Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond have led ActionAid UK together for six months, having previously shared the role as a trio of co-CEOs for the two years before that. Between them they are steering the organisation away from its roots as a child-sponsorship charity towards one built squarely around the rights of women and girls worldwide.

Two heads relieve the pressure of one. “Having two of us means we don’t have a single leader entirely bogged down in the day-to-day running of a very complex international organisation,” says Taahra. The pair split responsibilities cleanly: Hannah leads fundraising, governance and influencing; Taahra leads finance, strategy, people and transformation.

Don’t put leaders on a pedestal. Taahra cites Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership in the Age of Complexity: leaders who present themselves as having all the answers tend, eventually, to fall from a great height. “We don’t believe we have all the answers. We believe in sharing power and creating the right conditions for people to work together.”

Always have someone to call. For Hannah, the real value of co-leadership is having somebody to test a decision against – “this has happened, this is what I’m thinking, what do you think?” The answer is usually “go for it”, but sometimes it’s a challenge that makes the decision better. Sitting on decisions alone, she says, is a habit of “quite patriarchal”, traditional hierarchies.

Change the story you tell about yourself before you ask others to change theirs. ActionAid has shifted gradually since 2017 from a general development and child-sponsorship charity to one built around women’s rights. As Hannah puts it: “We need to create the building blocks internally to make that external change” – you can’t shift what you do in the world until you’ve shifted how you operate at home.

Ask the people you serve what they actually need, then listen. Ahead of a new strategy, ActionAid spoke to more than 300 women’s rights organisations across 64 countries. Their message: longer-term, trust-based funding, and allies willing to be political. Taahra says, “If civil society doesn’t step up to stop the rollback on rights, no one else is going to.”

Bring your supporters with you rather than leaving them behind. Child sponsorship still matters to many of ActionAid’s 120,000 loyal supporters, so rather than scrap it, the organisation is evolving the product over two to three years, redirecting funds towards local rights programmes. “It’s really important that we take our supporters with us on that journey,” says Taahra.

Change what you do, not just how much of it you do. Hannah frames ActionAid’s strategy as transformation, not growth: “How do we fundraise differently is really central to who we are as an organisation and where we’re going.” That shows up in how the charity communicates too – its public fundraising leans more explicitly feminist, anti-racist and decolonial than before.

Patience doesn’t have to cost you your convictions. Asked what she’d tell her 23-year-old self, Taahra – who says she “used to work at the speed of light” – lands on patience: “Have a little more patience, but still have that belief. Listen a bit more to other people’s thinking.”

Follow your instincts, not the ladder. Hannah never set out to become a CEO. Her advice to her younger self: keep trusting your instincts, stay close to your political core, and let the mission decide the path rather than the title. “You get one crack at this, so enjoy yourself.”

Real achievements are rarely solo ones. Hannah’s proudest work – building a partnership programme with women’s rights organisations in conflict-affected countries, grown from a tiny budget – reinforced a lesson she returns to often: “You never do it on your own. It’s always working with a team of people who also have a vision for a different world.”

Sometimes changing the organisation is the achievement. In 2022, after a race audit exposed serious failings, Taahra was one of ten women of colour who set up what they called Revolution HQ to confront how racism had been tolerated inside ActionAid. It was personally difficult – “there were a lot of people who were not very happy with the approach” – but she calls it her proudest moment: “It’s really those women that made it possible for me to be in this position.”

Know what actually gets you up in the morning. For Hannah, it’s her two sons and a belief that a different world is possible: “You can be upset and frustrated with the world, but you have to do something about it.” For Taahra, it’s building a place where “everybody can bring their true authentic self to work” and feel part of a community.

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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.