When 11-year-old Milly died by suicide in 2016, her mother Fiona Tuomey felt a need to speak to people who had lived through this type of tragedy.
She couldn’t find an organisation tailored to help people bereaved by suicide, so she founded her own.
Hugg (Healing Untold Grief Groups) was initially established with a board comprising family and friends. The organisation was a couple of years old when Tuomey decided she would need to professionalise it if she wanted it to grow and help more people.
She heard about an event run by Boardmatch, a small charity established to help similar organisations with a key part of their governance. The annual event works as a sort of speed dating between charities and would-be board members.
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“That first year I was looking for a chairman because I was holding about three posts at the time. And I found him,” she said.
She knew “straight away” he was a good fit, she said, because he “grilled” her about the charity, its governance and direction.
The charity had never done a strategic plan, admitted Tuomey, saying the new chairman, who had worked with an international technology firm, “absolutely took us from where we were to where we are now”.
Hugg now operates nationwide with eight staff, 20 support groups and a network of volunteers.
Tuomey was speaking last week at Boardmatch’s “speed-dating” event at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham. About 60 charities manned stands while a couple of hundred would-be board members wandered the room seeking a cause in which to invest their time and expertise.
All do it for free, giving up at least a few hours a month for the board meetings and perhaps more for other committees or roles. They receive training from Boardmatch once they have been recruited, a process that generally takes a month or two after this initial meeting.
“The idea is that we put everybody in a room and let them network,” said Eva Gurn, chief executive of Boardmatch.
Gurn was expecting the latest Boardmatch event to produce 50 or so appointments. This would see the organisation achieve more than 5,000 appointments over its 20-year history, with 500 of those likely to be made over the course of 2025.
Among those in the room this year were community groups, overseas development organisations and arts organisations. Many were small, founder-led charities with small staff numbers. They were seeking outside expertise in key areas such as finance, governance or marketing, but others are rather bigger and better known.
The National Rehabilitation Hospital’s chief executive, June Stanley, and its head of corporate affairs, Jen Maher, wanted to add to their 12-strong board, a third of which was recruited at previous Boardmatch events.
The hospital employs about 700 people and received some €75 million in HSE funding last year.
“We’ve recruited people with finance skills, strategy skills. They all volunteer their time free of charge and bring their skill sets to the board,” said Stanley.
“One area we are looking at this year is architecture or engineering, because we opened our new hospital and we’re in the early stages of planning the next phase. We would really like to have that skill set on the board, somebody who can advise the board and participate in discussions on the project,”she said.
Amy Herron and Declan Meade were recruiting for The Stinging Fly, a publication that promotes young Irish writers.
“I wouldn’t say no to an accountant,” said Meade, who founded the operation 25 years ago and ran it without a board of any kind for most of that time.
Arts Council funding comes with many governance requirements and, over the past four years, Meade has appreciated the benefits of having other voices around a board table. As is the case with so many organisations here, personal contacts produced the first line-up but they hope to branch out.
The pair are first-timers at the event and open to seeing what, or who, comes their way. “Governance is just so important, people with previous board experience would be good, but mainly it’s about people who are interested in our mission,” said Meade.
Mark Flanagan was one of the first potential recruits through the door of the event. Hugg was his first port of call.
Flanagan has more than 20 years in senior roles at big multinationals, generally in the technology sector. He said he is at a point in his career where he wants to get involved with a charity to “leverage the expertise I have, the knowledge I’ve built up to help those kinds of organisations”.
As well as Hugg, there were some children’s charities that caught his eye. “I’m a huge believer in trying to help children to be the best they can be,” he said.
Leila Calnan has been involved for 30 years in the international development sector, travelling widely and specialising in supporting small and medium-sized businesses.
“I’m edging towards retirement and looking for organisations where I can use my experience gained over all those years to help with strategic direction,” she said.
Calnan is already on the boards of a couple of organisations, including one that brings charities and volunteers together in the Dún Laoghaire area. The work is hugely rewarding, she said.
Sumil Govindan, who heads a software engineering team at BT Ireland, wanted “to do something other than my role at the company”.
He envisages helping some charity with its technology “because a lot of small organisations don’t have tech expertise”, he said.
“Maybe I’ll be able to help a little bit,” he said, adding: “I think personally, I’ll gain a lot.”
