About People & Purpose

People & Purpose is an initiative by me, Hannah Kowszun.

I have worked and volunteered in charities since 2006, in a wide variety of roles: from membership to marketing, from fundraising to strategy, from Trustee to CEO. Consistent across all of these experiences was a sense of dysfunction, of a sector inspired by others rather than one carving its own identity and approach.

In 2019 I started a Masters in Organizational Psychology to try and make sense of my experiences. My dissertation explored factors that affect the high voluntary turnover we have among staff. This was published in 2025 by the think tank, Rogare.

Charities and nonprofits - for-purpose organisations - are not like private and public sector organisations. We are the only ones to employ fundraisers; in the UK our paid staff are outnumbered by Trustees around 15:1 (NCVO, 2025); our success is measured by our impact not our finances.

We need approaches to supporting our people that are our own.

What I do now is work with for-purpose organisations, and the people in them, to understand each other more honestly. That means examining the culture, processes and assumptions that drive people away.

And sometimes, helping people understand that the organisation, not them, is the thing that needs to change.

I'm based in South London, raising a beautiful little girl with Down syndrome.