Welcome, comrades, to this week’s Barely Civil Society. This is sent to you in absentium, cued-up one week earlier, by a man who is currently (hopefully) in Europe. Proper Europe.

I know, I know, you think I already took the summer off. No, I spent it having a breakdown over a research proposal which I didn’t finish. And now I’ve completely changed me mind about what I’m doing. I’m a nightmare. In the meantime, I’ve been looking around for work at the busiest time of the year (I’m available! Hit me up), finishing the evaluation of a clinically-supported mental health green care project, bidding for funds for a range of projects, and creating a case for support for a fascinating and ancient charity.

Meanwhile, I have been writing a socialist history of charity. I’ve just about finished the 18th century, and it sort of feels like that goes for the charity sector too.

This week’s post is a helpful glossary for some of the weasel words you may be used to. Please do add your own in the comments. And remember, it’s just for fun.

News rundown at the end.

STOP PRESS

They’ve just released the souvenir brochure from the Tory Party conference. All Kemi’s best speeches and ideas, right at your fingertips.

Reform had one too but it was one of those wipe-clean baby books you can read to your kid in the bath, with a picture on each page and a single word like ‘MOO’. Or a racist epithet.

Anyway, for the Tories, the most important take home is: look at Kemi! Look at her! Isn’t she clever and special! What a clever girl! Such a clever girl. She’ll go far. Very very clever. I bet she won ALL the prizes at school.

A Nonprofit Glossary

Terminologies change fast. As an intrepid, selfless, mission-driven professional, you need to have a good understanding of all the latest words. But not just what people say they mean. What they actually mean.

Step forward, Barely Civil Society, with our new patented nonprofit glossary. This may become an ongoing feature, unless it doesn’t. Don’t forget to add your own in the comments!

Subscribe now

Enterprise

Nonprofit news rundown

News-wise, we’ve seen RNLI sailors getting threatened by a dinghies full of gammon. Behold! A floating charcuterie counter, replete with the kind of bellends who cry in the bathroom when they lose the football.

This has raised the question of volunteer safety - sort of. And there’s a new charities minister (also minister for, as far as I can tell, everything nobody is very bothered about). Vicky Foxcroft is an MP from Lewisham, and the VCS is very well-represented and listened to here. So that’s probably good. NCVO got their pic in pretty sharpish, with a headline in Civil Society about volunteer safety (just volunteers?). It does look a bit like Kate Lee has just done a home invasion and Vicky is signalling off-camera to call the police.

National Lottery: this is about more than processes and rubric

The National Lottery are currently going through their review, with people like and Sarah Jane Pickering sending a letter on behalf of the whole sector in terms of their application processes and people’s experiences. And there are big strategic - and I think fundamental, vision and purpose, changes on the agenda.

The National Lottery wants to get away from the word ‘charity’ and ‘charitable’, and to put ‘community’ and the idea of communities leading on causes and projects that matter to them at the centre. This sounds good, but it is taking the lottery away from being a funder of charitable organisations - this seems to be the long term plan, that it is a sort of investment platform for local groups to set things up.

This is no doubt driven by the, surely, pre-decided conclusions of the Big Society Boondoggle Bonanza that was Big Local - charities who have existed and supported their communities for generations are much less of interest - and much less politically useful - than groups of local people who choose to set up a cafe for yummy mummies who don’t have a Gail’s. More and more, the Lottery sees it cannot play both roles - as a supporter of your local cancer charity or a voluntaristic way of topping up local authority social care or education provision cut to the bone, or a funder of exciting new mutualist and community-driven major projects to revitalise whole areas. I understand this, and in some ways it is to be welcomed. But make no mistake - there is another huge hit coming for the existing charity sector. The localism agenda is also worrying - it could mean tribal and highly politicised as much as it means people-powered.

