002 When to Leave the Org You Founded | Sanctuary Foundation CEO Dr. Krish Kandiah

On this episode of The Nonprofit CEO Podcast, hosts Adam Jeske and Krish Kandiah dive into the complex, consequential decisions that shape nonprofit leadership. Krish Kandiah, founder of the Sanctuary Foundation and a key figure in driving the UK’s response to refugee crises, shares his journey from fostering children in his own home to influencing national policy and launching innovative charities. Together, they explore the challenges of starting organizations rooted in personal conviction, navigating government relationships, and leading through changing political landscapes. Listeners will hear candid reflections on letting go as a founder, inspiring large-scale community action, and maintaining a focus on what really matters—caring for the most vulnerable. This episode is packed with practical wisdom for nonprofit leaders grappling with funding constraints, sector competition, and the ever-present question of how to create lasting impact.

Transcript

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Nonprofit CEOs are constantly making consequential decisions, often under pressure or in isolation. I'm Adam Jeske, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor, and this is the Nonprofit CEO Podcast, where CEOs talk about the decisions they carry. Today, our guest is Dr. Krish Kandaya. He's based in the UK, and for our US-based listeners, the nonprofit landscape there looks a bit different. Charities work much more closely with government as operational partners., and the regulatory environment is more hands-on. But the decisions that Krish has faced through his career will sound familiar to those of us who are principally based in the US. Krish is the founder of the Sanctuary Foundation, a UK charity that helped shape Britain's response to the UK refugee crisis, including securing 29,000 hosting pledges before the government's own program launched. He's advised the UK Home Office and Foreign Office, chaired a national government board on adoption, and authored a stack of books. He's also a global ambassador for World Vision International. Krish builds small organizations that produce tremendous impact, so much so that he's been recognized by the British Crown for his contributions to public life. Today, Krish and I are talking about the decisions in that process. Krish, welcome to the Nonprofit CEO Podcast. Hey, Adam, lovely to see you again. I think we were in Mexico hanging out in the sunshine last time we were together. Yes, this is a very different environment, at least in the winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. Hey, first up, just tell me about a consequential decision that you've navigated as a founder or CEO. You have a few different chapters to choose from and I'll take whatever feels the richest. Well, a lot of our decisions as a family have actually influenced the nonprofits that we've founded. So I must go back 19 years. My wife asked me if we could foster or adopt children. We'd already had 3 birth children in 3 years and they were like 4, 5, and 6 at the time. And I thought we were done, like 3 and done seems pretty reasonable. So, um, I was quite resistant, but a few things happened. Some friends of ours in their 60s became foster parents, and I thought, oh man, if they can do that in their 60s, maybe I could do this in our 30s. I became aware of some of the statistics around children who grow up in the care system that don't get a kind of loving family, and sadly they're overrepresented in our homeless population, in our prison population, and in our sexually exploited population. And those are things I care about. And so I was thinking, hang on, if I'm someone who cares about people in prison or people being trafficked, or homeless, maybe I should get involved before the system chews them up and spits them out. Why don't I get involved when they're a 3-year-old? And then my faith is really important to me. So, you know, it was like every time I opened the Bible, it had something to say about vulnerable children, widows and orphans. I thought, okay, I'm in. So we became foster parents 19 years ago, and I'd been working as a theologian, teaching theology at Oxford University.. But this experience of welcoming first a little baby and then over the years, 30 children into our home, it redirected the course of our lives. And we saw firsthand the positive difference that a loving family can make to children in the care system. And then I thought, okay, they're just, why don't people know about this? Why aren't even people thinking about fostering or adoption? And I realized there needed to be a whole kind of narrative shift around this area. For a lot of people, we advertise fostering as a great way to earn money if you've got a spare room. If you're driving down the highway, you might see a bus in front of you in the UK that says, earn $25,000 a year being a foster parent. I thought, wow, that instrumentalizes children. It makes them a means to an end. I'm not comfortable with that. And in the UK, adoption is primarily seen as something you do if you can't have birth children. And that it's led to a real imbalance. We've got a lot of approved adopters who don't want or aren't, don't feel capable of taking the children that are actually in the system because they really want a baby and the children that are there are not babies. So, you know, they're