A new report has suggested that the voluntary sector is too diverse to unite behind a single voice, and so leadership is likely to become increasingly field-specific.
A strategic lead for the third sector? Some may lead, but not all will ever follow is the fifth and final paper from Third Sector Research Centre’s (TSRC) dialogues on the future of the voluntary sector, based on research undertaken over the past four years.
The paper contemplates whether a coherent strategic voice in the voluntary sector is possible, or even desirable, and places this discussion in the context of concerns about leadership in and of the sector.
Leadership across diversity?
Authors Rob Macmillan and Heather Buckingham outline the futility of trying to pinpoint a singular view or point of contact in a sector that is so diverse. “In reality, ‘the sector’ houses a highly diverse collection of groups, organisations and individuals: a ‘loose and baggy monster’,” is how they put it.
“If you get beneath the label and peer inside the box, you begin to appreciate both the sector’s diversity and its fuzzy hybrid edges,” Macmillan and Buckingham continue. “Then you might also begin to worry about whether it is feasible to call it a sector at all.”
Size, variety of mission, and locality versus nationality are some of the reasons given for why the sector is so hard to pin down. The paper recalls cases both recent and historic where the sector has failed to agree on a unified voice or position, and says that such incidents “are also fundamentally questions about leadership in and of the sector. How does or should leadership work across diversity?”
Vertical rather than horizontal
The authors highlight further TSRC research among charitable organisations which suggests that field-specific umbrella groups are sometimes seen as more relevant than bodies which try to represent the whole sector.
Thus such ‘vertical’ forms of specific infrastructure were found to be more significant for many than broad ‘horizontal’ ones – and the paper points to evidence that the state is thinking along the same lines by phasing out its strategic partners’ programme and reducing funding for cross-sector initiatives.
New cross-sector agreement?
Macmillan and Buckingham also contemplate the need to find a new basis for agreement, or ‘strategic narrative’, for the sector.
They suggest that this would not be in the style of the Compact, which was based of a particular set of relationships with a government, but “upon more far-sighted core elements and shared priorities which could command attachment across the sector."
Such an agreement would, they say, need to promote well-being and social justice on the one hand, and be willing to "speak truth to power" on the other.
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