Alec Reed

In 2022 he launched Reed Innovation Scholarships, providing financial support to undergraduate students at Royal Holloway, University of London. The scholarship rewards and encourages creative problem-solving.

In addition to projects uploaded by charities, the site also runs emergency appeals (such as for victims of the 2014 Philippines hurricane and the 2013 Syrian refugee crisis, and an annual Christmas Challenge), in which Reed’s funds (and those of external foundations) are joined with pledges from charities' own major donors, in order to double online donations made by the public. The 2021 Christmas Challenge raised £24.1m for 928 charities.

In 2012 the West London Academy was renamed The Alec Reed Academy, in honour of its sponsor. The school has a sports and enterprise specialism. Its catchment area has a high percentage of Indian, Pakistani and Polish families; 52% of pupils do not speak English as a first language. 80% of its pupils achieve Level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths.

A 2010 Ofsted inspection saw the school rated as "Good"; Ofsted’s 2014 inspection, which was marked under Oftsed’s revised scoring regime, saw the school listed as "requiring improvement". The 2014 report noted that “…senior managers and leaders have accurately identified the areas of the academy requiring further improvement. Their actions are beginning to have an impact on improving teaching and raising standards"

Reed is married with three children and 11 grandchildren. He and his wife live in a two-bedroom house in Kensington and a converted cottage in Little Compton, Warwickshire. Debrett's lists his interests as family, portrait painting, theatre, cinema, tennis, riding, ballet and bridge. He has a lifelong interest in farming and equestrianism, having joined the Young Farmers aged 14. In 2009 he purchased at auction nine lots of land comprising 1600 acres of the estate of Kiddington Hall in the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire; Reed has written of plans to turn the land into a residential equestrian estate.

Founded in 2007, TheBigGive.org.uk is a non-profit, charitable website which enables donors to find and support charity projects in their field of interest. Reed has referred to it as “…a Wikipedia for big givers" and "his biggest success". It reports raising in excess of £233m for charities and supporting 9500 ongoing charity projects. The site now hosts £1.3bn worth of projects in need of funding.

This 4-18 coeducational establishment in Northolt, England was one of the first academies to be created under the Learning and Skills Act 2000. It is composed of the former Compton High School and Northholt Primary School. Both areas are close to Reed’s childhood home in Hounslow, and to his former school, Drayton Manor Grammar. Reed’s involvement with the academy began in November 2001, when he sponsored Compton High School.

In 1999 Reed was asked by Tony Blair to investigate a decline in teacher training enrolment.

Reed has held the positions of Chief Executive, Executive Chairman, non-executive Chairman and Founder at Large during his career at the Reed group of companies. In 1997 he stepped down as chief executive to become chairman, handing control of the company to his son James; to mark the handover, Reed presented his son with a conductor's baton in a glass case. Reed became non-executive chairman in 2000 and Founder at Large in 2004, a position he still holds and which he assumed after his son James succeeded him as chairman in the same year.

Founded in HMP Holloway in 1993, Reed Restart was a not-for-profit charity dedicated the rehabilitation and assistance of women prisoners, helping them to become more employable on release. The pilot scheme at HMP Holloway was extended to provincial gaols, including Eastwood Park Women’s Prison.

Ethiopiaid works with local community partners in Ethiopia to alleviate poverty, support the elderly, empower women and girls, help children with disabilities and increase access to health care and education. Reed founded the charity with a £1m donation in 1989, having visited the Ethiopian capital in 1987 on a fact-finding tour organised and accompanied by Jembra Teferra, a relative of Haile Selassie and wife of a former mayor of the city. Reed had initially planned on promoting entrepreneurship in the area, but upon arrival was struck by Addis Ababa’s poor public sanitation, especially in the "kebeles" (poor urban neighbourhoods). Reed subsequently underwrote a two-year project to develop the kebeles, and arranged pledges for additional financial assistance from Water Aid, Help the Aged and Band Aid. Ethiopiaid has gone on to donate £28m in funding and match-funding. The charity now partners with around 14 local Ethiopian organisations, providing around £2m in donations.

As with Ethiopiaid, Womankind Worldwide was set up with a £1m donation from Reed in 1989. The charity supports women suffering from abuse, neglect and illness; it also educates against female circumcision and child marriage. Patrons include Kate Adie, Sandi Toksvig and Lady Helena Kennedy QC. In 2006 WomanKind Worldwide was merged with Women at Risk, a UK charity founded by Reed in 1997 which works in support of women suffering physical and mental abuse. Women at Risk generated over £1million for beneficiaries, including female survivors of acid attacks. the charity work with more than 40 partner organisations in 15 countries and claims to have reached millions of women and their families worldwide.

He has twice recovered from cancer, after receiving a diagnosis of colon cancer in 1986 and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2003. The latter left a significant scar on his forehead, which he refers to as his "Mail On Sunday headline", after being in dispute with the newspaper at the time of his diagnosis.

From 1985 to 1989 Reed was the honorary chairman and chief exec of Andrews and Partners Estate Agency. He took the business from a loss of £297,000 in 1985 to profits of just over £1m in 1986. The profits were used to buy out the existing shareholders and transfer ownership to three Christian charities. He writes in his autobiography that "Most of the non-executive directors were also devout Christians who prayed before every meeting. Despite this, I found them extremely difficult to deal with in subsequent negotiations...that episode may have been the beginning of my disillusionment with Christianity".

