Introducing Frank Sims - Treasurer for ACT

I have always been driven by the desire to improve the quality and accessibility of health and social care services and spent over 30 years working in the NHS, ultimately as a chief executive.  

I grew to understand the importance of the impact our lives have on our physical and mental health and wanted to be a part in supporting people who needed something other than NHS care.  I moved my focus to social enterprise and charity work, with an appetite to do something about adding more social value, as well as providing services.

ACE was a fantastic place to work and as a social enterprise we invested our surpluses into social value and local schemes.  My best memory is when we stepped in to fund a local football club designed around those with learning difficulties.  It was just brilliant in the way it brought people together – those with some challenges and others, who just loved football.  It broke down barriers and brought us all together under a common passion.  It also gave a large number of people the opportunity of doing something to help themselves.

We took a brave decision at ACE to recreate ourselves as a proactive charity investing in our local NEE communities and ACT was recreated in its current form.  The drive for doing something more to help our local communities came from the ACE members, those staff who, in a social enterprise are the shareholders!  So, the new entity came from their desire to help, which is truly inspiring.

My vision for ACT stems from what our ACE members told us.  They wanted a proactive charity that was able to focus on improving mental wellbeing, that could help support people with housing needs and who could help local people help themselves.  We want ACT to be self-sustainable as an organisation and we want to invest money into our local communities.  So, in part we are making the most of our capital sum and we are looking to work with local entrepreneurs who can make a social return and, of course a financial one, so that we can keep investing into even more projects.

This is truly exciting as we are in the start up phase and therefore open to new ideas.  As trustee treasurer of course I have one eye on the money, but at ACT we see ourselves as a different funder.  We see ourselves as really connecting with local people and helping them to help themselves – after all local people know what’s best for them. We have such an opportunity to improve lives and I am excited to be a part of it.