older children, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And so that, that experience of seeing the problem, uh, I felt we needed to step in. And so we didn't just foster children. I launched a fostering and adoption charity. Trying to re-narrate that whole thing that says, actually, this is, this is not about finding children for families who need a child. This is about families stepping up for children. Um, and lots of families from all sorts of backgrounds could, could make a difference. And it led me to working very closely, as you say, with the government, because they are the corporate parent of every child in the care system. And so I, I could get passionate with whichever kind of political stream was in power. I could get passionate to say, actually, there are things that we could do together for the sake of these children. So I launched a charity and ended up becoming a government advisor in that space. But the consequential decision was my wife saying, I think we should foster an adult. Tell me about the decision to launch a charity around that personal decision. A lot of people go through that and end up launching something. You've done it a couple of times, but tell us how you decided to move from, we have this deep personal commitment, observing the need at a wider level and I'm going to do something about that? Well, it's a good question, Adam. I think I spent a long time looking for who else was doing this, uh, because there are too many charities in the UK, hundreds of thousands of charities, most of them really struggling and a lot of duplication. And I thought if someone else is doing this, I'll just add value to whatever they're doing. So I went around, knocked on the door of loads of CEOs, loads of charities, tried to persuade those that were in adjacent decent spaces, whether they could take this on. And in the end, no one really was up for it. And so that, that massive gap bugged me. I also noticed that a lot of the people in the rooms that were talking about the care system didn't have any lived experience. They weren't, you know, former foster children or adopted children or foster parents or adoptive parents. And that bugged me too, because a lot of the time we were talking about this need. And the whole system just wasn't child-centered. It was based on, well, what will the doctors do? Or how can we, how can we save money? And I thought, we're asking the wrong questions. We really need to center the needs of children. They're the most important people in this whole system. So let's build a charity that's going to promote and speak up for the needs of children. That, that was a real tipping point for us. And programmatically, how do things look today? Well, in the fostering and adoption space, it's— I wish we'd fixed it, right? It was really, really tough. I think we did see a big change in a couple of spaces. So the first was I really focused on the faith community. Um, you know, loads of people could make great foster parents or adoptive parents, but in the work I was doing as a theologian, I had some platform. I was speaking regularly at large conferences. I was a kind of had some presence in the kind of Christian media landscape. And I did the maths, right? There were about 5,000 children that were waiting for adoption, and there was a shortage of 9,000 foster families across the UK. And I thought, look, I know there's at least 20,000 churches that would be up for this. I just need one new family per church to foster or adopt, the rest of the church to wrap around them, and we could meet the entire need. Again, not saying that Christians are the only people that should be doing this,. But that was a compelling ask to my community to play their part. And so we, we kind of launched a charity into that space. I was on every platform you could imagine. We wrote a book into the space and we did shift the needle. I mean, it, it, it's amazing. Like just yesterday I was speaking at a conference and someone came up to me and said, look, we're foster parents because of, you know, we read your book or we came to a seminar that one of your team members did. And you think, brilliant. You know, we, we saw a tipping point. But I think at one stage there was a real crisis in the care system, and I was asked to apply for this government role. And this was another really big decision for me actually, because I needed to leave the charity that I founded, which had become like our seventh child, right? Because we had six already. And, and suddenly I was being asked to lead this government body. And again, because no one in that government body had any personal experience, it really bugged me. And I felt, you know, I'm made for this role. So handed my charity on to new leadership. That's always a tough challenge. And, you know, as a founder, you can get in the way of the next CEO and, you know, you cast a long shadow and you don't want to do that. Even when you're trying to do the right thing, it can be misread. And oh man, so turned the page, cheered them on, and then started to work with the government, and that was a different government to the one that we have now. I work very closely with the government we have now. It's a different color. So we had a blue government before for Conservatives, a red government now for Labour. I'll work with anybody who has the responsibility for vulnerable children, as we'll see refugees as well. And I found a way to find common