The third sector is failing to convince the public about its message and needs a "new narrative", an audience in the House of Commons heard yesterday from a senior manager at Oxfam.
Andrew Curtis, UK senior programme manager at Oxfam GB, was speaking yesterday at a breakfast briefing in the House of Commons hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty, supported by the Webb Memorial Trust. The event was to mark the publication of a New Statesman supplement, produced in association with the Trust, on ‘A good society without poverty’, which asked, in part "is the third sector failing?"
Curtis said it is “easy in one sense to see where and why the third sector is failing, and finding things so challenging”.
Curtis said the sector's biggest mistake was trying to express outrage and push others to think as they did, rather than address how the audience felt about particular issues, and try to convince them. And he said the sector needed to speak with a collective voice to address this issue.
He said charities face a difficult environment in part because they are delivering more services. He said that this is a huge transfer or risk and responsibility to the third sector from the state.
He said: “The space for the third sector to influence continues to be squeezed. We need to ask ourselves even more often what we are getting wrong in the third sector.
"There is growing consensus that the narratives used by the third sector, however well-meaning and right, are being rejected. Take poverty for example, a term that is laced in stigma and highly contested to the point of still having to persuade people that poverty still exists.”
He said that “we can’t lay the blame at the door of the third sector, but we don’t help ourselves”.
“We often veer towards wanting to convert, rather than convince, showing our outrage at the injustice of the issue without considering our audience. We need to build a new narrative, and a new way of speaking. We need to speak with one voice, we need to speak with those directly affected, not for them, and we need to speak louder,” Curtis said.
Curtis was echoing the words of another of Oxfam’s senior programme manager, Justin Watson, who has written an article for the supplement which asked “is the third sector failing?”. Watson questoned whether the sector was building an "effective narrative" to communicate with the public and Parliament about poverty. As a result, he suggested, charities "may have contributed to the very problems they are trying to solve".
In his New Statesman piece, Watson said that the answer “has to be collaboration”, and that this should be both with and outside the sector. He said: “We do this together all the time, or at least we don’t stop talking about it, but there needs to be more action. We need to work together, pool our resources, share learning, ideas, skills, expertise and funding. The third sector should be a backbone not a blocker at a local level. Supporting, collaborating and convening on the terms of communities themselves, and community organisations.”
Watson said that “there is a constant challenge across the sector”, and large charities are “seeking to find their place”. He said: “We need to think carefully about our role, our added value and how we can leverage this in support of communities and their needs, rather than just looking to meet their own agenda”.
He said that “real change will only come when collective impact is embraced”.
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