Interview: Lucie Russell, interim chief executive of Redthread

Lucie Russell has more than 30 years’ experience of working in senior roles in the charity sector, but it was an unusual set of circumstances that led to her taking the reigns at youth violence charity Redthread last November.

Russell, who helped set up the Big Issue alongside Lord John Bird in 1991 and ran the Big Issue Foundation for seven years, was appointed following the surprise departure of Geethika Jayatilaka just a few months after joining as chief executive from Chance UK, which she’d run for nearly six years.

As a trustee of Redthread since 2019, Russell was well placed to step up to the plate – she had also been supporting the charity in the transition to Jayatilaka’s leadership on a part-time basis after securing leave from her post as chief executive of social action charity Street Doctors, a role she has since left after being appointed as Redthread chief executive for an initial 18 months.

Can you tell us more about the circumstances surrounding your appointment?

There was a transition between the then interim chief Tracey Burley leaving and Geethika [Jayatilaka] starting as the new chief. That was a transition of just over two months, so the board asked me if I would come part-time to Redthread from Street Doctors. Redthread paid Street Doctors for those two days a week, so it was a consultancy appointment and I was transition executive two days a week. There was a slight overlap with Tracey going and [when] Geethika started she asked me and the board if I could continue two days a week with the same processes continuing between Street Doctors and Redthread. So, I carried on doing that. After around four months Geethika decided she wanted to leave to explore new futures and obviously we wish her all the best in that.

You had a very close-up view of what was going on. Why did it not work out for Jayatilaka?

I can’t comment on that. That was Geethika’s decision and her decision alone.

So she felt the role wasn’t quite right for her?

Yes, that’s what we were told.

It’s never ideal to change leader after such a short period of time. And it came on the back of the founding chief executive John Poyton leaving in mid-2022. What lessons do you think you and the charity can take from this?

Instability is not a good thing. Nobody thinks it’s a good thing. Changes of leadership at the top do make people feel unstable. Since that has happened, there have been a lot of meetings with important stakeholders. We’ve had meetings with staff and what is crucial going forward is to ensure the stability of Redthread.

We have a relatively new board with a new chair and will also be recruiting for new trustees. Having stable leadership at the top, that the organisation feels “held”, upholding [its] reputation and continuing to prove our impact – it’s a case of ensuring that happens.

We know charities are closing. We are all experiencing instability. But what we have to do is now move forward with a positive focus. And that’s one of the reasons why we have brought in a new executive team to enable that stability to increase. And I think it is about acknowledging it. You can’t pretend it hasn’t happened. This is about how we can all pull together because we are in a very difficult environment and the need just gets greater.

Can you tell us more about your plans to strengthen the board and senior leadership team?

We’ve got a group of fantastic trustees, but we want to bring in some that especially relate to our regional areas of focus and also the expertise that is needed across Redthread. It’s about further strengthening the board.

We have appointed a director of services and a chief operating officer. We have a leadership team who are a very strong and effective, but they mostly consist of heads of [departments]. It was clear that with an organisation of our size, with the staff numbers we have, we needed an executive [team] and we especially needed the director of services because services are everything we do. It is a new role to bolster high-level oversight of the services team, but also to be out there networking, making relationships, developing partnerships.

Do you think your previous relationship with the charity will help in taking on this new role?

I’ve been around the block for many years, but all the organisations I’ve worked for are, to be honest, supporting the same groups of children and young people. I was at YoungMinds for seven years and did loads of youth engagement work there, went on Barrow Cadbury Trust for a year and set up a campaign about the poverty premium, I’ve been a governor of a couple of schools and was a trustee at the Criminal Justice Alliance. I’ve just resigned from that recently because I really want to devote myself to Redthread, it’s a big job.

I’m absolutely passionate about the cause and I’m loving what I’m doing. It’s for a period of up to 18 months to provide that stability. It’s right for Redthread. It’s right for me. It’s right for the board. And we will see what happens nearer the time [whether it continues].

