Head of Charity
Moon Charity Practice was appointed to support Bath Welcomes Refugees (BWR) in recruiting their first Head of Charity a pivotal role to help the organisation scale into a sustainable and strategically driven charity.
Founded in 2015, BWR is a small but impactful organisation supporting refugees and asylum seekers to rebuild their lives in Bath. The charity provides practical, emotional and advocacy support, working with over 200 volunteers and has supported more than 800 individuals to date.
This was Moon’s first engagement with the organisation.
The challenge
This search required navigating a particularly complex brief:
Highly niche experience requirement: BWR needed someone with both senior charity leadership capability and direct understanding of the refugee/asylum seeker landscape, significantly narrowing the talent pool.
Scale vs. impact: As a small charity with limited resources, the role required a candidate motivated by purpose, service delivery, and community impact, rather than organisational scale and a large renumeration package .
First senior appointment: This was a newly created leadership role, requiring someone able to establish structure, build strategy, and lead a largely volunteer-led organisation.
Breadth of remit: The position combined strategy, fundraising, operations, governance, safeguarding, and external advocacy - a broad and demanding leadership scope.
At its core, BWR needed a leader who could maintain the organisation’s strong community ethos while enabling it to grow in a more sustainable and structured way.
The approach
Led by Leighann Beck, Moon delivered a blended search strategy, combining targeted headhunting with a carefully positioned advertising campaign.
Key to the successful search was:
Working closely with trustees to ensure clarity on expectations, cultural fit and long-term vision, and a deep understanding of the brief.
Targeting adjacent sectors such as homelessness, housing and social care, where transferable experience and aligned motivations were more likely.
looking beyond CVs, using in-depth candidate conversations to ascertain candidate alignment and motivations alongside technical capability, resulting in a robust shortlist.
Carefully positioning the opportunity to engage candidates motivated by the opportunity to make a real difference and take ownership rather than a large renumeration package.
The outcome
Hattie Hansen was successfully appointed and joined in September 2025.
Hattie brought experience across homelessness, housing and social care, shaped through roles with organisations including Shelter, Second Step, The Salvation Army and Bristol City Council.
Importantly, her career demonstrated the breadth that smaller charity leadership roles demand spanning frontline delivery, contract and service management, partnership working with local authorities, and strategic planning. At points, she combined roles and voluntary experience to deepen her understanding of how services operate in practice and how systems connect.
This ability to move between operational detail and strategic oversight, alongside a clear personal commitment to supporting displaced communities, made her particularly well-suited to a role requiring flexibility, ownership and leadership across multiple disciplines.
Hattie’s appointment reflects a pattern seen across the sector: candidates who secure their first leadership role are often those who have consciously built breadth, transferable insight, and values-driven experience, rather than following a linear career path.
“Moon Charity Practice was appointed to support Bath Welcomes Refugees (BWR) in recruiting their first Head of Charity, a pivotal role in helping to maximise BWR’s impact and to become a sustainable and strategically driven charity. Moon really understood the complexity of what we were trying to achieve and brought forward candidates who not only had the right experience, but who connected with our values.”
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