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Currently, we have 4 trustees who collectively bring substantial senior expertise in both the charity and private sectors, including technology, accounting and finance, sales and fundraising.
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Christopher Shawdon joined as a trustee in summer 2024.
His career has been in technology services, specialising for the last 20 years in air cargo community systems. He was already a charity trustee and is also a volunteer for our friends at Pilotlight, who provide mentoring for charity CEOs. |
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Sarah Swayslandhails from the hospitality sector, and joined CEF during the pandemic. She has worked across all areas of business, but specialty is in marketing, as an award-winning marketing expert with a proven track record in developing and activating effective marketing and brand strategies in both small and large-scale businesses. |
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Amit Bansal is a Chartered Accountant (FCA) and Founder/Partner at Accountants For Good Ltd, a specialist accountancy practice working with non-profits. He joined as a trustee in June 2025. He brings deep expertise in financial management and governance across the sector. Through his practice, he supports a wide range of mission-driven organisations with financial strategy, compliance, and impact reporting—helping them to operate sustainably and in line with their values. His work is rooted in a strong commitment to purpose-led finance and the unique needs of charities. |
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Ed Mayo MBE has a long track record of action and innovation in the voluntary sector. From 2020 to October 2025, Ed was CEO of the skills-based volunteering charity, Pilotlight. Before this he was CEO of Co-operatives UK, New Economics Foundation and National Consumer Council and as Chair of the Jubilee 2000 coalition and Involve, the democratic participation charity. Ed has been awarded an honorary degree by London Met University for services to ethical markets. He has written widely on values, the economy and society (as well as two short stories of fiction). His book ‘Values: how to bring values to life in your business’ is published by Routledge. |
Thank you also to our founding trustees Jonathan Badger and Marie Davies, and also subsequent trustees who have now stood down - Dries De Coster and Jo Mann.
2016 to 2018 - Design and Launch
Alumna Ltd was formed in 2016 to provide limited liability protection for the founder, when he began full time work designing Charity Excellence Framework. It was launched 2 years later on his birthday - 2 June 2018. He worked unpaid and fully funded it until 2023 and he continues to contribute to the charity financially.
2020 - Covid
April - Covid Funding Database built and launched in ten days over Easter at the height of the Covid epidemic, with the support of 7 fundraising volunteers. The 5 initial Covid emergency toolkits were downloaded 38,000 times.
August - the resource hub was launched.
2021 - Charity Registration
January - #SurviveandThrive launched with the dashboard Critical Health Check table and the Covid database was upgraded to become Funding Finder, focussing on small and marginalised groups.
March - new super user functionality created, enabling anonymised CEF data to be shared with others.
August - after 23 months of the Charity Commission refusing to register the charity we took them to tribunal ourselves and they conceded almost immediately. We became a Foundation CIO (1195568).
2022 - Cost of Living Crisis
October - Help Finder and Data Finder launched in response to the Cost of Living crisis.
December - the first AI bunny launched, using Tenjin machine learning thanks to pro bono provision by Biomni.
2023 - Our Own Crisis
Spring - CEF came within 2 weeks of closure as founder no longer able to meet costs. Rescued by an approach from Red Brain, who donated £30,000.
March – the sector's first bid writing AI launched.
April - our first AI training webinar. By mid 2025, our You Tube AI playlist videos had been watched by more than 10,000 people.
June – Chat GPT interface and policy downloads for in-system AI bunny.
September - our £1bn Funding Cuts Report predicted the coming fundraising crisis.
2024 - Responding to the Fundraising Crisis
January – new website launched and structured data embedded.
April – Microsoft Power BI dashboards – 9 interactive dashboards, enabling us to fully exploit our Charity Sector Data Store. Finalist in Charity Times Awards (Charity Partnership category), September.
June – Help Finder Company upgrade, with 11 new search categories to create a corporate funding directory.
December - Funding Finder new categories for micros-charities like community groups and also to support charities that often really struggle; Infrastructure and Les Popular Causes categories.
2025 - Advanced AI
January to June - With some funding from Microsoft we launched an AI training programme that built on our existing work.
February - the first publicly available agentic AI bot built pro bono by Exquitech (a global AI consultancy) with access to the Help Finder data set and our first agentic web pages.
November - again with support from Microsoft, we launch the first Charity Excellence Learning, online AI training course, with 5 more scheduled. A further 5 courses were created over the Christmas break.
November - Kate Hillier joins the founder as our very first additional member of the team.
2026 - ?
A new Help Finder upgrade, we'll begin to accelerate the roll out of Charity Excellence 2.0 and, hopefully, also our new Future Charity concept.
