Meet the people behind the day-to-day operations of Smile.
Smile Foundation is a Yorkshire-based infrastructure charity leading the way on community voice and insight, health development, digital and making resources go further.
Empowering charities, people, and communities is the heartbeat of Smile Foundation Charity’s new direction. By inspiring communities, being a generous leader, and making a positive impact across the region, we can create a ripple effect that transforms communities and changes lives.
Over the next 5 years Smile will focus on becoming an organisation that makes significant impact in everything we do. We will further develop our infrastructure services to meet the needs of the charities we support. We will embrace digital and enhance our health offer. Smile will grasp the opportunity to venture into other parts of the UK and then go on to deliver on a national platform.
We draw unique strengths from our mixed model of operation: grant making and community investments; Community development and support; nurturing a diverse asset base comprising people, knowledge, history and work alongside our corporate partners.
Our new strategic plan for 2023-2027 builds on these strengths and our successes over the previous 15 years. We are motivated to increase our impact and do even more for our communities, and will achieve this through sustainable growth, leveraging, influence and maximising our assets.
We do this by having a range of experts on our Board who have lived experience and active involvement in our key areas of work, helping them to make inspired and informed decisions at a strategic level.
CEO & Senior Leadership Team
Our CEO and senior leadership team (SLT) inspire community investment with cross sector knowledge, skills and a driven passion for positive change. We recruit to our culture and community in mind not just CV’s and qualifications, creating an agile and responsive workforce which have trust and the ability to develop themselves and relate to the communities they serve.
We ensure we have the right resource to make a positive and lasting change, never afraid to invest with an educated risk knowing that in many cases you learn more from the journey then you do the destination.
All of the above ensures that investment in Smile goes further works harder and lasts longer – With the ultimate aim of empowering charities, people, and communities!
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Contact us to get involved.
Smile Foundation Board
One of the HEY Smile Foundation’s key strengths is our excellent board of trustees, brought together by our founder, Jim Dick. With a range of public and private sector leaders, the Smile team is able to count on our trustees’ years of experience to benefit our delivery.
“The Smile Foundation has given a refreshing outlook on charitable giving throughout the difficult economic times and continues to provide insightful approaches to resolving the ongoing challenges our communities face.”
– Jim Dick –
Founder & Lifelong President of the HEY Smile Foundation
Chair:
Trish Dalby
Trustee:
Andy Bowden
Trustee:
Graham Cross
Trustee:
Andrew Milner
Trustee:
Cathy Phillips
Trustee:
Dileepa Ranawake
Trustee:
Tim Wigglesworth
Trustee:
Kenneth Ross
Trustee:
Catherine Sykes
TRANSPARENCY
We are proud to work transparently as a charity and have solid procedures in place that we would like the public to be aware of. Our processes include:
Cheques (for any amount) have to be signed by our charity director and a trustee.
Our board of trustees have access to our accounts on a day-to-day basis and can login at any time. Smile’s figures are reviewed at every trustees’ meeting and our AGM.
All our accounts are available online at the charity commission website: gov.uk/government/organisations/charity-commission
Restricted funding, e.g. money from trusts for specific projects is locked in restricted funding pots on Xero (our accounting programme).
Unless there are exceptional mitigating circumstances, we only give funds to charities and community groups that will actively use the funds within a 12-month period.
We undertake a due diligence process before using donors’ money to support charities and community groups. We work with donors to ensure that any funds invested into local charities will be spent effectively and in some cases we’ve advised against donations.