WCIT Charity

The work behind the timeline

The dates above record the headline changes. Behind them lay a longer process of judgement, collaboration and institution-building - deciding where limited funds could make the greatest difference, bringing professional expertise alongside financial support, and ensuring that successful programmes could continue without depending on any one person.

Strategy, governance and stewardship

The first real challenge I faced as Chair was not how to expand, but how to protect the Charity. When Covid made the financial outlook uncertain, the Board suspended discretionary grant-making while honouring commitments already made. I chaired the risk response, including close oversight of the two major awards to CALM and Missing People. Careful reforecasting, cost control and donor support meant that the feared loss did not materialise, and grant-making reopened in 2021.

That experience reinforced the need for a longer horizon. At the end of 2021, Peter Cordery facilitated a strategic review in which trustees collectively examined and refined the Charity’s purpose, priorities and ambitions. I formally proposed the resulting strategy, secured the Board’s agreement and led its implementation. It gave us a clearer basis for increasing grant size, developing longer-term programmes and making more deliberate choices about where a specialist technology charity could have the greatest effect.

The strategy was accompanied by practical governance reform. I proposed the Charity’s first full benchmark against the Charity Governance Code, implemented by the Clerk and Charity Coordinator. Trustee recruitment was opened to the wider WCIT membership for the first time in institutional memory and I took responsibility for the induction of new trustees. We also clarified trustee terms, strengthened grant criteria and made the Board’s approach more systematic and transparent.

More than grant-making

The Charity’s most distinctive work combined three things: funding, professional expertise and the ability to bring people together. We described this as 'funding plus'. A grant might enable a project to begin, while WCIT members contributed practical help with systems, data, cyber security, procurement or digital strategy. Convening charities and technologists allowed experience gained in one organisation to benefit many others.

AI4C became the clearest example. It grew from a learning exchange associated with the two £300,000 Charity IT Awards made to CALM and Missing People in 2018. Rather than allowing the lessons from those projects to remain inside two organisations, the exchange created a trusted, vendor-neutral setting in which charities could discuss the practical use of artificial intelligence: what worked, what failed and what they wished they had known at the outset.

The programme’s development was collective. Maxine Ricketts made a major contribution to its establishment and later Paul Excell and Serena Chaudhry Pandey took programme leadership and Board oversight roles. My contribution as Chair was to recognise the value of the model, support its development and help put governance around it without trying to own it. AI4C grew from 14 participating charities in 2019 to 82 by the end of 2025, with leadership and momentum of its own.

Investing in knowledge and talent

Some of the Charity’s longest-lasting work has been about people and knowledge rather than conventional project funding. In 2015, during my first period as a trustee, the WCIT University IT Awards began recognising exceptional undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the UK. Academic achievement mattered, but so did resilience, enterprise and contribution to the wider community. The awards ran for seven years.

When the scheme was reviewed under the 2021 strategy, the Board retained its underlying purpose but considered how support could become deeper and more sustained. In 2022 it brought the awards in their existing form to an end and established a working group to develop a national PhD bursary. I helped commission and govern that transition, resisted pressure to rush unresolved questions, and served on the panel selecting the first recipient. The first bursary was awarded in 2024 and a second followed in 2025, supporting research intended to use technology for public benefit.

The Young Coders Competition provided a different kind of opportunity. After an initial allocation of £700 for prizes in 2022, I recommended that the Board provide a further £9,300 as one-off support, accompanied by regular reporting and a clear expectation that the organisers demonstrate the programme’s impact. I continued to follow its delivery and later worked with the WCIT’s Education and Training Committee and the Institution of Engineering and Technology to explore a sustainable long-term home for the competition. It was an example of the balance we were trying to achieve: being prepared to support a promising idea while remaining clear about evidence, accountability and what would be needed for it to endure.

The IT Livery Company Professorship at Gresham College formed another strand of the same commitment. Established with WCIT support in 2015, it made expert thinking about technology freely available through public lectures and recordings. I participated in the collective funding decision as a trustee and later helped steward the continuing relationship as Chair. In my final year, the Charity also provided seed funding for IT Pathfinder, a free technology-careers resource developed by members of the WCIT Financial Services Technology Panel, led by Julia George.

Scale, transparency and difficult choices

Across my chairmanship, the Charity’s accounts record £1.5 million in grant funding. Its beneficiary analysis reported 16,398 direct and 321,364 indirect beneficiaries - approximately 340,000 in total. The 117 awards and projects in the Charity’s grant register reached organisations from Scotland through several English regions, giving the Charity national reach well beyond its City of London home.

Scale also appeared in the applications that could not be funded. In 2025 alone, 540 applications sought more than £6 million. The Charity made 12 grants that year. Those figures represent many strong proposals and difficult decisions, not simply unmet ambition. They made clear why strategy, evidence and unambiguous criteria mattered. My position was that, if an organisation was to be excluded from consideration, the reason should be definite and capable of being explained.

The Charity also began publishing grants through the 360Giving Data Standard and adopted an Open Data Policy. That allowed applicants, members and other funders to examine its decisions more easily. Transparency did not make the choices simpler, but it made the Charity more accountable for them. An organisation asking applicants to explain what they would do with charitable money should be equally willing to explain how it had allocated its own.

What the period added up to

Across more than twelve years as a director and trustee, including six and a half years as Chair, I provided sustained voluntary leadership through a period of significant institutional change. I proposed and secured adoption of the Charity’s long-term strategy and led its implementation; helped establish full governance benchmarking; widened trustee recruitment; supported open publication of grant data; and chaired difficult decisions through Covid and rapidly rising demand. My role was active rather than ceremonial, but the work remained collective: trustees, staff, donors, volunteers, programme leaders and partner organisations turned decisions into public benefit.

The result was a distinctive national contribution at the intersection of technology and civil society. The Charity combined grant funding with professional expertise and shared learning; reported approximately 340,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries during my chairmanship; and supported organisations across the country. AI4C grew from 14 participating charities to 82, the Gresham Professorship continued to make expert knowledge freely available through the College’s international platform (whose YouTube channel had 451,000 subscribers as at September 2026) and the University IT Awards evolved into sustained national support through two PhD bursaries. These were different expressions of the same purpose: using technological knowledge and resources to create wider public benefit.

The outcome I value most is the lasting strength of the institution. When I stepped down, the Board had been renewed, governance and grant-making processes had been strengthened, AI4C had independent programme leadership, and established and emerging programmes were able to continue. The Charity did not need to start again with a new Chair. It had a clear purpose, functioning systems and people ready to take its work into the next phase.