This is a fundamentally different vision for the National Lottery, and I think many of us are sleepwalking into it. It is a very good idea to have a huge fund that people can choose to pay into to invest in good things that happen locally. But the NLCF is likely the biggest driver (as well as the biggest funder) of the charity sector as an economy per se, and of its huge growth since the turn of the century.

At this stage, people are very angry about it, and demanding change to how it operates day to day - but there may be a much more radical and unexpected change of its fundamental function and direction than many realise.

Share Barely Civil Society

Reproducing Ruperts

I was very lucky to meet the fabulous Fozia Irfan recently. I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone with a Wikipedia entry before. Anyway, like me, she’s very interested in how inequality reproduces itself in charity. She wrote a great post about this on LinkedIn.

‘Reproduction of elites’ is such a perfect phrase for how our top levels always find others just like them. I like to think of some kind of 1950s sci-fi movie: someone pulls a lever and another bloke called Giles falls out of a hole in the ceiling.

And even if they don’t always look like each other (although they almost always do), they certainly think the same.

The point is - even if you avoid the ‘tap on the shoulder’ and recruit openly, you will just be recruiting for the same characteristics and ideas. The list of types of ‘capital’ the article lists are like the sections of a person spec for a Chair or CEO in a large foundation. Who do you know, how do you talk, how much money have you been in charge of, what are your connections?

In fact, I sometimes worry that the open recruitment approach which is ‘meritocratic’ is even worse than the tap on the shoulder: it literally puts class on the application form like a qualification....

Meanwhile, as I mentioned, I’m working on a shortish leftist history of charity at the moment which looks at how this works at a structural level in society - and the role charity plays in politics... What is truly remarkable is how at each stage of charity’s development, whatever the ruling class is, they have been in charge - and how transparent this is... At the same time, the battles for control are in themselves fascinating. Things do change - but I’m not sure they change because of anything happening within civil society, so much as conditions outside it.

Fozia links to this article in her post:

That’s it for BCS this time. See you in three or so weeks for another James Cameron-style excursion into the depths of charity, in my reinforced pod.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe and become a supporter!

The research and writing of Barely Civil Society is 100% supported by readers who subscribe. Could you afford a paid subscription?

Share!

Support!

This work is 100% funded by kind donors and subcribers. Could you buy me the tube fare to a conference, or a periodical?

Send me a (nice) message

I love hearing from readers. Drop me a line!

Work with me!

Check out my day job webpage.

Or I will starve.

Welcome back to Barely Civil Society, where we are far from refreshed, increasingly anxious, and looking forward to a holiday.

AI is about to kill us, but in the meantime, we will have generated lots of videos of cats giving you the finger. As if we needed AI for that.

The UK has grown a pair and put sanctions on Israeli settlements. It’s something. Nigel Farage is hoovering up crypto donations. And Apple has released a folding phone that only Saudi oil princes can afford. Exciting times.

Spiderman was good. Obsession was brilliant. Backrooms was pretty decent. I did a weekend in Winchester where everyone is called Giles and wears red trousers.

But mostly, I spent three weeks of the summer researching the intersecting histories of charity and socialism. I’ve been down so many rabbit holes I’m growing floppy ears. ‘A nice break’, they ask? ‘A nice breakdown,’ I answer.

Have the last 30 years of Philanthropy failed?

This was the provocative title of the 30 year anniversary celebration of Alliance magazine, which took place in the incredible Aga Khan Centre in Kings’s Cross. A big thank you to Elaine at Alliance for inviting me. Philanthropists gathered. The ceiling was high, so were the ideals, and so, indeed, was I.1

I met Rhodri Davies, who was just as delightful as people said, and did a great job of compering. Tsitsi Masiyawa did an amazing talk, and I want her to adopt me. And I met somebody who had heard of Barely Civil Society, which is a first.

Alliance calls itself the ‘critical friend to philanthropy’. As I said to the editor, I’m sometimes not sure if I’m still a friend. But today made me think I was - with caveats and complications.

You see, I’m a traitor. A double agent. I play both sides.

