Kevin Turner

Kevin Turner founded UKRBA in April 2026, but the route there was anything but conventional.

His early years were spent in Nairobi, Kenya, before returning to the UK as a child. From the beginning, change and new environments were part of his story, something that later shaped the way he approached people, business and opportunity.

Kevin started out working in theatre before moving into sales. He built a distinguished career across advertising and distribution, handling significant business to business relationships and developing the commercial instincts that would shape much of what followed.

That grounding led into recruitment, where he built and developed successful businesses of his own. Recruitment taught him the realities of growth from both sides of the table: winning clients, finding the right people, building teams and creating organisations capable of scaling.

He later moved into online retail and senior leadership, taking on a CEO role and helping scale a digital retail business. From there came a different idea: an online marketplace designed to direct funds to charities through everyday consumer activity.

That business brought together two themes that had run through much of Kevin’s career: commerce and impact. It also gave him a front row view of how giving and doing good actually work in practice rather than in theory.

He saw how consumer behaviour was changing, how people wanted to support causes differently and how many established fundraising models were struggling to keep pace. Those observations became the basis of his book, The Fundraising Treadmill: Why Charity Fundraising Hasn’t Kept Up With How People Give.

The thinking did not stop with charities. Kevin increasingly saw the same shift happening in business. Customers, employees, procurement teams and larger organisations were beginning to look beyond price and product. They wanted to understand what businesses stood for, how they treated people, what they contributed and whether the claims they made could actually be evidenced.

The problem was that most SMEs had no simple way to demonstrate any of it.

That led Kevin to create the UK SME Responsible Business Association, UKRBA, in April 2026. UKRBA was built around a straightforward principle: responsible business should be practical, visible and commercially useful. SMEs should be able to demonstrate what they are doing without needing their own sustainability department or becoming experts in CSR and ESG.

Today, Kevin’s work focuses on helping SMEs turn responsible activity into evidence, credibility and commercial opportunity, while continuing to speak and write about the changing relationship between business, consumers and social impact.