Lindsey MacDonald is chief executive of Magic Breakfast, the charity working to end morning hunger for children across the UK. Since joining in 2021, she has led the organisation from direct delivery – over 350,000 children access a Magic Breakfast each school day – into a sustained advocacy campaign that helped secure free breakfast clubs for primary school pupils in England.

Remain hopeful. If I could speak to my 23-year-old self, I’d tell her to stay positive and stay hopeful. That’s the resilience of civil society and the charity sector as a whole. Change can happen, but it takes an awfully long time, and it only happens if people work toward it.

Be honest about what you can achieve alone. We weren’t, and certainly weren’t at the time, a massive campaigning organisation with a mailing list we could galvanise to put pressure on government. But we did have relationships with key decision-makers. So we built an intentional strategy around that: insider politics, having conversations directly with elected and unelected officials, much as organisations like Save the Children do.

Find your flotilla. It’s not surprising to anybody if Magic Breakfast is advocating for breakfast. So we worked closely with other organisations in the space, understanding where the wider system was trying to get to, so we didn’t cut across other parts of civil society fighting for their own asks. Everybody moving in the same direction carries more weight than one voice alone.

A good strategy and a lot of luck is probably what you need. A former consultant of ours, many years ago, was a certain Wes Streeting. You never quite know who your messengers will turn out to be, or in what future role they’ll appear. You can only build the case and hope the right person is in the room when it matters.

Winning the policy is not the same as solving the problem. We fought and made the case for breakfast in England for 20-plus years, and the new act is a great step forward. But hunger doesn’t end at age 11, doesn’t only exist in England, and doesn’t start at age five either. The way I simplify it internally is this: the risk is that we get breakfast, and the magic is lost.

A want can curdle into a must. When government steps in, it shifts provision from something a head teacher has voluntarily asked a charity for help with, into a must-deliver. There’s a real risk the conversation becomes solely about logistics – how you toast that much bread – rather than what would make children want to show up every day.

Learn from where the same policy has already gone wrong. In Wales, where free primary breakfast has been law for over a decade, uptake among eligible children is just 15%, because of how the policy was implemented. It’s free to eat the bowl of cereal, but it can cost five pounds just to walk through the door. We’ve drawn on that a great deal in shaping how the policy in England is designed.

If you set out to change the world, you have to be willing to change yourself. We were set up as an organisation intent on changing the world, and that means changing as the world around us changes too. If we carried on doing exactly the same thing now that there’s an act of Parliament for free breakfast clubs, that would be absolutely bonkers.

Watch that your own framing doesn’t work against you. We exist to remove hunger as a barrier to learning, so that’s naturally how we’ve framed the case for breakfast. But if “feeding hungry children” is still what’s driving public perception in a couple of years’ time, how likely is it that parents will want to send their children along? We’ve had to think hard about talking about our purpose in a way that’s inclusive of the world we’re trying to create, not just the problem we set out to solve.

Knowing when to close something down takes as much courage as building it. Something in my career I’m genuinely proud of is setting up, and then closing down, a charity. I founded the Homeless FA with a laser focus on not wanting to add another fundraising vehicle to a crowded field. When we’d proved the model, we had a choice: merge into Centrepoint, the youth homelessness charity, or into the Football Association itself. We recognised the impact mattered more than the intervention, or the brand, if you can call it that.

The mask you build to look professional is heavier than you think. My biggest regret is that I didn’t understand, earlier in my career, how important being authentic was. I spent a lot of my early to mid career trying to live up to a picture in my head of what professional looked like, what senior leaders looked like – most of them looked male, which didn’t help. A previous chair of mine once told me, kindly, that I was “too professional.” I’d built a kind of polish, a mask, and I wish I’d taken it off sooner.

Being yourself is not just nicer, it’s more effective. It’s so much more impactful for every relationship that matters: with colleagues, direct reports, your boss, funders, anybody. I wish I’d known that sooner.

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Cause & Effect is a series from Hope, a charity branding and marketing agency, in which leading figures who have been involved in building and promoting good causes tell us what they’ve learned from their experiences. Interview by Michael Isaacs.