ground with whichever political flavor is in power, because this is not about party politics. This is about great citizenship. It's about caring for the most vulnerable people in society. And so, yeah, that, that the sector is still broken, but the church has entered the field of play in a way that it didn't before. And that, that's really encouraging to me. That's an interesting moment to decide to leave an organization that you founded that feels like a child that you've been raising up that you start to see it's, it's growing, you see where it can go. I was talking with a CEO yesterday from an organization that had been in place about the same amount of time, like wasn't brand new and has made the decision to stay, like wants to be there long-term. Who knows if something will come up, some other opportunity that pulls that person away. How did you make that decision? Like go inside your head back at that juncture. You've alluded to some of the dynamics, but how did you make a decision to leave an organization that you founded, you had put your blood, sweat, and tears into, you cared about the outcomes, it was going well and growing. How do you actually decide what's the calculus you run to choose to leave? Yeah, it, it wasn't easy for sure. A few things helped me. One was I gave a talk at an event and not long after someone gave the charity £3 million, right? So I mean, that's unthinkable in America. Big philanthropy is not that unusual, but still pretty unusual in the UK. It's kind of unheard of. And I thought, oh my goodness, we're never gonna be in a stronger financial position for me to leave. I'm leaving them with, you know, money in the bank for years to come. And it's hard because when you start a charity, you start it at your kitchen table with a laptop and your cat and your wife, and that's all you got. And, you know, no money. And so you're thinking, you know, finally, but to be able to give that away was actually quite exciting. But the metaphor in my head was, again, borrowed from NASA, I suppose, you know, when they're launching a satellite into space, right? Off goes the rocket boosters and it launches it into space. If the rocket boosters leave too early, then the satellite doesn't make orbit, right? If the rocket boosters stay on too long, then it doesn't make orbit either and it goes spinning out into space. So there's a kind of critical moment, like I'm good at being a starter, a kind of initiator, you know, I can grow things, I can spot a need, but to sustain and keep things just plodding on, that's harder for my skillset. Um, and if I stayed, I might push them off the wrong orbit. Does that, does that make sense? So that, that was a metaphor. And again, I wanted to get that right. Don't leave too early. Okay. 3 million in the bank is pretty good. Great reputation with government, great brand presence in the sector, you know, trusted voice. All of those things were in place. Um, so to be able to leave and know it's going to carry on is really encouraging. I want them to win. I want them to thrive. It's difficult though, because, you know, a bit like a child going to university, you hope they'll phone home every now and again. And when they don't, you're like, oh, I think, but it's, you know, I think that's every founder's dilemma, how long to stay and, you know, when, when to leave. And what kind of decisions have you navigated in the Sanctuary Foundation, your current organization, which you also founded a number of years ago? You've been there a while. It's been growing. Lots of good governmental connections in this UK system. Discussed. Tell me about a consequential decision within your current organization. Well, the founding of Sanctuary was an interesting experience itself. So I'd been leading a charity, Home for Good. My government role was not a full-time role. It was one day a week. So I had four days spare and no income. And I don't know what government roles are like in the UK, but they don't, they don't pay so that you can work for one day. You need income. And I had a, I still have a really big growing family. So I was really quite, you know, wondering what to do. How am I going to be useful? And yet I still felt it was the right kind of move to kind of take on this role. And a few things happened. One was the UK opened its borders to people from Hong Kong. There'd been lots of political changes in Hong Kong since China's takeover, a lot of clamping down on democracy. People like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai were put in prison for speaking up I mean, Jimmy Lai has just been given, you know, another few decades in prison even though he's an elderly man. So it was a really difficult situation. Someone phoned me and they just said, we've got all these young dissidents that have fled Hong Kong. Could, could you help them? And I'm like, why? What do they need? And how's this going to work out? And anyway, long story short, we ended up running an intervention to help Hong Kongers feel welcome and settled in the UK. The expectation was 100,000 Hong Kongers would come in the first year, which would be the largest migration to the UK from outside of Europe since the Windrush generation that came from the Caribbean. And that did not go well. There were all sorts of ongoing scandals about racism and injustice, and our prime minister nearly had to resign over it. So it was a huge scandal, but someone made a report that said, look, here