Richard Hawkes, CEO, Oxfam
When Richard Hawkes agreed to become interim CEO of Oxfam GB earlier this year, he wasn't exactly walking into calm waters.
A sudden change at the top, an ongoing Charity Commission compliance case, and the long shadow of the 2017 Haiti scandal all made for one of the trickiest inboxes in British civil society.
On the latest episode of Causes, Richard talks Dave through why he said yes anyway — tracing a career that starts in Wolverhampton (which he describes as basically the Florence of the UK) and runs through an accidental landslide election to Manchester's students' union, a four-hour conversation with two Kurdish students that changed how he saw the world, and stints leading Scope and building the British Asian Trust from twelve staff into something much bigger.
The heart of the episode is Richard's account of a recent field visit to Syria and Lebanon — his first as Oxfam's chief exec, after thirty years of humanitarian visits worldwide. He describes a Syria cautiously rebuilding water, power and sewage systems after years of war, sitting against a Beirut that looks like a buzzing Mediterranean city on the surface but comes with the constant hum of drones overhead. One conversation, with a man whose three sons had all been killed, clearly hasn't left him.
This episode doesn't shy away from the sector's harder questions either — pressing Richard on Halima Begum's post-departure critique that "localisation" pledges are mostly rhetoric, and on whether the charity sector's famous egos get in the way of the actual work. Richard's answers are candid rather than defensive: he largely agrees with Begum on localisation, points to thirty years of pushing the same argument himself, and reckons sector leadership has genuinely matured over the past fifteen years.
Whether he'd take the Oxfam job permanently is a question he leaves for another day — for now, he says, it's simply the best job in UK charity.
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