Amanda takes charge at a photo shoot.
Amanda Bailey repeats back your question: “What’s it like working at RAFT for me?”
As RAFT’s Senior Fundraising Manager thinks, she touches her index finger to her thumb on each hand as if holding invisible thread, brings the closed fingers together and then pulls them apart. She does this once, twice, and then changes the angle; horizontal, vertical, diagonal.
“A piece of elastic, that’s what I feel like here, I’m always being pulled in a million different directions.”
This June will make Amanda’s 11th year at RAFT; if anyone knows what it feels like to be pulled so many different ways, it’s her. She says this though without complaint; just stating a fact – like she does when explaining what motivates her every day.
“It sounds so cliché but this is the way it really is, I love working here because I really feel like I’m making a difference in people’s lives,” she says.
Amanda says that the light bulb moment for her came at a meeting with members of the Lindsay Leg Club. The Leg Club promotes the healing of leg ulcers and brings together members – patients – and NHS nurses to promote best-healing practices.
“When you work at RAFT, you’re around scientists all day and you become slightly removed from what the research is really about,” she says. “You go to the Leg Club, you see the members and you realise why we’re doing it.”
In what probably seems like a previous life for her, Amanda worked at Sheraton Hotel complex near Heathrow organising conferences and at the BBC as a secretary, both she describes as being big, big corporations.
“If a copier jammed, you called the team which fixed copiers and somebody came and fixed it. Run out of paper, you call the people that order paper and more arrives. But at RAFT, it’s completely different.”
While at the time she didn’t think twice about it, but now she says that she could not go back to a corporate world.
“I’d find it really hard to go back to that world, with all the spending without any thought where the money comes from. At RAFT I feel personally responsible for any money spent; it’s not my money, it’s donors’ money.
“I talk to people in other, larger charity jobs to mine and my most feared question is: ‘What is your budget?’ I don’t know what to tell them, I don’t have a budget,” she says laughing.
Little known facts about Amanda are her being part of a rock chorus and being detained by Dubai security with questionable videos; as much as you might think otherwise, the two are not related.
For the last year Amanda has been a member of Rock Choir and has performed at Wembley; most at RAFT have been threatened at least once with being given a DVD of the event.
And the Dubai Incident – as it is known throughout all the Middle East – this happened when Amanda’s husband was posted to Dubai and she accompanied him.
“This was some years back and Sky really had not made a presence yet in Dubai due to censorship and other issues. So, when you’d go back to England, people would give you a shopping list of things to bring back and this often included VHS videos.”
She was stopped at Dubai customs with eight ‘Fools and Horses’ videos.
“I was lead away; they took away my passport and kept me in a room while they went through all eight videos to make sure there was nothing pornographic on them. Then to add insult to injury, once they were satisfied what they were, the officials wouldn’t let me have them. No, that required my husband – a man - coming down for that.”
While Amanda would love to go work in Singapore – having a love of hot and humid weather – she is in no hurry to leave RAFT.
“It’s funny because while I’ve enjoyed living out of the UK, those experiences only make me appreciate more what we have here,” she says.
