IDEAS-MAN DAVID
Welsh-born David Childs blinks a little behind designer spectacles and admits: 'I guess I'm a bit of a sentimentalist.'
The man who heads a team that has raised $4 million for the needy under his leadership, is also a salesman, organiser, stimulator of ideas. And as bossy as a soccer coach, which he still is, after 30-odd years in the game.
He sits in an office cluttered with motor tyres, signed portraits of famous entertainers, books, files, and telephones that almost jump with urgency; the top man in Queensland for the Variety Club of Australia, spending his 20-hour day cajoling, persuading and begging.
'Of course I sleep. But four hours is enough. Anything more is a waste of time isn't it?'
David, 53, arrived in Australia 30 years ago to be an optometrist. He particularly wanted to work in Wollongong so he could play professional soccer. But the firm who was to employ him had posted him to Sydney. He took his first big career decision and said no. Instead he went to Shell as a trainee manager, played pro soccer and rose to be secretary of the New South Wales Soccer Federation that controlled 97,000 players.
'I have,' he chuckles, 'always been a good talker. The Welsh can sing and they can talk; I wasn't born with the singing gift. I can persuade people; tap into their enthusiasm. A sort of a cross between Bruce Forsyth, who is so inspirational, and Norman Wisdom, a sad character in some respects.'
And he taps into the heart, in boardrooms, on television, on his public speaking engagements of which there are scores every year, persuading people to give. (His wife called the other day to say there had been some terrible mistake. A van load of furniture for a complete apartment had been left on their front lawn. David had forgotten to tell her it was a gift he was looking after.)
He waves an arm at his office window. 'Out there', he explains are children dying with leukaemia; families destitute because they've lost a breadwinner; the sub-normal, lost and lonely.’ David Childs' constant challenge is to inspire those who can afford it to help change those peoples' lives. 'You'd be surprised how easy it is! I go to people I'm told I'd have no hope with and they give me thousands.'
David managed and marketed shopping centres before he got involved with the Variety Club. Nine years ago they asked him to take it on full time, running its key fund-raisers like the 'Bash', a hell-raising drive about the outback by (this year) 400 men and women in 125 cars, paying for the privilege and being fined thousands of dollars for misdemeanours like wearing the wrong-coloured shirt on a Thursday.
Lurching through the bulldust in a 4WD that can have him in radio contact with anyone in the world in seconds, David has trailing behind him sports greats like Allan Border and Mal Meninga; dentists, QCs, plumbers, architects, mechanics, nurses, advertising copy-writers and retired millionaires. 'Where else can you sit down in the bush for breakfast with Allan Border?' he asks. There is, he readily admits, a little drinking, but not by the team-member driving. Cheating and bribing officials is actively encouraged, because those offering the bribes are heavily fined.
Awards are given to the team raising the most money - then they're fined again for being so successful, a sort of 'happy childishness we all need to revert to from time to time', he grins.
The Bashes have raised $1.5 m. And a 'splash' version $150,000.
Where does it go?
The Variety Club buys Sunshine coaches for the young ill, for the frail and elderly and for taking special children to special schools. No more than seven cents in the dollar is ever spent on administration. 'I get about 500 appeals for help a year; we can afford to respond to about 150 of them.'
Heading through lunch-hour traffic to a speaking engagement he tells me there's a lap-top in the back of the car that has a record of every telephone subscriber in Australia for him to tap into. He's busy organising Miss World at the moment and chatting to models.(Well somebody's got to do it...)
He has one big concern. Headquartered on the Gold Coast, where the achievers and the wealthy come to retire, he is appalled at the wasted brain-power. 'I don't think anybody should retire. I speak to audiences where there are men much younger than me - engineers, architects, doctors who have switched off. Their brain capacity is in neutral; wasted. I say to them: "Go out and mix with young people and do something with your lives. Australia got a bit down after the troubles in the late 80s and early 90s and it needs this great pool of talent."'
The little dynamo with "the worst eyesight in the world" and no cartilages left in his soccer-damaged knees, parks the vehicle with the awkward high radio mast and hurries into a luncheon to ask for some more money.
