What matters most

“I THINK of my personal values as being the key influence on the approach I bring to my work.”

Sarah Davidson is a child of the manse, and a woman whose personal values are clearly informed by her faith.

“Compassion; service; seeing the humanity in all people; addressing poverty and exclusion…I suppose those are probably the Christian values that I am most conscious of in the work context and which I try to bring to bear on the work I do and the relationships I have – although, of course, I appreciate these are values that are shared by those of many faiths and none.”

Right from the start, Sarah was keen to get going.

“I was born in Perth, although that was a bit of a surprise as I arrived seven weeks early! My family lived in Biggar at that time, although we moved to Edinburgh when I was four years old. My father was a parish minister there.”

Growing up around the church, Sarah reflects on a positive experience of being the minister’s daughter:

“What made the most lasting impression on me was being part of a community that extended beyond the domestic sphere, where people were interested in the manse family and cared about you just because of who you were.”

But it came with expectations too.

“I’m sure being expected to hold a polite conversation with all sorts of people who came and went from the church and the manse was a really useful formative experience as well, even if it could be a daunting one at times”, she laughs.

Sarah attended Oxford to study History, and admits she had ‘no idea’ what she wanted to do thereafter.

“I completed a postgraduate year in History of Art and I dabbled with that for a bit, working as a volunteer at the National Gallery while making a bit of money with a job in the stationery department of Jenners (the Edinburgh department store). However, the art world really wasn’t for me and I rather stumbled into sitting the Civil Service Fast Stream entry exams.”

And it was there that Sarah found she was not only genuinely interested in the things she was doing, but was good at it too.

“As I went through that process, it became clearer to me that it was a good fit for my skills and my interest in current affairs and politics, and I was lucky to have a great 25 year career working for the Scottish Office/Executive/Government. I got the opportunity to advise ministers on a very wide range of different policy areas, as well as going on secondment to help to set up the Scottish Parliament in 1999. My last job in the government was as a Director General – or Head of Department.”

Sarah’s career in Government lasted 25 years but she began to feel she needed a new challenge – that she was perhaps, becoming type-cast.

“After 25 years in the civil service I was starting to worry that I was becoming institutionalised and I wanted to find out if I could turn my hand to something else before I turned 50! “ she says. “I also increasingly realised that I wanted to use my voice to amplify issues that I was interested in and cared about, and – quite rightly – as a senior civil servant you are constrained in your ability to do that.

“I had engaged with the Carnegie UK Trust over the years and been impressed by the quality of its research and advocacy work. I thought I could bring my understanding of how to influence policy makers and help the Trust develop as an organisation. The Foundation’s purpose – a concern for the wellbeing of all people, with a particular concern for the most disadvantaged and marginalised – is very much in line with my personal values, which are no doubt shaped by my faith.

“Carnegie UK Trust is what is known as an ‘Operating Trust’. That means that we don’t set out to achieve our charitable aims through traditional grant making, but seek to influence public debate, public policy, and practice through our own research and by working in partnership with other organisations. You can see why I was attracted to working with the team, and in June 2019 I was appointed as CEO.

“Our founding mission is ‘to improve the lives and wellbeing of people’ across the UK and the Republic of Ireland. We are just coming to the end of our 2016-2020 Strategic Plan, during which the Trust has focussed on four programmes of work:

“It was great helping people individually, but once you start working with public health systems, you can help people from a population perspective, and make life better for everyone.

Digital Futures; Flourishing Towns; Fulfilling Work and Enabling Wellbeing – though I admit, my first year in the job has been full of unexpected challenges, centring principally round the Covid-19 virus!”

The Trust is an endowed trust, which means it receives an annual income stream from Andrew Carnegie’s original capital investment in the charity.

“One of the privileges of being endowed is that you don’t have to prove you’re making a difference overnight, and a lot of our work is aimed at putting down foundations for long-term change”, she says. “We like to work from the ground, the community, upwards, or with unusual partners, and use the evidence to change people’s minds.”

“There is no doubt that I’ve already seen the way in which our research and practice has caught people’s attention and made them think differently. For example, our recent work on the importance of kindness in communities and organisations has inspired lots of people to do purposeful things to ensure that kindness and relationships are enabled and not inhibited.”

Sarah particularly likes the ethos and the different ways the Trust works, including the way the Trust is given help from people who understand the issues on the ground and offer their expertise.

“A very different category of work which has led to real change in both understanding and practice is the Affordable Credit programme which has been running for five years now, (and has been associated with the Church of Scotland through the very direct personal support of the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers). The project set out to bring new solutions to the difficulties faced by those who can’t access affordable credit; when I worked in government the Trust was responsible for opening my own eyes to the complex issues involved. As well as trying to influence others to increase the availability of affordable credit, the Trust itself invested £1m of its endowment in establishing the Scottish Affordable Credit Loan Fund (match-funded by the Scottish Government) – a very practical way of using our money to bring about change.”

