Verdant Purpose

17/04/2026

Time for a lil' rebrand for Verdant Purpose.

When I launched Verdant Purpose, it's core mission was (and still is) about growing & sustaining UK charities through great HR.

But turns out, when you post pictures of trees as a symbol for long-term growth, people think you cut them for a living. Not that you handle HR risks for charities!

I asked Sam and the team at Fuzzy Logic to cut down the trees and build me something a bit more fitting of Verdant Purpose.

A huge thanks to the Fuzzy Logic Team for the skill to turn a few mad ideas into something that's a lot cleaner!

🌿 Loving the new look! 🌿

17/02/2026

Most charity "people problems" don’t start with a bang. They start with a whisper. 🤫

It’s the quiet stuff, the polite issues in the background that eventually turn into a grievance, a tribunal, or a £60k mistake your budget never saw coming.

I’ve worked with so many brilliant, dedicated charities lately that were carrying risks they simply couldn’t see.
Not because they were careless.
But because they were stretched.

When you're firefighting funding and service delivery, HR slips down the to-do list. You find yourself wondering: "Are we actually legally safe, or are we just lucky?"

Stop guessing and start sleeping better.

I’ve built the Free 10-Minute Charity HR Health check specifically for UK Charities.

No corporate waffle. No scare tactics. Just a straight diagnostic to help you spot:

1. Legal blind spots before they explode.
2. Slow-burn issues that drain your mission.
3. A clear, prioritised view you can actually show your trustees.

You don't need a 40-page report. You need clarity. In plain English. Fast.

👇 Get your HR health score here:

Discover our free HR Healthcheck for charity leaders to identify and resolve hidden HR risks in just 10 minutes.

02/01/2026

Are you accidentally paying below minimum wage without realising it?

If you’ve got staff on a salary under £25,274.70 for 37.5 hours a week, you might be.

Even if you think you’re “above minimum wage”.

I’m not talking theory.
HMRC has already named and shamed charities and small businesses for this exact mistake. Fines, back pay, and a public listing on a government website for everyone to see.

Here’s the bit most people miss:

You’re not judged on the yearly salary.
You’re judged on each monthly pay period.

So an employee on £24,000, working 37.5 hours a week, looks fine on paper.
But in a month with more working days, their hours go up… their salary doesn’t… and their real hourly rate quietly drops below £12.21.

On a spreadsheet, you’re “doing the right thing”.
By law, you’re in breach.

And HMRC don’t care if it was a mistake.
They don’t care if no one complained.
If the maths is wrong, you pay.

For charities, the risk is bigger than a fine:

Donor confidence

Trustee anxiety

Reputational damage

Time and money dragged into fixing something that could have been prevented

The good news? This is fixable.

I’ve built a simple 2025 Wage Check tool; you put in salary and hours, it shows you which months are safe and which months drop below minimum wage.

If you’re a charity leader or small employer and this has made your stomach flip a bit, do this:

Make a list of anyone earning under £25,274.70 on 37.5 hours

Get the numbers checked properly

Fix any issues before HMRC does it for you

If you want my Wage Check spreadsheet, drop a comment or message me “WAGE CHECK” and I’ll share the link so you can run your own numbers.

Better to find a problem now than read about it later in an HMRC report.

19/12/2025

I’ve seen charities nearly destroyed by one toxic employee.
Not loud. Not abusive. Just quietly controlling everything.

The kind of person everyone tiptoes around.
Speaks over others. Blocks change.
Rewrites decisions after the meeting.
Makes people doubt themselves.

And the charity tells itself:
“It’s just their personality.”
“We can’t afford to lose them.”
“They’ve been here forever.”

Meanwhile, good people burn out.
Volunteers drift away.
Trustees resign.
And the culture sinks while everyone avoids the conversation.

I worked with a charity in exactly that state.
One head office employee had slowly taken control of the entire organisation.
Not by shouting.
By wearing people down.

By the time I arrived they were on their third set of trustees.
Eighty percent of their volunteers had left.
The CEO felt trapped.
The board was terrified of the legal risks of acting.

Because that’s what charities fear most:
the tribunal headline, not the internal damage.

So we stripped the emotion out and went back to basics.
Evidence.
Fairness.
Law.

We documented behaviour.
Checked expectations.
Reviewed policies, probation notes, prior feedback — the whole lot.