are some lessons learned.. And I thought, I wonder if we could take those lessons learned and get everything we got wrong with the Windrush generation right for the Hong Kongers. And it was really quite pronounced because we'd had COVID lockdown. Let's not name him, but some important American senior government official had described COVID as Hong Kong flu-y and Chinese virus. And there'd actually been people attacked on the streets of the UK who looked like they were from Southeast Asia.. And so they needed someone to kind of wrap around them and support them. And so we mobilized community groups, churches to be the welcoming team for what ended up being 200,000 people coming from Hong Kong in the middle of lockdown. We were able to run all sorts of things. The government funded this welcome and integration program. They didn't care it was the church or not the church. They just said, you are our route to scale. We can help. So, you know, in we came. And that went really well. And then I got a phone call from the Home Office, which is, I think, your, what is your equivalent? Is it the Homeland Security? Is that, would that be your? That's certainly part of it. I don't think it maps cleanly to any specific governmental office. They're in charge of who gets a visa and who doesn't. Um, so anyway, our Home Office phoned and they said, great job with Hong Kong. Could you help us with Afghans? The US and the UK, we'd pulled out of Afghanistan. And suddenly we'd left behind a whole bunch of people who had been our interpreters, our security, and they were in real danger of death from the Taliban. And so we evacuated about 25,000 of our kind of former colleagues in Afghanistan, all local Afghan people. And the phone call came from the Home Office, said, look, we've got 3,000 Afghans going to 30 hotels tomorrow. 'Can you help us?' And I'm like, seriously, give me one day notice. What are you guys like? But sure, we'll do what we can. And then this was my favorite conversation with the Home Office. They said, 'Well, where are you?' And I said, 'Well, we're the church, right? We're in every single village, town, and city. There

are communities of Christians that have got two jobs in life: 17:08

love God and love their neighbor. And refugee, Afghan, Muslim people coming to the UK, they're our neighbors. Just show us where to go and we'll help.'. And so we set up a kind of rapid response to that. And all this time I was trying to operate outside of a charity. I thought I could just be a playmaker. I'll bring charities together and, you know, bring a bit of coordination. So with Hong Kongers, it was 3 charities working together. With Afghans, it was 3 different charities working together to provide that kind of support. We ended up, um, supporting volunteers to go into the hotels, do a basic needs assessment of the Afghans. No one had done that before. They'd just been kind of kettled and herded around as almost like cattle, which was really, really tough. I mean, one, one guy, his two children had bullet wounds that were not seen by anyone, and he'd been in the country in quarantine for 10 days. No one had seen these bullet wounds. So the local vicar got this dad and his two sons in the car, took him down to the local doctor's general practitioner. And the nurse faints because she's never seen a kid with bullet wounds, right? So all of this, and I mean, this basic needs assessment, that was beautiful because we found out things that we didn't know. So, you know, I hadn't, we knew they might not have the right clothes or the right shoes for the UK, but we wouldn't have guessed that they needed pushchairs and prams, um, or strollers. I think that's what you call them in America. Wheelchairs. A lot of the Afghans had 6 children and 2 of them would be babes in arms, which meant they couldn't actually physically leave the hotel without us. So we didn't know, but we went in with a kind of humble spirit, just asking, particularly the women and the children, what was needed. Set up an Amazon wishlist. So, you know, these were the actual things that people needed and Amazon would deliver it to the church or the community center that was going to provide the help. And it would be delivered personally. To the family. We had about 30,000 items bought off of this Amazon wishlist with all the fears people have about overheads and charities creaming things off. You know what, I'm buying a pushchair that's actually gonna go to a family was very empowering. Anyway, so all of this was fantastic. What I found, and maybe other charity CEOs would relate to this, is that the big charities, the big kind of huge NGOs, couldn't adapt to this current need. It was so quick, like, hey, we've got a need on Friday, and then the next few weeks we're just full on doing this. The big charities didn't have the capacity to turn around, but the little ones did. And the little ones, if you like, the big charities were like ocean liners, right? Or oil tankers, like big turning circle, couldn't, couldn't change. But the little charities were like dinghies, right? They could just turn on a sixpence and be ready, which was fantastic. The problem happened though, was one of the little charities, someone needed to hold the money that was coming in. They, we didn't even do a lot of fundraising, but people saw it on the news every day and they said, want to give, want to help. And so money started to come in and someone needed to hold