Welcoming Jane Ide OBE, CEO of ACEVO, to Purposely Podcast. ACEVO is the membership body for civil society leaders in England and Wales, with nearly 1,700 members. Jane explains its purpose: helping those leaders be as effective as they can, on the belief that this ripples out to their organisations and the people those organisations serve. She has led ACEVO for four and a half years, and she looks back at how it began in 1987, when a small group of chief executives who found the job lonely got together to support each other. ACEVO turns 40 next year, and Jane thinks it is now closer to those founding aims than it has been for a long time. Peer support is what Jane calls the beating heart of ACEVO. Alongside leadership development and one to one support from former chief executives who are qualified coaches, members share advice through an active online community, from writing an AI policy to handling a difficult senior team issue. Jane describes a recent networking event where she spent the evening introducing chief executives facing near identical problems who had never met. She is open about how tough the job is. Money, people and governance have always been the worry, and since the pandemic, Brexit and now AI, there are more layers on top. Many leaders, especially in smaller charities, end up as chief executive almost by accident, as Jane did, and she talks about learning in her first role that she had a part to play in shaping what her board thought. Jane's route into the sector was not a planned one. She grew up with a family principle that if you can help, you help, and she remembers raising hundreds of pounds as a child with a music box collection tin in her parents' shop in Somerset. She found her vocation in communications in her early 30s, worked in the NHS and the civil service, and was director of communications at an ambulance service, where she learned that a blame culture helps nobody. After time out caring for her mother, she joined NAVCA as head of member engagement, then became its chief executive when the board was giving it one last try. She talks about turning it round with a clear focus on what its members needed, and about a funder who rang unprompted at the start of the pandemic and asked how much they needed to survive. Her approach to leading is simple: be clear on purpose, have the right people, explain what you are trying to achieve and trust them. Mark asks about ACEVO's public voice. Jane says the organisation now talks about influencing rather than lobbying, because its members hold very different political views. She describes how the membership bodies came together during the pandemic and have kept working together since, including on the National Insurance increase, and how ACEVO decides where its small influencing team can add value, using procurement as an example. Mark notes that New Zealand has no equivalent body, and Jane offers to share what has worked and what has not with any group there who want to start one. Looking ahead, Jane's main concern is what sector infrastructure should look like in ten years, as membership bodies depend on fees their members find harder to pay. She is more hopeful about leaders themselves. Eighteen months ago she was hearing people say the job was not doable, and now they are coming forward with solutions like co-chief executive and deputy roles. She is excited about AI, while keeping its risks and its missed opportunities both on ACEVO's risk register, and about ACEVO's programme for aspiring chief executives, which sold out its second cohort the morning of the interview and is now onto a third. Thank you to our sponsors, Benevity and Trust Investments.
