Readers may know that the Directory of Social Change (DSC) is closing. All but five of our staff have been made redundant and left, with those remaining helping the insolvency practitioner complete their work.
DSC’s closure on top of the others in recent history, appears to have galvanised infrastructure colleagues into suggesting a commission, led by an independent chair, to examine the role and future of charity infrastructure.
I’m honestly not a cynical person but having seen “commissions” before I worry that we’ll end up with recommendations about infrastructure organisations needing to “get their act together”, accompanied by the inevitable exhortations to merge because apparently there are too many of us duplicating each other’s work.
Only so much adapting
For decades I’ve heard people suggest ACEVO should merge with NCVO, completely missing the point that the former represents charity CEOs (employees) while the latter represents charities themselves (employers). It’s rather like suggesting the TUC merges with the CBI. Ridiculous.
Of course, our members and services overlap, just as my local Co-op overlaps with Tesco. We’d go nuts if someone suggested we could only have one supermarket, yet somehow we’re comfortable telling infrastructure bodies they shouldn’t exist independently because their services or users overlap.
And while some organisations undoubtedly need to sharpen their axes, the implication that those who have closed simply weren’t sufficiently entrepreneurial, creative or strategically astute is – in a word – nonsense.
I can promise you that organisations like DSC, the Small Charities Coalition, Children England, Getting on Board and others haven’t disappeared because their executive teams and boards were sitting around waiting to be rescued.
They’ve spent years cutting costs, developing services, pursuing partnerships, exploring mergers, diversifying income and searching for increasingly elusive funding. Not once, not reactively, but relentlessly over the years. And there’s only so much adapting you can do when the ground beneath your feet keeps disappearing.
I know one infrastructure organisation which developed a credible survival strategy last year, doing exactly the responsible leadership we expect of charities, only for the market to take another massive nosedive before they could implement it. What exactly were they supposed to do? Adapt faster than the market could collapse?
Ripple effect of closures
We need to be careful about confusing survival with success and closure with failure. Let’s be honest, some organisations survive despite not being particularly well led, innovative or impactful, simply because they have greater reserves, favourable funding arrangements or business models less exposed to economic pressures. And seriously, even though we’d like to ascribe it to our genius leadership, there is a huge amount of luck and timing in any success – or failure for that matter.
Infrastructure organisations don’t operate in some parallel universe, insulated from the financial realities facing the charities they support. If charities can’t afford training, advice, governance support or membership, then guess what? Those providing these services struggle too.
When infrastructure disappears, the consequences ripple outwards and charities lose the support they need to run themselves well. And one of the biggest losses is that infrastructure charities are often the courageous voices prepared to challenge those in power on behalf of their members.
And it matters because the services they provide help build public confidence in charities and once lost they’re neither easy nor cheap to recreate.
System change
Of course, infrastructure organisations must evolve, collaborate and explore mergers. Nobody sensible argues otherwise. But merging two financially vulnerable organisations doesn’t magically create one sustainable organisation simply because they’ve combined their logos and overheads. Nor does innovation guarantee income when the people needing your brilliant new service can’t afford it.
We’ve created a system expecting infrastructure organisations to sustain themselves commercially whilst supporting a sector whose financial capacity is being systematically eroded. We celebrate their expertise, rely upon them in crises, yet treat the infrastructure underpinning a functioning charitable sector as an optional extra.
I’m not suggesting every organisation has an automatic right to survive. They don’t. But whilst we can keep letting organisations that have fallen into the river drown, surely we ought eventually to go upstream and discover why so many are falling in in the first place?
That’s where any commission should focus. Not simply on which organisations survived, but on the structural conditions determining who gets the opportunity to survive in the first place. Because blaming the casualties is considerably easier than confronting the system.
I’ve been around long enough to know that when charities disappear, others often spring up. The register of charities remains remarkably stable in overall numbers. If mergers solved everything we’d have fewer charities, but we don’t. People frequently establish new charities to replace what’s been lost. That’s part of civil society’s extraordinary, stubborn magic.
But resilience shouldn’t become an excuse for accepting preventable destruction.
Maintaining public trust, reassuring donors and funders, and ensuring charities are well governed, financially responsible, legally compliant and effective doesn’t happen by osmosis. It requires expertise, support, challenge and learning, provided by the very infrastructure organisations we’re allowing to disappear.
So rather than asking why infrastructure organisations couldn’t save themselves, perhaps we should ask what kind of charitable sector we’re creating if we allow the organisations that help everyone else survive to disappear.