Sarah Davidson with her husband the Rev James Aitken and their son Aidan.

“I have been beyond grateful for the friendship, collegiality and support shown by the Carnegie team to each other and to me. Both staff and trustees have really pulled together, looked out for each other, and risen to the demands of these challenging times.

The Covid-19 crisis has meant challenges for many communities, and those organisations that work alongside them. It’s something Sarah and her team are aware of.

“We decided early on in the crisis to carry out a ‘listening’ exercise, keeping in touch with communities we had worked with in recent times, in order to understand how they had experienced the pandemic. We’ve still to complete the full analysis of the stories we gathered, but early findings indicate how important community, place-based responses have been.”

She adds: “We’ve heard about a growth in volunteering, drawing on the unique power of people within communities to understand and respond to local needs. In some places, we’ve heard about an increased appreciation on the part of local authorities of the contribution the third sector can make to community wellbeing. We’ve heard how the restricted access to community infrastructure – community centres, libraries etc – has forced people to find creative new ways of engaging with each other, both online and in outdoor spaces. One of the key themes that has come through all of these conversations is the importance of recognising what only the state can and should do, and what only communities can and should do, and of the first supporting and enabling the second much more consistently than is often the case.

“Another part of the Trust’s work programme which proved particularly relevant to communities’ experience of the crisis was digital inclusion. We have all seen how much activity moved online from schooling, to shopping, to work, to keeping in touch with friends and family we couldn’t meet in person. Yet research shows that 11.3m people in the UK don’t have the basic digital skills they need to thrive in today’s world. The exclusion they already experience has been exacerbated by the Covid crisis, and the Trust has been working to highlight and address this, including as a partner in the Scottish Government’s Connecting Scotland initiative which aims to get 30,000 digitally excluded households online in 2020.

The pandemic has also required the Trust itself to find new ways of working as a team.

“Because we operate across five jurisdictions in the UK and Ireland, many of our staff travelled a lot and it was a rare day when we didn’t have at least one person working from either Cardiff, London, Dublin or Belfast. Our mode of working was very often to bring people round a – literal – table or to present research findings to larger groups. We liked to spend time face to face with our partners so that we built up strong relationships with them and understood the contexts in which they were working. All that stopped overnight on March 17 when we closed the office in Dunfermline and everyone started working from home. Like everyone else, we had to find new ways of engaging with each other, let alone the outside world”, she says.

“We quickly became experts on Zoom, Slack and various other digital tools, and use daily team huddles to share the ups and downs of lockdown. I think each member of staff has experienced this period differently, according to personal circumstances, but there’s no doubt that those early months were really hard for everyone. Having said that, we have all been keenly aware of our good fortune compared to what has been faced by so many others.

“As for our external operations, we have also found new methods. We have delivered webinars, both large and small; interviewed people over the phone and video link; convened peer learning events online, and broadly carried on our work in very similar ways. In some ways, Zoom has been a great leveller when it suddenly doesn’t matter whether you live in central London, Edinburgh, Dunfermline or wherever when it comes to joining a discussion. I often used to travel to meetings because I knew that it would be difficult to have my voice heard as the only person dialling in; I very much hope that this much more geographically inclusive practice becomes one of the things we can keep post-pandemic.”

And, like many other organisations, what comes next’ is on everyone’s mind. Sarah and her team, are no exception.

“Like lots of similar organisations, we have been turning our minds to what happens next, once this terrible pandemic is under control”, she explains.

“We have argued for a long time that it is critical to focus more on individual, community and societal wellbeing and to do practical things to improve these. The past few months have highlighted what matters most to many of us: our health; the people we love; the support available in our local communities; the quality and security of our work; being able to get the food, goods and services we need each day; the natural world around us; having control over our lives. What would life in the UK look like if our society and governments consistently prioritised these things in their decision-making? That’s the question we will keep on asking. We’ve published some of our current thinking in a report called Building Back for the Better, which is our contribution to the debate about how we can make our economic, social and democratic structures fit for the future.”

The Covid response though, has allowed Sarah to spend more time with her family, husband the Rev James Aitken, minister at Edinburgh: St Ninian’s and Aidan, their young son.

Another part of the Trust’s work programme which proved particularly relevant to communities’ experience of the crisis was digital inclusion. We have all seen how much activity moved online from schooling, to shopping, to work, to keeping in touch with friends and family we couldn’t meet in person.

“I never expected my first year of leading the Trust to turn out like this!” she laughs.

“I thrive on being around the team, and I do my best thinking when I can spark off other people’s ideas and creativity. It’s hard to translate some of that into Zoom-time. But I have been beyond grateful for the friendship, collegiality and support shown by the Carnegie team to each other and to me. Both staff and trustees have really pulled together, looked out for each other, and risen to the demands of these challenging times. This gives me huge confidence for the future of the organisation and the work we will do together under our next Strategic Plan, due to be finalised and published early next year.” 

This article appears in the November 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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