an effort. Since Washington – and the immediate trip to Israel and Palestine on the back of US – I have spent most of my time outside the business with government stakeholders but also with people in the world of finance. We have ambitious plans to grow the business to £500m and £1bn.
Our work is focused on tackling poverty, economic development and social development so it’s important we have a strong, robust financial foundations and a clear financial strategy alongside our business strategy. So, I’m making sure we have the networks, knowledge, skills and capacity to free the people in the business to do amazing things.
One of our wise Non-Execs told me a while ago that it was important to ‘sort out the long term financial planning’ to allow everyone in the business to get on with winning and delivering fabulous services. I’ve been making sure we continue to have all the resource we need to support our international growth and crazy longer term plans.
I’ve also been doing a lot of work on UK welfare policy. Partly because we are entering a new and exciting phase in the UK in service development – much more personalised and flexible – but also because businesses in this sector need very strong commercial, financial skills blended with knowledge of welfare to be successful in helping people into work. Our overseas learning – particularly running ‘AME’ funded programmes in Israel where funding depended on sustaining people in work, off benefits for up to 2 years – means we have extensive experience and understanding to apply to what we do.
The other reason I have spent time on the welfare work is that as the economy has tightened, our focus on joining up our services has heightened. There have been some good policy moves with freedoms and flexibilities under Train to Gain, additional support going into Debt Advice, enhanced response for redundancies. The challenge is taking these policy ideas and implementing them quickly and effectively so plenty to do.
There’s also lots of gloom and lost confidence around some business sectors at the moment. Lots of this in the press but Richard Lambert at CBI hit a point I’ve reflected to decision makers and policy folk in governments over the last few months. The media reports much of the negativity and the 24 hour news cycle drives us further into a ‘fear’ mentality. Things will get tougher but there are lots of businesses out there tackling adversity with vigour and others very positive about their future outlook.
Our job at A4e in many of the areas where we work with governments is to lessen the impact of recession on the communities and people we work with. If we can get on and get some flex across some aspects of our work, we will do just that.
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