No, not a bisexual - I work for both funders and funded. Half my time is spent with grant-makers, and half with the people on the other side of the desk. The biscuits are invariably better on the funder side.

Here is what you notice when you cross the rubicon from ‘charity’ to philanthropy. First: don’t imagine people who work in philanthropy don’t ‘get it.’ These, or at least, the ones in this particular circle of largely illuminated funders, are progressive, liberal, left-leaning. (Move towards the Telegraph readers who largely populate the ACF and it may change slightly…) And they care. I bet some of them are even, shhhh, socialists. They care about social change - maybe even more, and with a wider view, than people I meet in many charities. They’re also smart and extremely well educated. (And very middle class, and very white. None of this should be very surprising.)

Subscribe now

What I also want to get across is that these guys tend to be nice. They’re friendly. Philanthropy conferences are friendlier and tend to be more open, and have a more welcoming vibe. They tend to be very much open to challenge and debate. They talk about big ideas - decolonisation, extraction, globalisation, any number of left-leaning development and social theory buzzwords - they use them; they believe them. They’re historically informed. They are often very critical of philanthropy as an institution - in fact, 60% of them voted to say philanthropy of the last thirty years has failed. And yet, the tone was hopeful. Determined, positive.

Now, I think about the wider third sector conferences I go to. Honestly, the vibe is not great. People tend to look tired. They are not hugely friendly - if anything they are rather competitive and not hugely interested in exploratory conversations.2 The ideas there tend not to be ‘big’ - they are almost entirely managerialist. And they are focused on money, or improving ways of getting it. Wouldn’t you think a conference of philanthropists would talk more about money? They don’t.

So what is this difference about?

People with money don’t talk about money because they have to and don’t need to. People with money have hope - not just politically and in terms of society, but personally. They know they are going to keep their jobs. People with money have time to think. They can even think about the problems with what they do and how to get better - and accept the critical because they are largely unaccountable and do not feel threatened or constantly assailed. They have a certain confidence. And they are not tired because they do not have a daily Sisyphean task, personally experienced, often directly with people in dire need and unsolvable situations, in front of them. They do not have the emotional toll of survival.

Now if some of this sounds like a description of the rich and the poor as individuals, well, that shouldn’t be very surprising. In fact, it could also describe the individual subjective experience of class - what it feels like to live with money or access to resources, and what it feels like to never have it: it writes your subjective consciousness. It writes and shapes how you think, you feel, how you relate to others - for example, you might not feel very open, you might not feel able to think great thoughts, you might not feel very hopeful, and you might feel that competing is your best chance of survival if you aren’t sure where your next meal is coming from. There is less time for the hopeful collaboration than your comfortable, even if progressive, pals might suggest you should pursue. This ‘vibe’ is lived class in action.

When I say there is a class difference between philanthropy and charity, I need to be really clear that I am not (just) talking about individual socio-economic class (although that is undoubtedly an expression and a decider). I’m talking about classes as groups of people with similar relationships to wealth and economic power, and similar interests. I’m especially interested in ‘philanthropy’ and ‘charity’ workers, their structural class position, and their subjective experience - and how this may shape the work they do, the relationships they have, and how they do their work. What I note is that this may contrast and conflict at different levels, and with different relationships to resources.

The friction can be vivid: when I went to the third sector conference earlier this year, I remarked that listening to small charities talk about funders sounded like somebody in an abusive relationship - based, I suggest, more on obliviousness and a class relationship that is always unspoken or brushed under the rug, than on any malign intent. When, in one space, somebody on stage asked if there were ‘any funders here’, one guy put his hand up, and simultaneously his head down, as if anticipating a blow. This, I think, is class resentment in action - and again, it comes from different relationships and positioning to resources - not fundamental misunderstandings of mission or political alignment, as everyday discourses in nonprofits tend to suggest.