the money and I couldn't hold the money because I wasn't a charity. I'm a playmaker. So one of the charities ended up holding the money, but a small charity receiving a lot of money. I mean, more money than they would normally receive in 5 years. They got in 2 weeks. That was problematic. That was like an elephant in a dinghy. It destabilized the little charity and their board rightly got, oh my goodness, we need to just grab this money. And they couldn't kind of work out that we were working in partnership. So I learned a lot of lessons from that and reluctantly started a new charity, Sanctuary Foundation, because we were good at that mass mobilization, handling the data, mobilizing. Civil society, engaging with media, engaging with government, and we could hold the money and then grant make to other smaller charities, and they weren't needing to cope with all the money all at once. And that, that seemed to make a big difference. And our first use case was Ukraine, and we can talk about that more if you want to, but that was the biggest refugee movement of people to the UK in our entire history, and something incredible happened. And so again, our model needed to change again. But that, that was our experience. And it was hard because when you're trying to work at scale and pace, it's frustrating. The big guys can't help you. Little charities have different challenges to the big guys. And I was just navigating that for the first time. As you think about your leadership in a few different roles and organizations, but really paying attention to the same issues most of the time. It's this love of neighbor that you've talked about. What are the areas that you find yourself wrestling with most frequently? Sometimes people would, would point to fundraising. Some would say it's finding the right people to help with the work. Sometimes in your case, maybe it's the governmental dynamics and relationships. Where do you find yourself befuddled or flummoxed or just kind of chewing on a question? Oh man, so many. Um, I mean, you mentioned fundraising. I think globally we're seeing a huge challenge in fundraising. Some of it kind of triggered by the domino effect. At least this is my perspective. When the US and the UK, we cut our international aid budgets, that had a huge impact on, you know, large NGOs that were providing that or you know, bodies like UNICEF or World Food Program or World Health Organization or big guys like, you know, World Vision and World Relief. Now all of those were impacted and then suddenly they're now fishing in the same sea as the other charities that weren't receiving international government aid. And so there's more competition for that limited funds and the fund is getting smaller because in the UK, The cost of living is going up. People feel like they haven't got as much disposable income, and all the grant agencies are under a lot of stress. So money is really tight. Um, I guess for me, the frustration is that sometimes funders can be persuaded to prop things up that have done things in the same way, the historic things. And you know, I'm, in lots of ways, I'm a cultural conservative. I, I, I think institutions need to be preserved. They, they're great. But I also think they need to adapt. And so it frustrates me that, you know, we're, we're 3 people in our charity and none of us are full-time. And we were able to help mobilize, as you mentioned, you know, 29,000 people to host Ukrainian refugees. That's never happened in Britain's history before. And those 29,000 were actually seeds that allowed the government to say, you know what, we can do this. And we ended up as the UK. Welcoming over 200,000 Ukrainians. We've never done that. And we welcomed them into our homes, not into a refugee camp. People who had never helped refugees before opened their homes to strangers, looked after them for a minimum of 6 months, but most of them did it for 2 years. I mean, can you imagine like some new person living in your house? Most of us wouldn't want our in-laws living in our house, let alone a complete stranger. It was incredible. And yet You know, the traditional refugee charities really resisted it. They were like, I don't know, the kind of London taxi cab drivers, you know, those guys that have spent 2 years training to be a taxi driver. And then along comes Uber and you don't need 2 years anymore. And so they're quite resistant to this new kind of insurgent technology. And that's how it felt with refugee resettlement. In that suddenly, you know, people who'd never cared, never done anything, were welcoming refugees, and it upset the existing model. So there was now not just competition for funding, but competition for supremacy. And that really frustrated me too, because you go, hold on, we're refugee charities, we're all about welcoming, how can we be fighting each other? And sometimes, you know, those two things collide. So Sometimes a funder or the government will put out a competitive funding bid, which is basically creating the Hunger Games in our sector because there's a pot of money. And then people will say, oh, you know, welcoming Ukrainian refugees, that's rubbish, don't like that. But then suddenly there's some money available and people who didn't care now care and they can kind of fight their way in. So I think that those twin things for me, you know, this lack of funding coupled with, you know, a lack of reporting on impact, looking for innovation, that kind