Reed has described encouraging philanthropy as his “…main mission now". He is the founder of seven charities, including Womankind Worldwide, Ethiopiaid, Reed Restart at Holloway Prison, Women at Risk, and the Alec Reed Academy. In 1985, he established The Reed Foundation, a charitable foundation that provides much of the seed funding for his charity work. In 2007 he launched TheBigGive.co.uk, now one of the UK's foremost charitable giving sites.

The Reed Foundation is the main vehicle for Reed’s philanthropic activities. It was founded in 1985 with Reed's £5m entire personal proceeds from the £20m sale of Medicare. The Foundation owns 18% of Reed Group, hence Reed’s remark that the firm’s employees "work one day a week for charity". As of 2012 it reported total funds of £13.91m. Reed is one of four Foundation trustees, along with his three children.

Reed became a member of the governing council of Royal Holloway, University of London, in 1979, subsequently becoming the chairman of the college's finance committee. After the formation of the Royal Holloway School of Management in 1990, Reed recruited high-profile guest speakers and donated to the library. He also taught an interactive entrepreneurship course for undergraduates at the school called LIES (Leadership, Innovation and Enterprise Studies). Reed made his students turn up on time "...to introduce them to the basics of business life"; latecomers were fined £1, paid into a fund which purchased confectionery for the class.

Reed Business School is a not-for-profit residential and day accountancy college specialising in qualifications ACCA, CIMA, ICAEW and more recently AAT. The school is based in Reed’s former home, a 15th Century Jacobean manor house in Little Compton, England. The house was purchased with the proceeds of the Reed Group’s stockmarket flotation in 1971, after which Reed donated the house to the Reed Charity. It opened in 1972 as The Reed College of Accountancy, changing its name to Reed Business School after the formation of the Reed Educational Trust in 1980. The school’s trading profits are donated to the Trust and distributed to numerous educational charities.

In 1970, Reed founded Inter-Company Comparisons, now ICC PLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Swedish business group. In 1974, he also founded Medicare Limited, a 50-branch drug store with 500 employees, now part of Superdrug. Reed would later write that he started Medicare simply to smooth out the cash flow performance of his then-publicly quoted companies. He is a noted critic of the administrative burden of running public companies, and has compared his experience of running the Reed group as a public company to being an "...unpaid greyhound on a racetrack called the stock market". He would later blame the stress of running Medicare for his diagnosis of colon cancer; the business was sold as part of his recuperation, at his wife's insistence.

Reed’s first charity was set up in the 1970s to help the recovery and rehabilitation of drug addicts. In a 2011 interview with CIMAGlobal.com, Reed said

In the 1970s Reed bought Keveral Farm in Cornwall where addicts could spend time in recovery. From 1989 to 1992, Reed served on Oxfam's fundraising committee. Reed described his approach to philanthropy in a 2013 interview with Coutts:

Keen to be self-employed, Reed pursued a number of sideline businesses while still at Gillette, including making his own brand of aftershave that he brewed in his mother's kitchen and sold door-to-door. Reed also began working evenings and weekends in an estate agency in Hounslow, again while still at Gillette. The agency’s premises was split into two businesses, with one side selling property and the other side selling carpets. Noticing that the carpet business was struggling, Reed approached the owner (who was the father of Reed's then-girlfriend) and offered to rent the carpet portion of the premises for his fledgling employment agency, funding the launch with £75 taken from his Gillette pension fund. On 7 May 1960, the 26-year-old Reed opened the first branch of Reed Employment. It went on to become one of Britain's largest privately owned businesses, with 441 business units in 163 locations worldwide, employing over 3,000 people. .mw-parser-output .hatnote{font-style:italic}.mw-parser-output div.hatnote{padding-left:1.6em;margin-bottom:0.5em}.mw-parser-output .hatnote i{font-style:normal}.mw-parser-output .hatnote+link+.hatnote{margin-top:-0.5em}

He was called up to National Service in 1952. He tried for a commission with the Royal Engineers but was rejected after his Brigadier deemed him to be a "...muddled thinker". Reed left the army in 1954 to work as a trainee accountant for Gillette in Osterley, having passed his Chartered Secretary qualification the year before, at the third attempt.

Sir Alec Edward Reed, CBE, FCMA, FCIPD (born 16 February 1934) is the founder of Reed Executive Ltd, one of the UK's largest private businesses. Knighted for services to business and charity in 2011, Reed is a high-profile charity donor and organiser. His various charitable initiatives have given away over £233m, mostly in support of women, addiction, overseas development, education and the arts. Reed has founded seven charities, several companies, two schools and is the author of four business books. His current job title at Reed is Founder at Large.

Reed was born in 1934 in Hounslow, Middlesex. His father Leonard was a lithographic artist for the UK's Ministry of Information during WWII, supervising the production of a number of government information posters, including the original version of the Ministry's "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster. Reed's mother Nancy was a housewife and former employee of the Prudential Insurance firm. In his autobiography, Reed writes that his earliest memory is listening with his family to Neville Chamberlain's 1939 speech declaring war on Germany, a speech that so alarmed his parents that they fled London in a neighbour's car the same day, thinking invasion imminent, only to return "...before teatime" after concluding that nowhere in the country would be safe.