Julie Bentley ...TALKS IMPACT

Only two of these things are true …

‘I’ve chatted outfits with Annie Lennox in a pub loo. I failed my maths O level four times. I have a large butterfly tattoo’.

Julie is an experienced charity CEO with over 23 years of leadership, having headed well-known organisations like Action for Children, Girlguiding, Family Planning Association, and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. Since November 2020, she’s been CEO of Samaritans.

A passionate advocate for lived experience, equity, and inclusion, Julie’s leadership is known for being authentic and grounded. She’s driven real change, including reimagining Girlguiding as “the ultimate feminist organisation.”

Julie’s career began as a youth worker in South East London, and she quickly rose to Assistant Director at Charterhouse-in-Southwark. She’s received numerous accolades, including ‘Most Admired Charity CEO’ in 2014 and ‘Outstanding Individual Achievement’ at the Charity Times Awards in 2019. Julie is also a published author and a qualified Humanist Funeral Celebrant.

We sat down with Julie to ask a few questions about impact –

What is your personal motivation for creating social impact?

A dual motivation of seeing some of the most disadvantaged  in our society better supported but also contributing to wider societal  change that eliminates the barriers and disadvantages impacting people.

What’s been the best impact you’ve seen in your career?

I think many charities are working really hard now to understand their impact and to be better accountable. I have been particularly impressed by organisations that are seeking to take a systems approach to addressing complex societal challenges and ultimately want to see the end to the need for their services.  Such as the work of Trussell who under the leadership of the brilliant Emma Revie have pivoted from a focus purely on providing food to driving change toward a society in which food banks are not needed.

Without naming names (unless you want to!), what has been the worst?

Many years ago, an organisation that captured client data not by asking the clients themselves to self-report but by the organisations representative filling it in based on their assessment/assumptions of the person! Terrible.

What frustrates you most about people, businesses, organisations trying to achieve impact?

A personal frustration is the challenge we are facing in Samaritans in being able to measure our impact thoroughly enough. The changes we are needing to make in order to gather more of the most helpful data will mean quite a cultural shift for us. It’s the right decision, but the change will need to be managed well for our volunteers and service users.

If you could change anything about how people talk about and report impact, what would it be? 

A move away from outputs and short-term outcomes to long term systems change.