Martyn Lewis - New territory

Veteran newsman and NCVO chairman Martyn Lewis is ready to help the sector navigate a dangerous landscape – and to learn from the journey. He spoke to Caitlin Mackesy Davies.

For someone who has in the past famously bemoaned the lack of positive stories on our nightly news, Martyn Lewis sure doesn’t pull his punches when assessing the scale of the challenge facing NCVO members and the entire voluntary sector today. We’re working in an ‘incredible financial wasteland’, he tells me, and in a recession that many people in the sector will never have seen before. ‘So,’ he admits, ‘this is new territory for a lot of people.’

As an entrant into rather new territory himself – taking on chairmanship of NCVO just a few weeks before we speak – he is aware that he faces a formidable challenge in helping members through this dramatic and challenging landscape. But when I ask him what message he most wants to send to Engage readers, his response is both ready and reassuring: ‘What I would say is that NCVO wants to surround you a package of help and care that is probably the best that you have ever seen.

‘We want to be riding shotgun to you as you go through this difficult time ahead, as the nature of the voluntary sector is changed in line with the government’s new objectives.’

NCVO itself, of course, is tackling its own challenges in the face of reduced funding, and Lewis acknowledges that it is in the process of taking and implementing some ‘really, really tough decisions’. However, Lewis is pleased that these decisions have involved those at every level in the organisation. ‘Everyone has been kept up to speed,’ he notes, ‘so there are no surprises, no big shocks, and the organisation is being restructured around the new financial world that it finds itself in.’

The process, Lewis believes, leaves the organisation in a strong position to advise members who are going through a similar exercise: ‘We’ve done it ourselves, we know how it’s done, and we want to help people with the same problems and the same ambitions as we have.’

As part of this drive, Lewis is championing the development of a ‘charity doctor’ service, which would see teams of advisers and experts work with members who find themselves in trouble during the transitions that are now taking place.

The team, he says, ‘would be like a team from Spooks: a hit squad that would be able to make recommendations to a charity as to how it could stay in business helping its particular cause. This might mean pursuing joint ventures with other organisations, it might mean partnerships, it might even mean mergers. But what we would do is suggest the best form of rationalisation, so that it can continue to achieve its objectives, and do it in the context of what else is happening in the same area.’

Cut-throat sector

Lewis stresses the importance of considering context in surviving the tough times ahead: ‘I’ve often said that the charity sector is the most cut-throat sector in the British economy and this is because people do what they do because they passionately believe in it. But this passion can also mean that an organisation goes down one set of railway tracks, without taking much notice – or any notice, perhaps – of those who are on parallel tracks, and where those tracks might cross. Sometimes, you have to take a step back and look at which other organisations are doing a similar thing. There might be a junction at which you could get together.

‘We are heading for an era in which organisations can be rivals for the raising of money, but they should not be rivals when it comes to spending it,’ he continues. ‘In other words, where organisations with similar objectives are working in the same area, they should consider where they can share resources or create economies of scale, and also where they can eliminate duplication of efforts and complement each other.

It’s happening already, Lewis says, pointing to cooperation between Macmillan Cancer Support and Marie Curie Cancer Care that sees them sharing an administrator in some areas of the UK. This means they can ensure that they offer a totally rounded service, and that the people who give money to those organisations get a much bigger bang for their buck. Lewis would like to see a lot more of that, while at the same time retaining the passion that individuals who are involved have.

Lewis would also like to see people’s passion and achievements recognised more in the media, and has recently returned to the subject of his widely reported 1994 speech, which sparked a debate about negative reporting, but a debate that missed his point completely. Contrary to the way it was spun, says Lewis, he did not suggest that ‘we should fill bulletins full of light, happy stories’.

‘What I said is that the judgement about whether a story makes it onto a bulletin or not should not hinge on the extent of doom and death and tragedy and disaster that the story embraces, but the extent to which that story shapes or changes – or has the potential to shape or change – the country or the world or the city in which we live.

‘Let’s analyse and report on really interesting positive things in society, as well as the things that are going wrong. And in doing so, you give hope to an awful lot of people and you give ideas to an awful lot of people about how they can tackle a problem they have. So you actually change the psyche of society, and you change it for the better.’

At present, as in the past, he says that there is a tendency in a newsroom to automatically ignore a positive story or a charity story – ‘it just goes on the spike’. Lewis revisited this argument, contributing a chapter to the book Media Values, published in November 2010. His suggestion is that when a reporter is sent out on a story with a negative headline, he or she is required to spend some time finding out what is being done to tackle the problem. Lewis has coined the term ‘solutions-driven journalism’ for this approach.

The majority of these solutions stories, he believes, would come from the voluntary sector. ‘It’s a win-win situation. The proprietors and editors who think that negative stories should dominate the news win by getting their negative headline, but the reader or viewer is not left with the feeling that the world is going down the plughole.’

It’s sad, he says, that ‘most editors are utterly and completely consumed with the daily news process, so they don’t have time to get involved. A better understanding of the sector could change the attitude of the media and the way it reports the voluntary sector, enabling some of the great, positive stories about what is happening in our country to get a wider audience.

‘People are talking about the potential breakdown of law and order as economic cuts begin to bite. The way to combat that is for people to get more and more engaged in helping the problems in their community, but that also requires the media to report that and to put it on a pedestal.’

Lessons from lean times

While as concerned as everyone in the sector about the impact of the economic crisis, Lewis will be looking forward to what is learned by the sector when we eventually turn a corner. Having interviewed many of the world’s most successful and admired leaders, he says that what always interested him was what they learned not from the good times, but from the difficulties and setbacks. ‘Almost everyone that I interviewed who was successful had also had down times. The media would be interested in reporting those down times, but I was more interested in how they recovered, because that teaches people more.

‘I feel very strongly that when you are down – as a lot of people will be or may be as they read this – that this is the time you come out fighting and you really respond to the challenge that life has ahead for you. And that is what I believe the NCVO can do for the voluntary sector, in so many ways.’

Three decades of service: where it all began

In 1983, I was approached by four formidable people who were setting up Help the Hospices. They had been quoted £30k to £85k for making a promotional video and they asked me to advise them on which bid to accept.

It struck a huge chord with me, because my mother-in-law had spent the last year of her life in a place that was run on the hospice principles. It was a retreat run by nuns, and my wife and I were not Roman Catholic, yet they took her in and they waived the charges because we had no money at the time, as we were just setting out on our careers.

When something like that happens to you, you tuck it away at the back of your mind. I thought, ‘If I can ever do something to help that cause, I will.’ So when I was approached with this request, it really clicked.

I asked my boss for a film crew and an editing suite for a week, and I made their video – the first they had. Of course, when I had done that, the other hospice charities reached out and grabbed me warmly by the throat. And I found that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience!

Lewis’ many sector roles include founding YouthNet, which has created a national volunteering database at www.do-it.org. It’s proof, he says, of how easy it is to point the public to ways in which to make a positive difference in the community