
Richard lived on a boat and worked at Oxfam, before joining Fern in 2007. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Birmingham, where he retains one of the world’s leading beer bottle top collections.
“One thing everyone knows about me is I absolutely love Fern. At our 20th anniversary party two people said: ‘Fern seems like an amazing place to work. Is it really as good as it seems?’ And for me it certainly is.
Fern is very supportive of the ups and downs that all staff go through, and its flat structure has given me the freedom to try new things and change how Fern communicates.
Communication is integral to everything Fern does.
We're not able to be collaborative unless we can communicate well: unless we can explain complicated issues in ways that encourage people to understand, care, and get involved. So in the last few years we’ve focussed on producing material that explains issues linked to forests, climate change and human rights in a way that most people could understand.
The beauty of working for Fern is that no day is the same.
I often come in to an extremely full [email] inbox. A typical day would involve Skyping or chatting with people about exciting new ideas that need to be turned into reality and proposing communications tools that might help – everything has to be tailored to its audience – and then, at the other end of the spectrum, I could be going through the final proof of a beautiful new report, checking the images and the captions, and making sure that it’s convincing.
Even when I’m travelling, which is a lot, there’s a wide variety of activities: from working with filmmakers to produce videos, overseeing the building of our new website, or training up an intern.