When Pilotlight was founded in 1996, it began with a simple idea: charities needed more than funding. They could benefit from access to people, skills, experience and perspectives from outside the non-profit sector.
Having previously founded Charity Projects to inspire new awareness and resources for stubborn social issues and make charity fun, Jane Tewson then co-founded Comic Relief to focus on projects in Africa as well as the UK.
After this, she set up Pilotlight where she wanted to bring new skills to addressing entrenched problems. The starting point for Jane was people, and her desire to make a difference.
We recently caught up with Jane to recall some of the earliest moments in Pilotlight’s story.
Creating agents for social change
Jane saw Pilotlight as a bridge between people who wanted to get involved and those who needed support, creating opportunities for them to work on ideas together. She believed that nothing was impossible and that everyone had the right and responsibility to become agents for social change using their passions, skills, imagination and ideals.
“I have always been overwhelmed by the fact that most people want to give back and when they do, report getting more out than they put in.”
Igniting other flames
Jane has described Pilotlight as “igniting other flames; being a catalyst, bringing things together and letting them go.” An example of how this idea was put into action was The Real Deal, a project Pilotlight worked on with then-Chancellor Gordon Brown in 1998. Jane explains how this project created opportunities for young people experiencing hardship to speak directly to government and policy makers about what they wanted and needed. She recalls that the project went on to influence government policy on youth employment and training, as well as how key decision makers thought about involving people with lived experience in creating lasting social change.
That wider shift in thinking is what mattered: “It’s about creating opportunities for people to see and think differently – which they can bring into other areas of their lives.”
The power of unexpected connections
Collaboration was part of Pilotlight from its earliest days. Jane particularly credits Paul Jackson the inaugural Chair (formerly Chair of Comic Relief), Alan Parker and Brunswick Communications, which housed Pilotlight without charge and opened its knowledge and expertise to the organisation. She describes that early support as “absolutely priceless”. Jane also credits Fiona Halton, who succeeded her as CEO, with spearheading the relationship between business and charities as a central focus for Pilotlight.
Asked what makes her most proud of her time at Pilotlight, Jane comes back to lasting relationships: she remembers an event at No. 11 Downing Street where community leaders, people with lived experience, business leaders, creatives and communicators worked together on shared goals.
“Together, they made things happen.”
That feels particularly fitting as Pilotlight marks 30 years. The organisation and its programmes have changed, and so has the complex environment it operates in, but bringing together people with different experiences and skills remains central to its work today.
Jane's legacy
Thirty years later, Jane Tewson's words still best explain what Pilotlight is about: bringing new people to the table, creating the conditions for something positive to happen, seeing where these connections can lead - and their impact on the organisations involved.