NCVO’s Karl Wilding has said that the voluntary sector is suffering from ‘a considerable degree of uncertainty’ over its identity.
Wilding, recently promoted from NCVO’s head of policy, research and foresight to its director of public policy, was presenting his views on the policy issues the sector faces in 2013 at a seminar run by Ecclesiastical insurance entitled ‘Uncovering the issues faced by charities’ yesterday.
“What are charities here for?” Wilding asked the audience of mostly lawyers and insurers. “What have they been put on the Earth to do? Is it run food banks? Is it to pick up the pieces when bits of the state, bits of the welfare system, have failed?
“Alternatively, is the voluntary sector about campaigning and lobbying, being a service that is independent from government that’s about trying to identify solutions to problems and telling the government what it’s got wrong?”
Wilding continued to outline how many charities feel pulled in different directions. “There is a considerable degree of uncertainty from voluntary organisations at the minute,” he said. “You’ve got certain MPs who don’t want charities to campaign. And there are certain political risks – if an organisation is delivering contracts and campaigning against a political commissioner at the same time, you might get some political blowback.
“We think it’s incredibly important that charities and voluntary organisations have the right to campaign; it’s what their members and supporters expect them to do.”
NCVO’s chief executive Sir Stuart Etherington recently underlined this attitude when he said his organisation would fight against opposition to charity campaigning.
Amongst Wilding’s other predictions were the rise of micro volunteering – people doing short shifts in person or helping charities out remotely online – and a financial landscape that will continue to gear towards impact reporting through models such as payment-by-results.
When Wilding asked the audience if they had heard of social impact bonds, there was barely a murmur of accent and a mere one hand tentatively raised.
NCVO has just published its latest Almanac (available here), statistics from which Wilding drew from in his talk.
