Guest blog by David Thorp, FP&A Assistant Analyst at VSO International:
Having
a job or a career that works towards the end goal of helping people and contributing to society is something that has always been important to me. But not having a clear ‘dream job’ coming out of school and university, exactly how I would be able to do this was a little bit uncertain. For some people it’s working on the frontline, interaction with service users etc. I’m able to do this to an extent with other volunteering that I do, and feel that I can contribute and personally gain quite a lot out of this, but have always felt that my real strengths may lie somewhere else, perhaps a little more in the background.
Over the years I’ve done the rounds with jobs a little bit, both in and out of the charity sector; I’ve worked in a mail order warehouse, a call centre for a well-known (and at the time not particularly popular!) bank, and for large and small charities. Each of these have given me different skills, viewpoints and experiences, but it was the opportunities that I got through volunteering with KickStart Ghana (KSG) that have helped me to understand a little more about what my best skills may be.
Voluntary experience
Myself and two friends (one from London, another from Ghana) set up KSG, a sports and education charity that aims to provide opportunities and facilities in these areas for people in the Volta Region in Ghana, back in 2008. Since then we’ve helped to grow the charity to the point where we now have two five-person boards in the UK and Ghana, as well as our Ghanaian co-founder working full-time for the organisation. Being involved from conception meant that we had to do everything – from writing policies and sorting out formal charity registration to delivering training to volunteers and writing the content for the website. In recent years, I had been working on our budgeting and cost reconciliations, and have really enjoyed that and helping the organisation to understand a little bit better how we can distribute the money that we raise to try and make as much of an impact as we can with what is, in relative terms, not a huge amount of money.
This was coupled with my work in my previous job for a small cultural exchange charity in Bethnal Green, where my remit was again very wide. Once more I found myself enjoying the organisational aspect of this through planning and monitoring budgets for the organisation and, importantly, sharing with other people what this meant – taking the bigger picture of the financial position and discussing what this was going to mean for the future, both short and long-term.
Finding a job related to my interests
Having decided that this would be a good move for me, I started to think about how this could become a specialism. I didn’t have any qualifications in this area, and the experience I had was mostly through talking to other people or self-taught. It was then that I saw an opportunity at VSO, a charity that I used to work with in a different capacity. This was an entry-level role as a Financial Planning Assistant, and it included the opportunity to get financial assistance to undertake a qualification in either financial or management accounting. The short story is that I applied, interviewed and got the job – mainly down to those other experiences that I had picked up along the way, both voluntary and paid.
Currently, I’m only a few months into my new role, but I’m very much enjoying it and am learning a great deal as I work with people who are not only very experienced in finance, but also specifically finance in the voluntary sector. I’ve recently started studying for the CIMA qualification and, although this is going to be a test for me to study and work side-by-side, I’m getting stuck in and improving my knowledge. I’m already really seeing and enjoying the way that those in finance can help those in the organisation working to deliver programmes and projects, and that my time and efforts are being well spent and focused.
Overall I get the feeling that finance is my opportunity to use my skills to best effect to make a difference to other people, and that just because I am in the background and, often, dealing internally, that doesn’t mean that I am having any less of an effect to our cause. The more that I experience and learn, the more I hopefully will continue to make a positive contribution to good causes in the future.
