The Difference Podcast: Marchu Belete, Director of Migration Exchange (formerly CEO of Hibiscus)

“The moment required us to step up.”

That’s Marchu Belete, on why she chose to challenge Hibiscus’s biggest source of income rather than let the organisation drift further from why it was founded.

Marchu is an excellent leader in the UK’s migration and refugee sector. She was co-director at Women for Refugee Women, then Chief Executive of Hibiscus, and is now Director of Migration Exchange at Global Dialogue. Helen worked alongside Marchu during her time at Hibiscus, in her Trust Impact capacity, so this conversation carries real history with it.

Marchu’s story is one of the case studies behind Chapter 4 of the book. This is the conversation behind that chapter.

The biggest question - purpose or money?

Marchu joined Hibiscus in October 2020 to lead an organisation set up to support migrant women. When she looked at the numbers, most of the people Hibiscus was working with were men – this was the result of government contracts that had quietly pulled the organisation away from its founding purpose.

Rather than asserting a fix, she went and found Olga Heavens, the woman who founded Hibiscus in 1986, and invited her back in to tell the team why the organisation existed in the first place. Marchu made the case to walk away from a government contract worth a huge share of Hibiscus’s income, because keeping it meant working against the very reason the charity existed.

Centring the right risk

We talk about what Helen calls Marchu’s quiet leadership, and Marchu’s answer to how you build a culture that takes risks: keep pointing back to who you’re there to serve. Her sharpest point is on risk itself – the reputational risk a funder worries about is nothing next to the risk migrant women face to their safety, their homes, their children. Getting that comparison right changes every decision that follows.

Also in this episode

• Why the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter moment made 2020 the right time to force the purpose question, not the wrong one
• How Marchu carried the same discipline into Migration Exchange, building a clear purpose statement from day one
• Her case for why charities can’t afford to work in silos any longer
• Her honest answer on when the work of a charity like hers is never “done”

Listen now

Marchu Belete is Director of Migration Exchange at Global Dialogue, and former Chief Executive of Hibiscus. Her case study features in The Difference: How to Understand, Measure and Maximise Social Impact, out now and a number one Amazon bestseller.

The Difference Podcast is hosted by Matt Stevenson-Dodd and Helen Greig.