Within weeks, there was a lawful, fair route forward.
The employee was exited respectfully.

And the change was instant.

The tension disappeared.
Meetings felt lighter.
Volunteers returned.
One trustee said to me later:

“It’s like they were never here.”

Here’s the hard truth:

Ignoring toxic behaviour isn’t kindness.
It’s neglect.

One toxic employee can drain a charity faster than a funding cut.
Your best people aren’t staying for salary.
They’re staying for purpose.
When that purpose feels contaminated, they leave quietly and don’t return.

If you’re a CEO or trustee, the question isn’t:
“Can we afford to deal with this?”
It’s:
“Can we afford not to?”

You don’t need drama to act.
You need clarity, documentation, fairness, and the courage to follow through.

If someone in your charity is blocking progress, it’s not too late to fix it.
Calmly. Legally. Confidently.

And if you need help navigating it, send me a message; this is exactly the kind of work I support charities with every week.

Because protecting your mission sometimes means protecting it from the wrong people.

12/12/2025

A charity shop I supported almost failed because no one told the manager what “good” actually looked like.

They were polite.
They were punctual.
They had experience.

And the shop was still falling apart.

Sales barely covered costs.
Donations piled up untouched.
Volunteers were exhausted and frustrated.

When I asked the trustees why they’d extended the manager’s probation, they said:

“We’re not sure if they’re underperforming… or if we just haven’t set the bar.”

That was the whole issue.
Everyone was working hard, but no one knew the standard.

The manager thought “managing” meant delegating everything upwards.
Trustees were covering shifts.
Volunteers were doing the job.
And the shop drifted into chaos because nobody had defined success.

So we fixed it.

We built the charity’s first simple, clear, measurable targets:
• weekly sales expectations
• sorting and turnaround times
• volunteer stability and retention
• what good leadership actually looked like

Not as pressure.
As clarity.

And everything changed.
The shop became profitable.
Volunteers came back.
The manager finally understood what the role required.

Here’s the truth people don’t like to say out loud:

People don’t fail because they don’t care.
They fail because no one told them what “good” means.

If you’re seeing extended probations, vague goals or “busy but not effective” teams, this is your signal.

Set clear expectations.
Review them often.
Support people properly.
And if they still can’t meet the standard, act fairly but decisively.

Your mission deserves more than guesswork.

(If you run a charity and want help building meaningful targets or resetting a struggling team, drop a comment or message me — I’ve got tools that make this far simpler than it sounds.)

08/12/2025

I’m hearing the same sentence from charity workers all over the UK:
“I haven’t taken a single day of leave this year.”

They say it like it’s normal.
It isn’t.

And as we head towards year-end, a lot of charity staff still have most of their annual leave untouched. On paper, they have the same entitlement as everyone else. In reality, many are taking far less.

This is more than a wellbeing issue.
It’s an organisational risk.

A charity manager said something to me recently that sums the whole problem up:

“The work will still be there when I get back… so it’s easier not to take the time off.”

This is what I see across charities, large and small:

• people scared of the backlog if they take a break
• guilt about adding pressure to the team
• fear that vulnerable people or animals will be impacted
• worry the trustees will think the place is falling apart
• a belief that the mission is more important than their rest

Charities aren’t full of people avoiding work.
They’re full of people who find it easier to keep running than to stop.

And the consequences are brutal:

• burnout
• rising sickness
• collapsing performance
• key-person dependency
• huge chunks of unused leave building into financial liabilities

One charity I worked with had a manager who’d taken zero days off with six and a half weeks left in the year. Everyone pretended it was fine.
It wasn’t.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your organisation falls apart because one person takes a week off, that’s not dedication.
It’s a structural risk.

And trustees underestimate this constantly.

Key-person dependency is a governance issue, not an HR admin problem.
Untaken leave becomes a financial issue.
Burnout becomes a safeguarding issue.
Silence becomes a retention issue.

So what can charity leaders do?

• Put annual leave and dependency on the risk register
• Make it clear: everyone uses their leave (leaders must model this)
• Cross-train even basic tasks so no one carries everything
• Do a mid-year leave check-in: how much taken, what’s the plan
• Use a simple handover template so people aren’t terrified of the backlog
• Brief the board so they understand the risk, not just the workload

Most charities wouldn’t collapse if someone took time off.
What collapses is the illusion that their sacrifice is the only thing holding the place together.