of conservatism. We'll give to what we've always given to rather than give to what works. Plus the kind of inter-sector competitiveness and politicking. I thought those are really draining for me as a CEO because we just want to get stuff done. We just want to help people. And I'm always keen to work in alliance. That's my kind of MO whenever possible. But sometimes that's not easy because people have to show that they're different from everyone else in order to win the competitive funding. So it's a shame. We actually make things kind of harder on ourselves. I often think about the nonprofit sector as the sector of love because of its extending the sort of care to neighbor like you're talking about. But then in the actual operations, you sometimes end up with these cannibalistic tendencies or weird competitive tendencies rather than how do we work together to achieve the outcomes that are beyond any of us individually as organizations or as funders. It's dispiriting sometimes because, I mean, you mentioned the spaces I'm interested in and they are hospitality is the golden thread for me. So fostering adoption, hospitality towards vulnerable children. Refugee resettlement, hospitality to refugees, often in your home, at least in your country, in your community. And the other space is related, it's child welfare reform internationally. We don't need there to be orphanages anymore. Orphanages actually are damaging to children. But in all three of those sectors, I've seen that elbows out, we say in the UK, competitiveness. And actually, the problems are so huge, we need all of us on the field., right? If it's like The Hunger Games where only one person wins the money, they are incapable of fixing the challenge and actually helping all the people that need it. But together we could. So, you know, I'd rather have an Avengers assemble moment where we think, actually, let's all play to our strengths with each other for this common goal. But we've created almost like a free market fight. And And, you know, there's a bit in the Bible where it says to be as innocent as doves and as cunning as snakes, right? So I don't want to be naive about this. There are economic realities, but I still, I still believe there's more that we can do together. Let's shift gears into something of a lightning round, some quick questions. Come on. Yeah, let's do it. What do you wish someone had told you before you were leading a charity? I think the key thing I needed to know is how important the relationship between the CEO and the chair of the board is. If there was only one relationship, that's probably the most important one. And when that relationship is great, it's fantastic. And I think I took for granted a close relationship. I had a really great relationship with most of my chair of boards and they were, you know, fellow travelers with me, but One time it wasn't great and it was so terrible it nearly ended me as a, as a leader. So that relationship is absolutely crucial. It's almost like a marriage relationship. Don't go into it too quickly. Date around, find the right person, and then commit. Tell me a couple of books that have been formative for you and your leadership in the sector. Oh, that's a good one. I'm a voracious reader, and so asking for a few books is hard. It's like choosing your favorite child, which is obviously impossible. I'll tell you one that I read recently. It was called Waging a Good War, and it was a military historian's analysis of the civil rights movement. And I found it electric because, um, the civil rights movement under, you know, people like Rosa Parks and John Lewis and Martin Luther King, they brought such an incredible sea change. Like, if you think about social change in the world, that was one of the biggest ones to be accomplished in, you know, recent history. And to have a military analysis of it was absolutely fantastic. Because a lot of the work we, I'm in, you know, fostering adoption, refugee resettlement, actually you don't just want to deliver a service, you want to release a social movement. And so I've been leaning into those social movements to try and understand them as best I can. And that was a great one. So Waging a Good War was a fantastic book. Um, I do read a lot of the management books. Um, you know, I think From Good to Great, Jim Collins was an important one for me and that kind of the hedgehog principle. You know, what is it that you and only you are going to be good at? I think that really helped me in a lot of leadership positions, actually, because there was one moment I had to choose between leading a theological college or leading a charity. And the question I asked myself was, actually, there's a lot of people out there that can lead theological colleges, but there's very few people that have my lived experience that could lead this charity. And so that, that book really helped me kind of make that decision. What's a quote or concept that often comes to mind as you're going about your, your life as a leader? Oh, one a friend of mine gave to me from— she was working in autism, uh, you know, helping children with autism. And it's probably come from somewhere else. I can't pin down who, who's, who coined it. The phrase is, nothing about us without us. Uh, I was at a meeting last week at the German embassy, which was looking at why there are so many people in the UK and in Germany who leave school and then are not in education, employment, or