People Inspired By Purpose - Purposely Podcast

Welcoming back Tara Arnold, Head of Grant Making at ShareGift, to Purposely Podcast. 
Sharegift is a UK charity built around an idea most people have never heard of: collecting donated shareholdings that are too small to sell, pooling them together and distributing the proceeds to good causes. The model was created thirty years ago by founder Claire McIntosh, a stockbroker who noticed the waste sitting in small, unwanted share parcels. Today, a team of five has given away close to 70 million pounds, with all grants unrestricted and no impact reports required. When Tara rings a charity to let them know money is coming, she hears the relief in their voices. 
Tara also works as a fundraising consultant, supporting small charities through Unbound Philanthropy and Lloyds Bank Foundation. It means she understands the funding relationship from both sides, and that perspective runs through everything she talks about in this episode. Her fundraising career started in 2001 with face-to-face fundraising, moved through trusts and legacy roles, and sharpened into a specialism around compelling grant applications. Her thesis has always been that good proposal writing is part craft and part alchemy. You collect everything you need, you speak to the people whose lives the work touches, and then you bring it all together into something that reads as human. That last part, she says, is what most applications get wrong. If it does not feel human, you will not get a look in. This episode is full of practical insight for anyone working in fundraising or grant making. Tara talks about how Sharegift actually finds charities to support, and it is not always through traditional channels. She describes discovering organisations through Google searches, LinkedIn and even maps. She talks about the reality of pitching to funders, including a memorable moment in a room at St James's Place Foundation where she clocked that her ten-page proposal had been reduced to a single paragraph, and had to think fast. Her advice: always recap your project at the start of a pitch, regardless of what you think the panel has already read. She is also candid about the state of the UK charity funding environment right now. She started fundraising just before the 2008 financial crash, and says that felt like child's play compared to what smaller organisations are facing today. Frontline charities are dealing with rising costs, shrinking grant rounds and funders changing criteria mid-cycle. Against that backdrop, the unrestricted, no-application model that Sharegift runs feels more valuable than ever. The conversation closes on the funder-plus model, where grant makers offer capacity building alongside financial support. Tara's consulting work sits squarely in that space, helping small charities strengthen their income generation, review applications, sharpen their storytelling and think harder about stewardship. Her recurring observation from across all of it: most charities just need to do the basics well. Read what the funder has asked for, and do that. 
Key Themes 
- How Sharegift works and why unrestricted, no-application funding matters more than ever 
- The alchemy of a great grant application and why human writing beats polished writing 
- How Sharegift finds charities, and what that tells fundraisers about their digital presence 
- Pitching to funders: what really happens to your proposal before it reaches the room 
- The UK funding crisis and what it feels like from inside a grant making charity Funder-plus models and the case for investing in fundraising capability 

This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we are back with Gary Stannett, CEO of the Rio Ferdinand Foundation, on the realities of setting up and running a charity attached to a famous name, and why getting it right matters far more than most people realise.

Gary is direct about something the sector doesn't always say out loud: putting a well-known name on a charity is a brave thing to do. Charities are more publicly exposed than most organisations. Anyone can look up the finances, the governance, the trustees. When the name above the door belongs to someone famous, that scrutiny goes up considerably.

He talks through how the foundation came together. Gary had crossed paths with Rio Ferdinand when Rio was playing at West Ham and Gary was running programmes in nearby Elephant and Castle in South London. When Rio started exploring the idea of setting up a charity, Gary found himself in the room helping explain how it would actually work, including pushing back on assumptions about government funding that weren't going to materialise. The introduction was informal, the process was long, and what Gary told Rio at the start turned out to be true: the foundation would look very different in the long run from what anyone imagined at the beginning.

A lot of athlete-led charities, Gary explains, either go quiet or wind up fairly quickly. Often it comes down to the athlete not fully understanding what running a charity actually involves, or not having the right people around them from the start. The Rio Ferdinand Foundation took a deliberate approach to building its board, reviewing trustee skills every year and making sure key areas are covered: legal, financial, youth and community development, civil rights, business, and higher education. It is not the most glamorous part of the work, but Gary is clear it is the foundation that makes everything else possible.

The broader point Gary makes is one that applies well beyond celebrity charities. Setting up a charity sounds straightforward. It rarely is. The governance responsibilities, the public scrutiny, the financial oversight, and the ongoing need for care and momentum, none of it switches off once you start. Anyone thinking about it needs to go in with their eyes open.

Key Themes
• Why putting a famous name on a charity raises the stakes for governance and scrutiny
• How the Rio Ferdinand Foundation came together, and what Gary told Rio at the start
• Why many athlete-led charities struggle or close, and what makes the difference

Welcoming Dan Leverington, founder of The Ocelli Group, to Purposely Podcast.

The Ocelli Group is a for-profit business built around a clear purpose: connecting organisations that need to do sustainability work with the right partners to deliver it. Dan sits in the middle, not as a consultant doing the work himself, but as a connector who understands both sides of the equation and knows how to bring them together. The name comes from the secondary visual system bees use to navigate by the sun. It is a fitting metaphor for a business built on seeing just over the horizon.