And yet, there is hope. There is very significant overlap in the ideas - whether intellectualised, or in the same district framings - between those frontline charities and the ‘funders’ - that is, professionalised philanthropic managers. They are far more sympatico - and if anything, as ever, they are divided by the maintenance of certain ideologies as much as reality. Obsession with risk, ludicrously baroque processes, metrics suited to profit not people, these are the tools they use - but often, it must be said, these are foisted upon them, as much as they are the end grantees.

And why is this? This is because, at the top end is the actual philanthropists, and their associated trustees. Boards stuffed with hedge fund managers and residual aristocracy, or indeed, just family friends. Even if the original money and founder has long gone, or never existed (as in the case of, say, huge public foundations), the great and the good selected for boards bring with them the ideas and ideologies of their own business experience and the view from their world - which they ludicrously and rather self-aggrandisingly claim is meritocratic - and impose those (sometimes obviously, sometimes less so) through boards and governance. Or indeed, sometimes just directly through taking the steering wheel and telling their grant-makers to make the grants.

And perhaps this is why I think the key task for ‘philanthropy’ as an industry is, as fast as possible, to get the money away from philanthropists - and the rich.

In the debate, a philanthropist (who shall remain nameless) was tasked with persuading us that philanthropy had not failed. They talked instead about the decline and failure of liberal democracy - in a way that did not sound entirely disapproving. And they claimed that philanthropy - the actions of the rich - had succeeded precisely where governments had not. And philanthropists were way better now - at least they were better than, for example, “Genghis Khan.” (There was a bit of an intake of breath in the audience at that point.)

This felt to me a rather dangerous argument that could collapse into an apologia for a government of oligarchs - although it didn’t, to be fair. But the legacy of Carnegie - and the viewpoint of many autocracies - continues. They also argued that the problem with governments was actually a problem with ‘the people’ - that ‘we’ did not rise up against our masters. But our masters, after all, are really people like them - the extremely wealthy and powerful. They buy governments all the time. They also do very well at controlling populations ideologically, or when that fails, violently, through said governments and more nefarious means. As the excellent debate challenger pointed out, philanthropy has been a constant force against democracy, and has been used to prevent and pollute it, across history and the world - not to mention that the massive wealth extracted by billionaires is perhaps the most significant cause of global poverty. We might point out therefore that one of the main reasons liberal democracy has failed is precisely because of the ultra-rich and their replacement of taxation with scraps of donation for their own purposes and interests.

What was evident overall - and any glance at a whole range of philanthropists’ discourses in the present or the past will confirm this - is that there is a profoundly solipsistic ideology in the ultra-wealthy which cannot but infect philanthropy as a practice and an industry - even when the managers of the day to day process have the expertise, the right ‘vibe’, and far better knowledge.

It felt very well-timed therefore that Naomi Klein’s new book, and her interview in the Guardian last weekend, talked about how extreme wealth creates supremacists. The wealthy have to believe they are gods among men - otherwise how can they explain, or feel secure in, their wealth? And how can they legitimate it? Philanthropic giving, especially when shaped directly by the giver and their deeply ingrained ideology as a ruling class, both bears the shape of their deformed picture of the world which cannot countenance their own culpability, and helps fulfil this function of legitimation. Both reinscribe their own power.

And this is the myth of the modern philanthropist - that they know best how to spend the money they extracted, for the benefit of the people from whom it was extracted. They pitch themselves as dynamic, entrepreneurial, and of course archetypes of success, and intellectual prowess. They know everything. And very often this means that they will not let others make decisions, or shape how their wealth is used. They hold on to the wealth and the power, because they believe - and must believe - the idea that they are best placed to spend it - otherwise, why would they have it?

For this reason, no amount of enlightened managers and professionals can change a thing unless we remove the yoke of the ultra wealthy and their beliefs - in forms either genuinely delusional, or simply bad faith. What Klein is talking about here is, essentially, a class ideology: a justifying myth that legitimates power and privilege. And this, I think, is still what most profoundly shapes the philanthropy industry. That is because, after all, as Marx told us, and Gramsci expanded, the ruling ideas are always those of the ruling class. And it is very clear, in the world of philanthropy as much as outside it, just who that is.

