Impact UK: Family man

Having watched his mother die too early from a rare bone marrow cancer and his youngest son born with learning disabilities, David Forbes-Nixon chose positivity. On retiring from investment banking, he channelled his skills and drive into a new mission: to accelerate research into multiple myeloma and to expand education and employment opportunities for young people with disabilities.

The Spark

I’m a big believer in following your passion, that your philanthropy should be relevant to you. I founded the David Forbes-Nixon Family Foundation in 2014, driven by two things. First, my youngest son, Charlie, is disabled.

He is my hero. My absolute inspiration. Seeing through his eyes how poor disability education and employment provision was a wake-up call. Second, my mother, Jacquelin, died of multiple myeloma at a young age and it broke my heart.

The Choice

I thought that if I stayed laser-focused on a few things and did them well and used some of the skills from my career, I could make a difference. Across the portfolio, I brought a mindset of clear KPIs, rigorous data, brilliant boards as ‘critical friends’, and hiring the best specialist talent.

We started with trying to develop a world-class special needs school in Surrey—at Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s old house and partnered with Stepping Stones School—because so many special schools offer a poor education provision with very low aspirations and outcomes. We restored the house, added a new wing with classrooms, therapy rooms, a hall, gym, swimming pool, multi-use games area, forest school—the lot. Today it has 107 pupils and was rated ‘Outstanding across the board’ by Ofsted.

Then we asked the question: what happens after school or college? Only 4.8% of adults with learning disabilities are in jobs, in a country with a million such adults of working age and a big skills shortage. That’s unacceptable. I’m a firm believer that every life is of equal value and that everyone can contribute in their own unique way.

We studied supported internships, and most providers don’t have a rigorous programme with good data, but there was one shining light—the US Project SEARCH model. Seventy percent of the young adults with learning disabilities or autism put through this one-year programme were getting jobs. It blew my mind, so we negotiated the master franchise for the UK and Ireland and set up DFN Project SEARCH in 2018.

Separately, in myeloma, we invested £1,000,000 to set up a myeloma research centre at the Institute of Cancer Research and establish the Jacquelin Forbes-Nixon Fellowship, named after my mother, and awarded it to a brilliant researcher, Professor Martin Kaiser. He’s leading ground-breaking clinical trials exploring whether using a combination of treatments simultaneously, rather than sequentially, can help find a cure or keep patients with high-risk myeloma in remission for longer.