Why was it the right time to move on from Street Doctors?

Street Doctors is a very niche intervention. It’s a very important part of the jigsaw in the response to young people affected by violence. But I think I have this affinity with Redthread because the work it does is deeper because of its nature. We work with children and young people affected by violence and exploitation for much longer, using a youth work model, walking alongside young people, connecting them with a range of other support.

At this stage in my career it felt the most meaningful place for me to go in terms of making some sort of impact on vulnerable children and young people’s lives. I want to do something that takes a broader perspective to reducing the harm and trauma left by violence and exploitation.

Do you have a leadership philosophy or approach that you adopt and use?

I think my leadership style is relational. It’s compassionate, but it’s about decisive leadership. Leadership is collaborative and it’s so important to collaborate, mentor, coach and to develop. No one person can run things by themselves and know how to do everything. I would always say: “I’m good at this, these are my key skills, I’m not so good at that and I need help with it.” That collaborative model of work is important. But people want leaders to lead too. That’s about feeling held, about boundaries. I think it always goes back to family relationships…parents have to be caring and loving and collaborative and walking alongside, but they also do need to take decisions, and people want leaders to take decisions. I’ve always tried to balance the two and sometimes it is quite tricky.

How do you see Redthread developing over the next 12-18 months?

Last year we worked with just over 2,600 children and young people, 80 per cent reported feeling safer and decreasing their risk.

In terms of where Redthread is going, that’s an interesting one because what happened is Redthread grew very fast in response to the need. At the time, we were the only organisation working in health settings, in hospital settings, with affected children and young people. In 2018, the Home Office gave us a good sum of money to support this kind of service provision and then the violence reduction units followed a year later. Lots of other hospitals wanted us to come in to deliver our services, so now we’re in 13 hospitals in London, the Midlands and Nottinghamshire. We’ve also really grown our young women’s services as well in several London hospitals. We also provide services to children and young people with other multiple vulnerabilities and have pilot projects around diabetes, liver, and mental health issues. We’ve done some really good work around social prescribing and would love to do more. There was a lot of rapid growth – but how does the infrastructure keep up with that? So I think the focus going forward – and we are creating a new business plan which will run until the end of the current strategic plan in 2026 – will need to look at consolidation. I don’t think more rapid growth at this point is right for the organisation. We need to make sure the infrastructure can match the provision and support the provision effectively.

Do you see the social issues driving the causes of youth violence changing? Is the modus operandi of exploitation changing? And, from an organisational perspective, how do you respond to that?

The contextual drivers of violence are just getting worse. A cost-of-living crisis, rampant poverty affecting children and young people and adults in this country. Disadvantage, inequality and marginalisation causes increases in violence and exploitation. Currently, 27,000 children are at high risk of exploitation by organised crime gangs according to Home Office figures. One in five children say they skip school due to feeling unsafe – it’s terrible. What’s also important to be talking about is the blurring between being a victim and perpetrator because you will find with some young people they go from perpetrators to victims and back again. We see that so much in our services.

In terms of what we’re doing about it, it’s about ensuring we can respond to needs because they are very complex – we’re talking about modern slavery, exploitation, physical violence, mental health issues. Thought leadership is also a big part of Redthread’s work. We’ve done really strong policy influencing with the child criminal exploitation and knife crime all-party parliamentary group, which has highlighted post-traumatic stress disorder as a key priority.

LUCIE RUSSELL - CV:

• Nov 23 – present: Interim chief executive, Redthread

• May 19 – Nov 23: Chief executive, StreetDoctors

• Apr 18 – Apr 19: Director, Fair by Design Campaign

• May 16 – Apr 18: Head of policy and communications, The Young Foundation

• Jan 09 – Feb16: Director of campaigns and media, YoungMinds

• Sep 02 – Dec 08: Director of SmartJustice, Prison Reform Trust

• Oct 91 – Aug 02: Director of development/CEO, The Big Issue Foundation