Life purpose journey (journal)

[Consept]

Got the urge to journal so why not here? This will be focused on my work/life purpose and I may update it with more developments. Any comments or discussion welcomed. 

For context theres a previous post about finding my life purpose above. 

So I like what im doing atm because it uses the skills ive attained through my life and uses them for what i perceive to be good. My main job is senior fundraising officer for a mental health charity that directly help people with things like OCD and BDD. Essentially i get to raise money for them and bring a bit of structure into the organisation, my strength is using business practices to make more money and based decisions on data whilst keeping everything ethical. In the non-profit sector there are a lot of charities that arent really focused on the business side of things, so this is where the gap lies for me. Most people into business wouldnt really work with charities as they can make lots of money working for private companies.

But the problem for me personally is that its hard to find a charity job thats well paying enough to cover my expenses and allow me to save and grow financially myself. Especially as i only have limited experience. The job I have now is decent but part-time (20 hours per week), and I got it by doing a year as a helpline co-ordinator, which is real frontline work that i couldnt see myself doing for a long period of time. In my current role I'm doing well, its a small team but i have raised the most for years and ive setup really good foundations for the future. Everyone seems to be happy with my work, unless theyre just not telling me lol. 

However i needed to get something else for the rest of the week as I'm struggling to live off a part-time wage. So looking for another job, I applied for many and couldnt get an interview, which i believe was down to less than a year of experience. Its very possible AI just automatically reviews and discards cvs that fall in that bracket. Another thing Ive been looking at is freelancing, going to charities who dont necessarily have the budget for a full on fundraising team but could benefit from having the infrastructure set up and then taught how to maintain it. I came across a youth charity a had spent a few years at helping deliver projects previously. The were looking for a community fundraiser, however it wasnt paid, you just get 10% of what you raise, which looking at the job spec looked completely ridiculous. Anyway, I negotiated with them and managed to get a freelance contract but it was only an initial £500 per month plus the 10%. 

Problem is, its probably the worst run charity ive come across. They have a board of trustees and only 2 permanent staff, both with the titles of assistant manager! You might be asking, where is the manager? There is no manager so I dont know who these guys are assisting. The chairman, in theory, is taking the role as the manager but he really just signs the cheques. There doesnt seem to be any central strategy apart from get in as much money as you can, there are no outcome reports about how many kids theyve helped or how successful their programs have been and theres no process for deciding on what projects should be pursued. One of the 'assistant managers' lets call her Mandy, basically has free reign of whatever she wants to do. She decided to do several projects which literally cost a total of upwards of £30k just off of a whim and all this was signed off by the chairman. 

When i came into the fold i started asking question like 'why are we doing this?' or 'where are the outcomes for this?' and i was never really given any answers. One of the trustees could sense my feelings about the situations and offered to meet with me. When I met her she echoed everything ive been concerned about and suggested there needs to be a manager and I would be suited to fit that role. This was also the view of the other assistant manager, who in my first meeting with him brought up concerns about Mandy and suggested that I should go for that role with his backing. 

Now I dont want to blame Mandy for everything as shes working in this system which is maintained by the board, but I think what irks me a bit is that shes on a contract for 30 hours a week and I'm not convinced she even does 10, in my view shes making a lot of money out of this charity whcih is not really deserved. 

My master plan now is to maneuver to this management role, the difficulty is convincing the chair, while also managing Mandys emotions so she doesnt fight against this change even though ultimately she wont be better off if I get it (the charity will be of course). So I have the trustee and he other am who've slightly warmed the chair up for me and then Ive set up a meeting with him next week and prepared evidence that we've literally lost money due to not having proper reporting to show funders, as well as how having a structure will give contingency to the charity and a stronger foundation, ultimately helping many more kids. 

