In this episode of the Charity Changemakers Podcast, Adam is joined by David Craig, Chief Executive of https://www.scaa.org.uk/, for a conversation about a career that was never planned.

David talks candidly about falling into the sector almost by accident – from processing invoices in a hospitality company, into its public relations team running charity-of-the-year partnerships, and from there into professional fundraising with no formal background in it at all.

He shares the pivotal, deeply personal moment that reshaped his path: after his son was born ten weeks premature, David became a trustee of Bliss, the charity for newborn babies, and helped establish Bliss Scotland from scratch. That experience of sitting on the other side of the boardroom table gave him his first real grounding in governance and strategy, and set him on course for his first chief executive role at 38.

Eleven years into leading Scotland's Charity Air Ambulance, David reflects on what's kept him in one organisation for so long in a sector where leaders typically move on every five to seven years, what it's like leading a team whose work is genuinely life or death, why he's already thinking about succession planning, and why – whatever the job title – he still describes himself first as a fundraiser.

Takeaways

• A career that began entirely by accident, from accounts admin to public relations to professional fundraising
• How corporate charity-of-the-year partnerships can be a genuine route into the sector
• Why a personal crisis – his son's premature birth – led David to become a trustee of Bliss
• The case for taking on a trusteeship as a deliberate career development move
• Becoming a first-time chief executive at 38, at Falkirk FC's Community Foundation
• Why David still calls himself "a fundraiser" despite the CEO title
• What's kept him at Scotland's Charity Air Ambulance for eleven years and counting
• Succession planning, and the responsibility of leaving an organisation in a stable position
• Leadership lessons learned the hard way: listening, clarity, and a culture of "no surprises"