FIGS Trustees are delighted to announce the appointment of David Lewis as the new Chair of FIGS.
After a national advert and intensive selection process, Dave has agreed to take over the FIGS leadership role on Dec 8th from Founding Chair John Benington, (who after 9 years in this role, will move on to become one of FIGS Vice Presidents and as a Visiting Professor at Juba University School of Public Service). FIGS new Chair, generally known as Dave, has recently retired as Deputy Chief Constable with Dorset and Devon & Cornwall Police.
Dave has a Law Degree from Bristol University and a Post Graduate Certificate in Adult Education from Surrey University. Dave has 30 years’ experience of police leadership at both frontline and strategic command levels, in both urban and rural communities. His roles have included police policy and practical action in relation to drugs, murder, forensics, ethics, modern slavery, and human trafficking, domestic abuse and mental health.
Dave also has substantial leadership experience in the voluntary sector. He has been Chair of All We Can (the international development charity of the Methodist Church), a chair and facilitator with the Windsor Leadership Trust, elected church council member, and is currently a Non Executive Member of the England and Wales Cricket Board Regulatory Committee. He is also an active fan of Reading FC, Bath RFC, and Sussex County Cricket Club.
Dave will bring to the FIGS leadership role a strong commitment to values-based leadership, experience of large-scale, long term cultural change, partnership working across organisational, cultural and national boundaries, and to promoting diversity and inclusion.
John and the FIGS Trustees are proud and pleased that Dave will take on the leadership of FIGS. We believe that the appointment will help facilitate the transition from a highly successful innovative start-up enterprise, led largely by a network of individual volunteers, into an organisation with the strategies, systems, skills and agility to survive and thrive for the short, medium and longer term.
Dave shares FIGS aims to restructure its organisation, staffing and fund-raising strategy so that it is more nimble, fit for purpose, and better equipped to empower the Trustees, governors, head-teacher and staff of Ibba Girls' Boarding School. In turn this supports IGBS ambition to become less dependent upon external aid, more African led, more resilient, more sustainable, and to gradually share and spread its learning and influence across South Sudan.
Over the next few months, Dave and his wife Jayne are looking forward to meeting FIGS Trustees, volunteers, interns, donors and potential donors and stakeholders in government and NGOs, and, when the pandemic allows, meeting the IGBS Trustees, Governors, students and staff in Juba and Ibba.
Dave says, “I am delighted and honoured to have been appointed to the chair of FIGS, a wonderful charity which makes a huge difference in the lives of girls in South Sudan.
It is shocking that a 15-year-old girl in South Sudan is more likely to die in childbirth than complete her education. One of the most important things we can do is to educate young women and empower them to take control of their future.
FIGS plays a critical role in the futures of girls in the world’s youngest nation. I am looking forward to working together with the Trustees of FIGS, its partners and Ibba Girls School. We have exciting work to do to develop a strategy to support the school in being permanently sustainable so that it can continue to make a difference in the lives of young women in South Sudan."