And that illusion is what burns people out.

If this feels uncomfortably close to home, you’re not the only one.
Share this with your Chair or your board. It might be the nudge they need.

And if you want support untangling leave, burnout or people-risk in your charity, drop me a message.

I help charities build safer, healthier, more sustainable ways of working; before the cracks turn into crises.

05/12/2025

Most charity HR problems stay hidden… until they explode.
And by the time they do, it’s expensive, stressful, and usually lands on the CEO’s desk at 9pm on a Tuesday.

The truth?

Small charities don’t ignore HR because they don’t care.
They ignore it because they’re drowning.
But here’s the scary part…

Some of the charities I’ve supported this year were carrying risks they didn’t even know existed.

Right to work issues.
Holiday liabilities.
Governance gaps.
Missing policies.
Messy volunteer boundaries.
Potential £20k, £30k, £60k claims.
All quietly ticking away in the background.

And leaders keep asking me the same questions:
1. Are we actually compliant?
2. What are we missing?
3. What should we fix first?
4. How do we reassure trustees?
5. Why does HR always feel so overwhelming?
6. What does “good” even look like?
7. How do we get ahead of problems instead of reacting to them?

So I built something that gives you answers. Fast.
The free Charity HR Healthcheck.

It takes around 10 minutes and gives you:
- A clear picture of hidden HR risks
- A simple plan for what to tackle first
- Something trustees can actually understand
- Peace of mind you’re not sleepwalking into trouble

Just straight, practical clarity.
Because charities don’t collapse overnight.

People-risks build slowly… then hit all at once.
If you’re a CEO, trustee or manager in a charity, do yourself a favour:

Take 10 minutes now instead of 10 hours fixing a crisis later.
https://www.verdantpurpose.com/charity-hr-healthcheck/
Let me know what surprises you when you get your results.

05/12/2025

A charity I supported nearly collapsed because its trustees were told their job was to “just be a bum on a seat.”

And honestly, that line still makes me wince.

The place was falling apart.
Volunteers walking out.
Staff burning out.
Finances on life support.

And the trustees?
They’d been told to sit quietly, nod through meetings, and not get involved.

No wonder the charity was in crisis.

Because trustees aren’t decoration.
They’re the safety net.
The conscience.
The steering wheel.

Once we reset things, everything changed.
We gave the board clarity on what the Charity Commission actually expects, rebuilt agendas around real decisions, recruited for the skills they were missing, and ran a proper skills audit so people knew where they were strong — and where they weren’t.

Within months, the turnaround was obvious.
Volunteers came back.
Staff felt heard.
The board stepped up.
And the charity finally stabilised.

Here’s the truth every charity needs to sit with:

A weak board drifts.
A strong board protects your mission.

If you’re a trustee or charity leader, it’s worth asking yourself:
Are your trustees sitting back… or stepping up?

If you’re not sure, start with a quick governance review or a skills audit. It’s amazing how much it reveals.

21/08/2025

“Yeah, but their sickness is genuine, so I can’t do anything?”

Heard that one before? It’s the biggest myth in absence management.

Genuine or not, you can act. And if you don’t, the costs stack up: burnout, resentment, lost time, and claims.

The Absence Management Toolkit gives you the system managers need:
✅ Step-by-step process map
✅ Template letters
✅ Record-keeping log
✅ Adjustments checklist
✅ Plain-English manager’s guide
✅ Walk-through call/video

No drama. No legal risk. No excuses.

👉 Fixed price: £197. Going back up to £299 next month

Interested? pop me a DM.

20/08/2025

Have you got a spare £45,000 if your Right to Work checks aren’t up to speed?

One missing passport copy = a fine of up to £45,000 per person.
Most charities don’t realise their files wouldn’t pass a Home Office check.
Our Right-to-Work Audit spots the gaps, fixes the risks, and closes any gaps with digital checks so you’re watertight.

✅ Review of every staff file
✅ Clear “fix list” report
✅ Record-keeping template
✅ Option for digital checks to make things smoother!

👉 Fixed price: £199. Cheaper than a fine.

Stop £45,000 fines before they stop your charity.

Need help with your right to work checks? DM us.