Military charity awards top honour to county resident

David Harris, Volunteer Operations Programme Manager for SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity has been awarded the Sir James Gildea Global Award.

SSAFA’s Sir James Gildea Awards were created to recognise the staff – voluntary and paid – for their exceptional contributions and commitment to SSAFA’s activities and values. The awards were presented at SSAFA’s Annual Members’ Meeting in London at the Victory Services Club on July 11 by His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, SSAFA’s President.

Born in Hereford in 1959, David has moved around many locations through his life, and is now settled on the outskirts of Lincoln with his wife Sarah, and their Welsh Springer Spaniel, Macsen.

Back, though, to a few days after his 16th birthday when David joined the Army in 1975 as a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) electronics apprentice.

He qualified in 1977 as an avionics technician, and served with several Army Air Corps Squadrons and 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron, Royal Marines seeing active service in Northern Ireland and the South Atlantic as well as tours in Belize, Hong Kong, Kenya, Canada, Norway, two further tours in the Falkland Islands and as an instructor at the Aircraft Engineering Training Wing, where he taught avionics and supervisory management. He left the Army as an Artificer Staff Sergeant in 1992.

His post-Army career has been no less diverse.

David’s first civilian role was as a maintainability design engineer on the Harrier jump jet at British Aerospace as was. Gaining experience and qualifications in integrated logistics support, he moved on to provide consultancy support to the MoD on major procurement programmes, and joined the Royal Navy’s Merlin helicopter programme at Lockheed Martin.

Subsequent career changes saw him becoming the HR Operations Manager, eventually the HR Director, while gaining Chartered Membership of the CIPD. His next role, as Director of Corporate Responsibility and Ethics, allowed him to bring his business acumen, HR knowledge and leadership experience together, building the first corporate responsibility programme across the corporation. David became Head of Business Conduct at BAE Systems in 2009 and moved onto PwC in 2014. In 2017 David set up his own limited company, providing management, HR and data privacy consultancy to clients including independent schools and housing associations.

David joined SSAFA as maternity cover for the Data Governance Manger in May 2021 for 12 months. He also led the successful achievement of ISO 9001 Quality Management certification for SSAFA Family Health Services, putting an information governance programme in place. He then led the completion of work to develop a digital strategy for SSAFA and more recently has been the programme manager for the Network Delivery Project (NDP).

Reflecting on his time with SSAFA, and his award, David says: “When I see the fantastic work that our employees and volunteers do for our beneficiaries, receiving this award is extremely humbling.

“I feel privileged to have been recognised for having experiences that could make a difference here at SSAFA, and to have been encouraged and trusted to bring those to bear. And I would really like to take this opportunity to say that any successes I have achieved have only been because of the support, effort, commitment, and trust of so many others, employees, and volunteers alike, and so I share this award with the whole NDP team.”

All at SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity extend their sincere congratulations to David.