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What’s our ‘Endgame’?

A woman stands in the foreground wearing an orange Catch22 tshirt with a Catch22-branded fabric tote bag. In the background, people are taking part in a workshop. Overlaid is text that reads "Reform Agenda".

It’s my job as Chief Executive of Catch22 to make sure that we’re delivering our mission and vision. Recently, Catch22 has been doing some soul searching – why do we exist? We’ve been very inspired by a paper published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review ‘What’s your Endgame?’ The paper argues that:

“Non-profit leaders should shift their focus from the scale of the organisation to the impact that their organisation can achieve.”

What struck is that the end needs to be the beginning – the purpose of a non-profit needs to derive from its conclusion. Scale is essential for development, but not the reason for being.

So, in answering this existential question we have decided to reconfigure Catch22 to focus on our endgame. We are intent on delivering well – then capturing the experience and learning from our service delivery so that we argue from a position of strength how public services can be better designed and delivered, achieving better outcomes for those who use them.

This is not to suggest that Catch22 will not continue to grow and develop its service provision, but we are to be absolutely clear about our reason for doing this. We deliver well so that we can in the longer term have more impact – not just at a micro level but hopefully at a system level, to influence the shape of future operating systems.

Catch22 is an optimistic organisation that fundamentally believes in the ability of those we work with to seek solutions to the challenges they are confronted with. We believe that it is critically important to put people in to the lead and use this approach to change how services are organised, delivered and owned.

To achieve our endgame we will continue to deliver public services – across children’s services, education, employment, social action and justice – to as high a quality as we can. We will maintain a national presence and an operational scale at a level necessary for us to gain credibility, reputation and hopefully influence so that we can seek a platform from which we can make a case for change.

What does this mean for us? We have redesigned Catch22 to help us achieve our endgame. From today we have a new leadership team, best placed to drive this agenda forward.  They are:

  • Naomi Hulston – Chief Operating Officer
  • Nigel Richards – Chief Finance Officer
  • Pamela Dow – Chief Reform Officer

I look forward to working with them – and you – to improve public services, to build resilience and aspiration and people and communities.

– Chris Wright, Chief Executive Officer