INVESTING IN LEADERSHIP FOR IMPACT AT THE GRASSROOTS

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THE BACKGROUND​

Aynsley works as a Clinical Pharmacist and has been involved in the health sector for more than a decade. She cares about her community and enjoys seeing the positive impact health education intiatives can have on communities, especially those suffering with the effects of inequity.

 

This was one of the reasons she joined Clothed in Love as a volunteer in 2021. Clothed in Love is an organisation that helps Christchurch families in need by providing them with free good quality preloved or new clothing for their children. It was a good fit for Aynsley’s passion for health and community. Even though Aynsley joined to volunteer her time in the operational side of the organisation, helping with sorting and delivering of clothing packages, she was soon invited to join the governance board.

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THE OPPORTUNITY​

Clothed in Love had been started by friends of Aynsley’s, Louisa Stewart and Kim Steetskamp less than a year before Aynsley got involved. The service commenced as a response to a local community need and grew rapidly, involving 60 volunteers who provided over 700 gift packages to children in the first year. This number soon reached over 150 children per month with 80 volunteers. This was a brand new entity run entirely by volunteers in their spare time.

 

No one expected or planned for it to grow so quickly. Aynsley says, “We didn't put our hands up and go, Hey! Let's get bigger, because we knew we couldn't deal with it all ourselves. It wasn't our [regular] job, it was a volunteer run organisation, but we knew the need was there and it was never going to go away easily.”

 

The board were committed to meeting this need, and that meant upskilling themselves and building the systems and capability of the organisation. Aynsley took on the responsibility of leading this development. This was a daunting task as she had never been on a board before. It was at this time that she put her name forward to find a mentor through Mentoring Foundation of NZ.

 

THE MENTORING​

When Aynsley was matched with her Mentor, David Wright, they hit it off immediately and she realised it “was the best thing [she] could have done.” David is an an experienced mentor and business consultant who has spent decades working in strategy, leadership and organisational development within the public and private sector. One of David’s strengths is to listen intentively and help people get their thinking onto the most important topics; the topics that have the biggest impact. That’s exactly what he did for Aynsley.

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Aynsley recalls, “the way he provided clarity from our first meeting. He said, don't think of the organisation, think of you and what you feel you need as a person to allow your confidence to grow.’ Then he said, ‘this will translate into the organisation.” And it did!

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This started with acknowledging their constraints and taking the pressure off themselves to keep growing. “David helped me realise that staying where we were at the time was actually okay because we were all doing 9 to 5 jobs and then doing everything else after hours.” Aynsley states, “There should be no expectation. We sort of put the expectation on ourselves at times.” ​This provided the space for the board to put its energies into being smarter, not bigger, to work on building the foundation and let the growth take care of itself.

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IMPACT FOR THE BOARD​

“The impact for the board, was allowing us to identify that we needed other people with special skills. Using the skills we had and identifying what we were lacking was a huge benefit. It's actually okay to identify, then wait and see who comes forward because we may have had the blinkers on, but now they have been taken off and we're actually looking at the bigger picture.”​​

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"... we may have had the blinkers on, but now they have been taken

off and we're actually looking at the bigger picture.”

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This approach helped them find new board members with ideal skills and experience from within their own volunteer base. They have been able to find people who initially volunteered to sort clothes and help them realise they can offer more value by taking their skills onto the board. They now have a new Chair, new treasurer, and people with skills in HR and funding and grants. This has allowed for role changes within the board, providing more time for some members to step into the operational space, where they prefer volunteering. The result is that people are volunteering their time where they are best suited, where they can have the best impact and where they enjoy it most.

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IMPACT FOR THE ORGANISATION​

All of the above has translated into the organisation. Aynsley explains that “we had a priority to sort and get more volunteers. Upon review though, it wasn’t about just getting more volunteers, it was to get people working smarter. We’ve now got about a hundred active volunteers, compated to about 80 eighteen months ago. But, now volunteers can run sessions themselves, the ownership they're taking is amazing. It just seems to be that the right people are taking the leadership now and just going with it, saying, well, Hey! I've got a couple of hours, does anyone want to join me?

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It’s getting great results in efficiency and in quality of the service. Aynsley shares that the feedback they receive often mentions that “their kindness, their compassion and their professionalism is just exemplary.” People say they “would never know that [Clothed in Love] is not an organisation with large pots of funding.” This is something Aynsley is proud of. The standards are important. Volunteers know it from the start. It’s about respecting the people they are serving by being consistent, being professional and personalising the service. “The end product is always a gift. It's never a handout. It's individualised,” and that matters. There are some non-negotiables. For instance, “clothes have to be folded, they're not just stuffed in a bag. “Everyone involved has at their heart what Clothed in Love values and is all about”

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And it’s not just about the clothing. The impact is broader. Aynsley says that “organisations are coming to us and saying, by you providing a clothing pack, it’s allowing the family to redirect money that they would have spent on a new clothing item, for a child that they might grow out of in three or four months, into their weekly or fortnightly grocery bill.

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IMPACT FOR AYNSLEY​

For Aynsley, it’s given her clarity about how best she can add value. She states, “It's definitely shown me my strengths and my skills are better used, for Clothed in Love, in the background of the organisation. Even though I love the operations side of things and being near the people, identifying areas that we might need to address, helping come up with a plan for how that's addressed, and then delegating it on to be done by someone else, gets better results than personally being bogged down in the operations as well.”

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“It's definitely shown me my strengths and my skills are better used ..."

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It's also given her confidence in her professional space.  David had said to her “You're going to grow in yourself. You're going to learn how to review systems and think strategically and you can use it in lots of other areas of your work.” Aynsley can see how that has happened. For the last 12 weeks, she has been covering part of the Practice Manager role at the medical centre she works with. “I would never have said or thought I could take on my role as the Clinical Pharmacist as well as part of the Practice Manager role, helping run a practice of 2,500+ patients. It’s a huge learning curve, but it’s been okay and a good way to realise  the skills that I've got can translate to somewhere else as well.”

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Without the mentoring, Aynsley believes, “we probably would have grown to a point where we actually would have had to say, we've got to stop, we've got to close the books and catch up. The governance foundation would have been completely put to one side. Everyone would have been so caught up in operations that they would have all burnt out.”

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But instead, Clothed in Love continues to go from strength-to-strength. Aynsley reveals that when she started the mentoring, “we were thinking that there's no way we could get past helping 150 children per month. That was comfortable and we thought maybe roughly about 200 children a month was our absolute maximum limit. We're now averaging about 400 to 450. Wow! The way we're going, by the end of this year, we would have helped 10,000 children. That’s 10,000 individuals. It's not bags of clothing. It's children. It’s important and something to be proud of because “it’s such an incredible achievement that 10,000 children would not have had these packs gifted to them, if Clothed in Love had not existed.”

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" ... The way we're going, by the end of this year, we would have helped

10,000 children. ..."​​