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What are you changing into?

Finance | Robert Ashton | 8 Aug 2012

After just over a year of transition funding some organisations have fared better than others, muses Robert Ashton.

Our friend Jenny is visiting us this week. We don’t see so much of her since she got divorced and moved away. But she’s over to see her psychiatrist and spending a night with us before her long drive home. Jenny is in transition and when we first knew her, was called Jeremy.

Gender transition is not a step anyone takes lightly. Apart from the hormone treatment and quite tricky surgery, there’s the challenge of coming out as the new you. Hot flushes and the surgeon’s knife are quite personal. Walking down the street as a woman, when for 50 years you’ve lived as a man is much more public.

You see before you can be considered for surgery, you have to live as a man (or, if transitioning the other way, a woman) for a year or so. That I think is the difficult bit. Although Jenny looks good, she inevitably attracts the odd stare or comment. Every time she steps outside her front door, she is making a public statement about her gender identity.

Jenny’s visit prompted me to reflect on transition of a different kind. Just over a year ago Big Lottery shared out £105m between just over 1,000 third sector organisations. According to the Big Lottery website the cash was to "help civil society organisations which deliver high quality public services adapt to a different funding environment during a period when they are at risk from reductions in taxpayer funded income".

In other words, it was intended to support the cash flow of organisations as they replace grant funding with earned income. This transition was for many every bit as painful as Jenny’s. Many had been grant dependant charities for decades. Now they have to ‘come out’ as social enterprises and ask for money.

In my experience, some have risen to the challenge and gone out flaunting themselves in their new guise. Others have pocketed the cash and remained in denial about the fundamental economic change they are experiencing.

The latter group have now largely spent the money and find themselves back where they started. What are we to do with them?

Who's Who: Robert Ashton