Better Business / Member profile
‘I’d want funding for community to be treated as an investment rather than a cost’
Adam Tutton is the chief executive of Bristol Rovers Community Trust, the official charity of Bristol Rovers Football Club.
Born and bred in Bristol, Adam previously served as chairman of Bristol Rovers Women’s FC. He has also been a non-executive director of St Paul’s Carnival.
Bristol Rovers Community Trust uses the power of sport to inspire positive change.
In recent years, it has been recognised as one of the region’s leading sports charities, including being named EFL Community Club of the Year.
Can you describe the career journey that has led you to where you are today?
It’s fair to say my CV doesn’t reflect a conventional route into charity leadership.
I’m a born-and-bred Bristolian, but I left the city at 17 to study business management in London. Once I’d graduated, I did what a lot of graduates do: I drifted from job to job, trying to work out what I actually wanted to be when I grew up.
My first proper foothold in “the industry”, if you can call it that, was becoming head barman at the Groucho Club, the legendary Soho haunt for actors, artists and musicians during the Cool Britannia years. I pulled pints for the likes of Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Blur’s Alex James, which is a strange sort of finishing school, but it teaches you an enormous amount about people, pressure and reading a room – skills that turn out to be surprisingly transferable to charity leadership.
After a few years of that, I decided it was time to get what my mum would call “a proper job”. I trained as a teacher, picked up my football coaching badges along the way, and spent several years teaching in some genuinely challenging parts of Hackney. That gave me a real grounding in the needs of young people growing up without many of the advantages others take for granted – a theme that has stayed with me ever since.
I moved back to Bristol, carried on teaching and qualified as a head teacher. Then, in 2009, a job came up that I couldn’t turn down: head of education at Bristol Rovers Community Trust.
I got the role, fell in love with the work and never left. Sixteen years, several promotions (and relegations) and a rapidly expanding workforce later, I’m now Chief Executive of the Community Trust, overseeing everything we do across health, education, sport and inclusion for the city.
Bristol Rovers Community Trust uses the power of sport to inspire positive change
Tell us about one (or more) of the people who inspired you along the way
Honestly, the two people who inspire me most aren’t in football or the charity sector at all – they’re my children.
In 2014, I lost my wife, their mother. Watching my two daughters grow up in the shadow of that loss, and become the strong, kind, caring young people they are today, has taught me more about resilience than any leadership course or career mentor ever could.
They’ve faced something no child should have to face, and they’ve done it with a courage and determination that genuinely humbles me. I look at them and see resilience that never asks for sympathy – it just gets on with things. I’d be lying if I said that hadn’t shaped how I try to lead and how I try to live.
I must also mention my partner. We met some years after I lost my wife, and she has been by my side ever since, through thick and thin. She never tried to replace what my daughters had lost; she simply showed up, consistently, with patience and warmth. In doing so, she became a genuine source of stability for all three of us during some very difficult times.
It’s another reminder that the people who inspire you most in life rarely appear in the way you’d expect, but they matter more than almost anything else.
There isn’t a day that goes by when I’m not proud of my children. They are, without question, the reason I know what strength looks like, and they inspire me far more than they probably realise.
I’d also point to the young people who’ve come through our Community College over the years. That might sound like a soundbite, but it isn’t meant as one.
Watching a teenager who arrived with few qualifications and not much confidence leave us with a BTEC, a degree or a full-time job is genuinely inspiring, week in, week out. More than half of our full-time staff came through our own education programme. When your workforce is proof of the thing you’re trying to achieve, that’s about as motivating as it gets.
Are there any memorable challenges you have faced along the way?
Football clubs are not known for their stability, and the Community Trust sits alongside that turbulence even though we’re an independent charity.
During my time here, I’ve worked under 14 different managers, some considerably warmer to the Trust’s work than others. Learning to build something durable and long-term within an environment that changes its senior personnel almost as often as the seasons change is its own particular skill.
More broadly, the charity sector itself is under serious strain. Funding is harder to find, costs are rising and demand for what we do keeps growing. Keeping the lights on while also trying to expand – including our plans to develop a 16-acre community site in north Bristol – requires a stubborn refusal to accept “no” as a final answer.
Adam Tutton is the chief executive of Bristol Rovers Community Trust, the official charity of Bristol Rovers Football Club
What is the most important thing for you to focus on in business?
People – and specifically, giving them a genuine route forward. Everything else – funding, partnerships and buildings – is really in service of that one thing.
Our education programme is the clearest example. We don’t just want to run good BTEC and degree courses from the stadium; we want those courses to lead somewhere real. When more than half of your own staff are graduates of your programme, including two members of your senior leadership team, you know the model works, and you have a responsibility to keep it working.
If you had one piece of advice to offer people aspiring to your role, what would it be?
Don’t be precious about your route in. Nobody plans a career that goes from cocktail bar to head teacher to charity chief executive, and yet here we are.
The skills that matter – reading people, staying calm under pressure and genuinely caring whether someone’s life improves – are built in all sorts of unlikely places. If I’d waited for a conventional charity sector opportunity to present itself, I’d probably still be behind a bar in Soho.
If you could change one thing about your sector, or Bristol as a whole, what would it be?
I’d want funding for community and charity work to be treated as an investment rather than a cost.
The current climate makes the sector feel perpetually fragile, when in reality organisations like ours are doing preventative work in health, education and social inclusion. That saves the public purse far more than it costs. If Bristol, as a city, backed that logic more consistently, I think we’d see the benefits within a generation, not just a single funding cycle.
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What are your aspirations for the future (personally and for Bristol)?
For the Trust, it’s about delivering on the promise of our new north Bristol community site, turning 16 acres of land into a facility that lets us support thousands more people each year across health, education, sport and inclusion. That’s the big one on the horizon right now.
For Bristol more widely, I’d love to see the city’s sporting and charitable organisations working even more closely together. The collaboration we’ve just launched with North Bristol NHS Trust, using football to reach people the health service sometimes struggles to engage with, is exactly the sort of joined-up thinking I want to see more of.
Personally, I’ll keep doing this as long as it keeps mattering. And if I can occasionally still be found singing Goodnight Irene outside Number 10 Downing Street, so much the better. Some traditions are worth keeping.
All photos: Bristol Rovers Community Trust
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