David Barclay, CEO for Good Faith
This year, the Good Faith marks ten years in business. We’ve redesigned our brand and are today launching a new website to better showcase who we are and what we do.
Good Faith’s work is about inspiring people to create positive change. We help create solutions to society’s most challenging problems. Problems that are too complex for any one organisation to solve alone.
We work at the intersection of sectors, disciplines and communities, convening unlikely relationships and turning shared intent into practical action. Our work spans advisory services, innovation programmes, and the incubation of initiatives that respond to urgent social challenges.
When we first started Good Faith 10 years ago, we had high hopes for what could be achieved by bringing different sectors together to tackle big social issues. But we also had a healthy degree of scepticism about whether it was possible to build a sustainable organisation to do that work. After all, working at the intersection of different organisations and sectors almost inevitably means putting yourself in the gaps of where resources and focus tend to exist.
What we’ve learned since then, with plenty of twists and turns along the way, is that there is in fact a bigger appetite than we imagined for the kind of expertise and capacity that Good Faith sought to develop and offer.
Often this appetite is strongest at moments of crisis. That’s when leaders and organisations confront the limits of their own existing circles, and the necessity of moving beyond them to find meaningful solutions. It’s not a surprise, then, that many of Good Faith’s most notable projects, from community sponsorship of refugees, to YourNeighbour and the ChurchWorks Commission and now the Warm Welcome Campaign, emerged from those points of crisis.
But we’ve also had the joy and privilege over the years of working with leaders who understand that even in the smoother times, partnership and collaboration are the key to developing new solutions to our deepest challenges. We’ve found these leaders in a whole range of contexts – from politicians and civil servants to business executives to faith and civil society to funders and philanthropists. And we’ve worked with them at different geographical scales – locally, nationally and internationally. Coming alongside these transformational systems leaders and helping them and their organisations achieve more through collaboration is what we love to do, and it’s how we want to grow as we look ahead to the next 10 years of Good Faith’s life.
So, as we look back at what has been an incredible journey of the last 10 years, we’d like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who has been a part of it – colleagues, partners, clients and funders. And to all those who are yet to experience Good Faith, we’d love to invite you to get in touch and to explore how we could work together!