I have a meeting with Mandy today in a couple of hours and the meeting with the chair is next week. I genuinely believe me getting the role would help the charity immensely and, I cant lie it would help me financially as it would be more money for me and mean i can just focus on the work without worrying about financial pressures.  If I didnt get it or if they didnt at the very least put someone into a manager position, I would leave. Not straight away but I'd look for a job or freelance work and as soon as i got something, I'd make my exit. 

So stay tuned for part 2, I could either be the manager of a local youth charity that has a long history or I could be at odds with the assistant manager and have a plan to leave.

 

[Olaf]

@Consept so she is getting paid 30 hours for working 10 hours? Wow. I knew these chairities are not to be trusted, that is redicilous. 

[Ulax]

Great stuff man

[Consept]

On 08/10/2026 at 1:55 PM, Olaf said:

@Consept so she is getting paid 30 hours for working 10 hours? Wow. I knew these chairities are not to be trusted, that is redicilous. 

I dont know officially but by my calculation its something like that which is crazy. But I don't want to blame charities as a whole or make it seem like this is normal. The other charity that i work at, they make sure every £ they spend is used effectively and get the most out of staff. To be honest in that job im probably underpaid in the sense of if i did the same thing at a private or corporate and get a lot more. 

What I would say though is that if the charity isnt run and structured properly, it can very easily be open to abuse. This would be the case if you had a situation at any organisation, where there isnt sufficient oversight. So no one checking member of staffs work and the hours they do for example, is really a gamble, you might get someone who even does more than the hours or you might get someone who just takes the piss and does as little as possible.

On 08/10/2026 at 3:30 PM, Ulax said:

Great stuff man

Thank you bro, really good to hear from you! Hope you're doing well

[Consept]

Updates - 

Ill try and keep it as succinct as possible- 

Mandy meeting - I thought it would be quite bad, i think it was worse. Main takeaways are she was very defensive with certain basic questions i was asking. I wanted to understand what she did, how much it cost and what were the outcomes of her work. At first she was very weary of me, the impression i was getting is, in her head shes saved the charity and done all this amazing stuff and she doesnt want someone coming in and changing her setup. She said specifically she doesnt think someone could come in as she doesnt like being told what to do, she wasnt specifically talking about me and i didnt mention anything about becoming manager. Although she mentioned it on 3 separate occasions, which was strange. She said she didnt really think about the future which was another red flag. She didnt think there were that many problems with the charity, the only thing she thought would improve the charity would be more funds to recruit more youth workers. 

She also claimed that youth workers theyve had previously were lazy and in fact had something negative to say about most other people in the organisation, another red flag. After she sent me some of the bids that shes done which were all written terribly to the point where she wrote her name in the place where it was supposed to be the orgs name. But apart from mistakes they just didnt have much coherence, budgets didnt make sense etc. 

Meeting with the board - this meeting was the following week. With the chairman mostly and a trustee whos really championing me. This was interesting, i asked the chair what they thought were the issues with the charity first to see if we were on the same page and if they saw it as enough of an issue to actually get a manager in. So thank God, yes he said exactly what i wanted him to say! 

I highlighted the issues that ive found and put myself forward for the role, to which they confirmed that i would be the main candidate. Obviously this is all great news. They later met up themselves plus another trustee to discuss and yeah apparently all good news. Its not confirmed yet, ive still got to have another meeting with them, mainly to just iron out the details but they do want to wrap things up by the end of the month. The one spanner and im not sure how its going to be resolved, the other assistent manager is probably closer to leaving than i thought and he wants to change to a consultancy position to help transition the charity for him leaving and help with the structure. My worry is the board might feel they dont really need him to do that if im kind of doing it anyway, but to be fair to him he has done a lot for the charity and deserves something for it like this type of contract, hes been here for over 10 years at this point. 

So im gonna have to have a think and see where things go. But hopefully it will work itself out. What im finding a bit tricky is the charity needs to basically be ripped up and rebuilt but in that process some people might not be happy about that, so its trying to keep them happy at least til we have a decent structure in place, a lot of people management basically. 

Generally positive though so will update after the next meeting.