Make Connections | Gain Ideas & Insight | Share Your Skills

Everyone is welcome at the Charity Meetup London Group, a friendly, facilitated networking and skills-sharing event.

When: Tuesday 22nd Sept 2026 11 am - 1 pm

Where: Online

Meet like-minded people and connect, as well as learn new practical skills and tactics to help further your professional development.

Theme: Strategic Breakthroughs

Step back from the day-to-day firefighting and join us for an event focused on creating strategic breakthroughs across charity leadership, fundraising, and resilience.

Featuring two high-impact spotlight sessions, speakers Jamila Daley-Jeffers and Fran Borg-Wheeler will share the practical breakthroughs that transformed their work, from using AI as a strategic partner to secure £200k in grants, to building organisational resilience that moves teams past constant survival mode.

Held in a welcoming, friendly, and safe space, the event also offers dedicated time to network, share candid experiences, and connect with fellow sector leaders. You’ll walk away with fresh perspectives, actionable frameworks, and practical tools to build capacity and drive sustainable impact without burning out your team.

What to Expect:

• Insightful Talks: Peer-led sessions on the psychology of resilient teams.
• Interactive Breakouts: Small-group discussions to share leadership wins and hurdles.
• Actionable Takeaways: Practical strategies to bring back to your organisation immediately.

This isn't just a networking event; it's a critical opportunity for UK charity leaders to connect, collaborate, and spark new thinking to address the biggest challenges facing the non-profit sector.

Spotlight Sessions & Speakers

Spotlight 1: The Fundraising Partner You Didn’t Know You Had: My Strategic Breakthrough with AI

Speaker: Jamila Daley-Jeffers | Fundraising Expert, Strategist & Speaker | Get That Money (Founder and Lead Consultant) & The Female Founders Table (Founder and Host)

Speaker Bio:

Jamila Daley-Jeffers is a fundraising expert, strategist, and speaker who helps organisations build sustainable income without burning out their teams. With over nine years of experience across charities, consultancies, and social impact initiatives, including The Children’s Society, GOSH Charity, and The Reef-World Foundation. Jamila is known for making complex strategies practical, ethical, and human-centred.

Session Overview:

How do you create major capacity in a stretched fundraising team without sacrificing judgement, authenticity, or donor trust? In this spotlight session, Jamila shares her strategic breakthrough using AI as a thought partner, rather than a lazy copy generator—to unlock capacity, streamline grant research, and refine high-value applications. Jamila will share how this shift in mindset helped secure approximately £200,000 in funding across three major grant applications in a single week. Moving beyond the hype, this session connects AI adoption directly to team wellbeing and ethical leadership, offering five practical prompts you can take away and use immediately.

Spotlight 2: Moving from Surviving to Thriving: A Strategic Breakthrough on the Personal and Organisational Level

Speaker: Fran Borg-Wheeler | Leadership & Organisational Development Specialist | Heart-centred Leaders Ltd (Founder)

Speaker Bio:

Fran Borg-Wheeler is a leadership and organisational development specialist who works with charity leaders and their teams to sustain impact, strengthen leadership and build organisational resilience. She was CEO of a Buckinghamshire-based youth charity for 13 years, giving her first-hand experience of leading people, services and organisations through change and complexity. In 2020, she set up Heart-centred Leaders Ltd and since then Fran has worked with more than 1000 Not-for-Profit leaders across organisations of different sizes and at various stages of development, via leadership development, coaching, training and facilitation for Teams, Boards and Senior Leadership teams.

She is a leadership coach and trainer- an organisational sustainability consultant with The Avocado Foundation; a Leadership trainer for Homeless Link and co-facilitator on the Confident Trustee Series. She is also co-founder of Charity Leaders UK and has held two interim leadership roles in the sector, including Director of Services at Become and Head of Membership at Charity Finance Group. In her spare time, she is a proud trustee of Radical Recruit. Her work spans leadership and organisational development, helping charities move beyond individual leadership interventions towards broader, sustainable approaches that enable both people and organisations to thrive and increase their impact

Session Overview:

What do you do when you’re handed a charity CEO role with no manual, no mentor, and no training in fundraising or line management? In this spotlight session, Fran shares her own strategic breakthrough — from writing 45 funding applications a year and running herself into the ground, to a health scare that forced a hard reset on how she worked. Fran will tell the story of how she built a Business Fundraising Action Group: a team of corporate supporters she recruited and empowered, who went on to raise £100,000 in eighteen months, starting with one sponsored walk. This session connects personal sustainability directly to organisational impact, closing with practical tips on the mindset shift needed to move from surviving to thriving — and how to build your own action group.

Who is this for?

This event would be relevant to anyone working in the charity sector. This event is particularly useful for fundraisers.
Whether you are an Executive Director, a Team Lead, or an aspiring changemaker, this space is for you to recharge and refocus.

Who will you meet at the Charity Meetup?

A diverse network of connections is essential for people and organisations in the non-profit sector. The purpose of the Charity Meetup is to help foster and grow these connections.

The Charity Meetup is a friendly event full of skill-sharing, networking, and fun, and all are welcome. The event was created by Dawn Newton after noticing that there were lots of events, but nothing that supported participants in networking practically through facilitated activities.

Join the discussion about how we can build a thriving future for the charity sector and the practical steps we can take now to work towards it.

Refunds & Cancellations

• 7-Day Window: Full refunds (excluding booking fees) are available for cancellations made at least 7 days before the event start date.
• Late Cancellations: Tickets are non-refundable within 7 days of the event. However, you are welcome to transfer your ticket to another guest via your confirmation email.
• Event Cancellation: In the unlikely event that the meetup is cancelled by the organiser, all ticket holders will receive a full refund.

Photos by: Marcus Jamieson-Pond www.jampondphotography.com

Please share this event with your contacts (links on the right hand side of this page).