Dan grew up around mining and heavy industry in Australia, which gave him an early and unromantic view of how extraction economies work. A university project on the Murray-Darling Basin introduced him to ecological economics and the idea that threats to nature carry real economic consequences. That tension between industry and environment has run through his career ever since.

His path to founding The Ocelli Group ran through engineering recruitment in Queensland's LNG sector, tech startups, time in the US, and a co-owned media company focused on B Corps and renewable energy businesses. Across all of it, the same pattern: he was always the person in the middle, figuring out who had the problem and who had the solution. When mandatory climate reporting began to create urgent demand for sustainability partners across Australia, he saw a gap that matched exactly what he was built to do.

The business model is built on referral fees from partners rather than charges to clients, which keeps the value exchange clean and the incentives aligned. Dan facilitates the introductory calls himself, which means he gets to see in real time whether his read of both sides was accurate. His first deal closed in three weeks. He is candid that nothing since has moved that fast, and that the first 18 to 24 months were difficult as the market caught up with where he could already see it heading.

This conversation covers the realities of building a connector business from scratch, including the trust problem people warned him about, the discipline required to work both sides of a marketplace simultaneously, and what it actually feels like to leave a stable career and back your own thesis. Dan talks about the weight of that decision on his family, the importance of honest timelines, and how he learned over time to give himself permission to step back.

He is also the host of the Green Fix Podcast and the author of Honeydrops, a weekly newsletter that started with six recipients and has since become a platform for making sense of the sustainability landscape in plain language. Both have become genuine business development assets, not just content for its own sake.

On ESG, Dan is direct. The term takes a kicking, he says, because leaders have spent careers putting difficult things in the externalities bucket. What is changing is that those externalities are starting to sit on the balance sheet.
Key Themes
What it means to build a connector business, and why the model works when trust is earned
Mandatory climate reporting as a market catalyst and what it revealed about the gap Ocelli was built to fill
Why ESG gets a kicking, and how to have the sustainability conversation in a language that moves CFOs
The reality of founding a business: bumpy not linear, and the weight it places on family
Being too early: the upside of arriving before the market is ready
Content as a business asset: Green Fix Podcast and the Honeydrops newsletter
From coal country to climate economy: the career arc behind the business

This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

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Welcoming Kate Sclater, Head of Community Investment at Rātā Foundation, to Purposely Podcast.
 
Rātā Foundation is one of twelve community trusts acrossAotearoa New Zealand, formed following the deregulation of the banking sector in the late 1980s. With a fund of around $700 million, it operates in perpetuity across Canterbury, Nelson Marlborough and the Chatham Islands, striving for an equitable and sustainable society under the kaitiakitanga of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Its name comes from the Southern Rātā tree, a flowering native that lives within an ecosystem and lifts those around it.
 
Kate grew up in Exeter, Devon, in a low-socioeconomiccommunity. At eleven, she was awarded a scholarship to attend a private school, an experience that gave her a daily, lived view of inequality. Walking between two worlds shaped a belief that would carry through her entire career: whatphilanthropy gives people is not just money. It is belief in themselves.
 
Her early career in the UK took in the National LotteryCharities Board, where she ran a small grants pilot designed to reach the parts of the voluntary sector other programmes had not reached. She recalls a man in Plymouth who received a grant of two and a half thousand pounds to bring acommunity together around a football, who later secured six million pounds of European regeneration funding for his neighbourhood. The lesson she carried from that: remove barriers, meet people where they are, and enable them tobelieve what is possible.
 
Twenty-two years ago, Kate arrived in New Zealand with herpartner. Her first role here was with St John, before Canterbury's twin crises, the earthquakes and the 2019 mosque shootings, shaped much of what Rātā became.In both cases, the foundation's pre-existing relationships with funders, iwi and council meant they could respond within days, not weeks. Kate is clear: you cannot build those relationships in the moment of trauma. They have to existbefore the crisis arrives.
 
At Rātā, Kate has helped develop a community investmentapproach that sits across a full range of tools: grant funding, multi-year partnerships, capability building and impact investment. Their current strategic focus areas are health, housing, education and environment. Housing has been the primary focus for their impact investment work, using construction financing, revolving credit facilities and equity placements to support affordable rental and progressive home ownership. The outcomes are tangible. Afamily that had moved fourteen times in ten years now has a stable home. The educational and health outcomes that follow from that stability are what intergenerational change actually looks like.
 
The conversation also covers the AI capacity-building workRātā has supported through the Nelson AI Sandbox, helping community organisations use the technology ethically and practically, including for multilingual communication, grant writing and data collection. Kate talks abouta future in which AI might allow funders to have conversations with people that populate application forms, rather than requiring applicants to navigate written processes that can feel designed to exclude.
 
What philanthropy actually gives people, and why beliefmatters more than money
The geographic reach and intergenerational purpose of RātāFoundation
Impact investment as one tool among many, and why housingwas the right place to start
Responding to crisis, the mosque shootings, the earthquakes,and why relationships have to come first
Starting again: arriving as a migrant and starting again
AI, the digital divide, and how the community sector cankeep up
Holding purpose tightly and method lightly
 
This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevityand Trust Investments.
Key Themes