training. And they had big bosses there. I mean, the German ambassador was there, the head of some of our big corporate companies, Bosch and Airbus, they're all there. And they're all talking about young people. And I thought, you know what, why are we talking about young people? Why aren't there some young people actually in the room telling us? And that phrase has really shaped my thinking. So, you know, there are councils of reference that we've built into our charity that are made up of refugees. Because we don't want to work for or on behalf of, we want to work with refugees. So on Monday, I'm going to 10 Downing Street, the home of our Prime Minister, with a petition on behalf of 7,000 Ukrainian refugees. But I didn't write the petition and ask the refugees to sign it. They wrote it and I helped amplify their voice. So nothing about us without us is really important to us as a charity. Is there a piece of conventional wisdom in leadership or management or elsewhere in the sector that you ignore? Yeah, loads. I mean, basically I realize you can get a lot more done with a small organization than a big one. A big one, often you have so many mouths to feed. Like both economically, you've got to find enough money to cover everybody's salary and you can actually be more impactful with less. There was a little video I watched a while ago and it was 100 schoolchildren playing soccer against 3 professional Korean footballers. And guess who wins? They just passed the ball over everybody. I thought, oh man, I mean, having less people in our organization really changed our thinking. So for example, we're really good in an emergency, right? You've heard how we mobilize people from all sorts of sectors, often from churches, but way beyond the church as well. And when there isn't an emergency, what do we do? And we model ourselves a bit on the fire brigade, right? They're great in a fire, great in an emergency, but when there isn't a fire, they don't just sit around doing nothing. They pivot to education. So that's where we've gone. We pivot to education, but we're 3 people, none of us full-time. How many schools could we visit? I mean, if we wanted to visit all the schools in the UK, We'd have to hire like tens or hundreds of people to do it. But we thought, well, we haven't got tens or hundreds of people. So we put on a live assembly that's like a broadcast and get schools to join it. And so the biggest one we ever did was for Black History Month, because sadly racism and xenophobia are linked to how people respond to immigration. And so let's, let's jump on with that. And we had 350,000 children come to our assembly. Right. And, and if I'd had 100 staff, I would have sent them all to schools. It would have cost a lot of money. Um, but I could get the message out to more people because we had less people and therefore I had to rethink how we do what we do. So that's my conventional wisdom. You don't actually need a large organization in order to have a big impact. One of my core beliefs is that constraints breed creativity. Yeah, I like that. Great example of it. Dr. Krish Kandiah, CEO and founder of The Sanctuary Foundation. What do you love about what you do? Oh man, there's so many things. I think the most important thing for me is I get to actually help people, right? Like that I get up in the morning and my job is to try and make the UK a more welcoming and supportive place to vulnerable people, whether that's refugees, asylum seekers, vulnerable children, and I meet the people often that we are serving, and I can see the difference. I mean, that comes right back to the beginning. Um, you know, we became involved in this charity space because of our fostering story. And, you know, when we're finished here, we're going into town where one of my old foster children, uh, he— we fostered him when he was 6 and turning 7. He's now 19. And when he was 18, he reached out to us. He said, look, I really appreciated you guys. You made a big difference in my life when I was young. Can we reconnect? And while this lad had lived with us, somehow, I can't work it out, he became a fan of the best football club in the world, Liverpool Football Club. And so now every time there's a game on, he'll text me and say, ah, have you seen, we're one up, we're two up, or he'll phone me. Anyway, it's his birthday, so we're going out for dinner with him. And he's thriving. And you know, that, that completing the circle is so joyful. And if your work in a charity doesn't actually give you contact with the people you are serving, if you're so far up the kind of managerial tree that this is all just, you know, spreadsheets and statistics and mission statements, the energy just lapses out of it. But I'm so blessed that the refugees, the asylum seekers, the vulnerable children I get to work with, I I get to know so many of them and I can see the impact. And that is so life-giving. It's really encouraging. Krish Kandiah, founder and CEO of The Sanctuary Foundation, thank you for joining us on the Nonprofit CEO Podcast. Hey, absolute pleasure. Lovely to speak to you. If you know a CEO of a nonprofit who's carrying something significant, send them this episode. And if you want more of the patterns I'm seeing across hundreds of CEO conversations delivered weekly, you need the Nonprofit CEO Briefing at nonprofitceo.com. I'm Adam Jeske, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor. Thank you for what you are leading.