From trustee to Chair

It is my great honour to have been appointed Chair of Libraries Connected. I feel tremendously excited, having enjoyed my initial term as trustee. We have grown a lot as an organisation during those three years. It has been an energising period on many fronts and, during the months and years ahead, the board’s challenge will be to capitalise on and consolidate these advances, despite any obstacles that arise.

We are lucky to have had Ed Jewell as President these past two years – he has been so brilliant in the role – and prior to him (when I first joined the board), Ayub Khan. Last year, after a rigorous independent review, our governance structures were clarified and strengthened. 

Focusing on strategy, governance and sustainability

As Chair-elect, I look forward to working closely not only with our dynamic CEO, Isobel Hunter, and her excellent team, but also the inbound new President. I especially look forward to collaborating with them and our members, alongside my fellow trustees, on the formulation and subsequent implementation of our new strategic plan. This must be bold but also dexterous, grounded by our members’ current reality yet ambitiously forward-facing. It must be a platform that truly empowers Libraries Connected, amplifying its members’ voices with renewed purpose and urgency.

Alongside that future strategic direction of the organisation, its governance and sustainability as a charity are the board’s key responsibilities. We will continue to work in tandem with the Advisory Committee, led by the President, and there will always be a minimum of four member trustees on the board, per our articles, to ensure that we draw upon sector expertise for all decision-making and are always meeting the needs of our members. We are currently recruiting for trustees and are striving to ensure we have the right balance of skills, experience, as well as diversity of opinion, in order to deliver our obligations as a charity as well as advance Libraries Connected’s best interests during the years ahead.  

A life devoted to film, books and charity

My own professional background is in the film industry, as an executive and a producer, but also as an author of anthologies. I grew up around books, my family being writers. I studied English Literature at Oxford University, before starting my career as the runner in a major film company the week after my finals.

I have always sought ways to contribute. My books, for instance – one of which, Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, proved a Sunday Times bestseller – were published by Simon & Schuster, but all in partnership with charities. 

Then, seven years ago – coincidentally, around the same time that the Society of Chief Librarians became Libraries Connected – my wife and I founded our charity, the Lightbulb Trust. At the outset, we focussed on literacy and life chances for younger people in West London, where we live with our own kids. Since then, we have collaborated with 80-some charities and social enterprises across the UK. Our core activities, though, remain place-based and true to those founding priorities.
 

Public libraries: Centres of cohesion and transformation

This background explains, I hope, why I feel so passionately about Libraries Connected. I know that public libraries provide a dizzying range of positive impacts. Not only are they society’s greatest bastions of change, as well as social cohesion – true palaces for the people – but also our safe spaces, available to all and free at the point of use, where we can be alone together and communities can thrive. The network Libraries Connected represents therefore is kinetically powerful. The impact it fosters is monumental, on a daily basis, locally and nationally. Put another way, librarians don’t get nearly enough credit for the transformational impact they have on society. 

I tried, in my own way, to counter this with my podcast, Ex Libris. For it, I met great authors – the likes of Melvyn Bragg, Tessa Hadley, Ken Follett, Candice Carty-Williams – in their most beloved library (or, if they insisted, indie bookshop). They returned to the place that changed their life. We always sat alongside the resident librarian for our conversation. 

Working for our members and their communities

Lockdown put a premature end to the show, but my learnings in making it led, in part, to my application to serve Libraries Connected as a trustee. Ultimately, our responsibility as a board will always be to work in the best interests of our members and, by extension, the communities they serve. This means supporting them, promoting their work, and representing them by amplifying their impact as boldly as possible. I remain humbled to play a part in that crucial enterprise.