What this also tells us, as I’ve remarked before, is that we have a remarkably Victorian class system at work in the charity and philanthropy sphere. A wealthy capitalist class who have the money and who direct ‘investment’, a managerial class who manage that effectively and bring their own technologies to bear on it, a lower managerial class of foremen and shop stewards running charities, and below them, the worker bees on the frontlines - entirely alienated from their labour and removed from agency or decisions about what their labour does, or how resources are used. No wonder they are grumpy at conferences and always thinking about money and how awful their managers are. But their manager’s managers’ managers - or rather, the ‘owners’ - are really the problem.

Add in an underclass of the deserving poor as the object of the ‘labour’ and propose a process of ‘transformation’ of resources and labour into a final commodity - that is, ‘charity’ - and you have a Victorian factory. The profit, at the end, is not so much a changed society - how could it be? - as a heroic philanthropy class who have avoided taxation, raised their profile, and bought influence. And meanwhile, it keeps the poor off the streets. (Or does it…?)

So if there is one thing that we can take from this, it is that the absolute priority in the modern philanthropy industry has to be getting the money away from the original philanthropists, and as soon as possible. This is why the most progressive foundations are usually those that have thrown off, or never had, founders - the Esmee Fairbairns, NLCF’s and the like. But even they still remain run largely by bankers and the great and the good. The price of entry to their boards is acceptance of ruling class ideology.

Whatever the next stage would be, who knows. ‘Co-production’ and all the rest might have a chance if the real decision-makers were somewhere else entirely. But it is not the answer alone: as ever, my argument for philanthropy as an industry and a practice is not that we need to change ‘systems,’ but that we need to do something much harder - indeed, almost unspeakable: we need to change the structures.

That involves handing over - or taking - power in ways that our society has rarely achieved - especially when it involves redistributing money and resources.

There’s nothing left but faith….

In the last year, I’ve become interested in the role of faith charities. Not a faith person at all, although as you have seen, I have taken to quoting socialist theologian Paul Tillich on the regular. So why am I interested? Well, there are several key reasons.

The first is that religion is currently being used as a force - and an excuse - for incredible evil in the world. That’s not new - apart from quite a few wars over the years, in all of this, I should add that as a gay man, I have an innate distrust of religions, having grown up during the AIDS crisis and, well, you know, the world.

But there is an increasing schism happening: the rise of the Christiano-fascist death cult in the US - which is barely even an offshoot of Christianity, and hardly even bothers to conceal it at this stage - is one of the greatest threats to democracy, justice and peace, and indeed, possibly even our very survival. And yet, some parts of the Christian world are starting to awake and combat this. The Church of England could be a ‘sleeping giant’ in preventing the rise of extremist anti-migrant, homophobic, Christiano-fascism in the UK, and has started to speak out, albeit too slowly and quietly for my liking. The new Archbishop of Canterbury is deeply liberal and, I am reliably informed, a woman.

Meanwhile, another Pope turns out to be a good guy. Who saw that one coming? Magnifica Humanitas is quite a volley, with impacts I hope are felt far beyond the church. After all, the Pope is perhaps one of the only figures on the planet strong enough to stand up to Trump.

And increasingly, I have found myself having significant common cause with liberal progressive Christians in the US. Especially socialists; hence Tillich. There is a sense that the extreme and increasing cruelty of the Christian right in the US has driven a counter-movement of anti-Trump, liberal socialist Christians to speak out. Socialists and Christians have always made common cause, even if we also have had some significant disagreements.

At the same time, I’ve met in recent years incredibly strong, outspoken, progressive Muslim women and young men who have been galvanised by their own faith, by the war in Palestine, and indeed by a connection with the wider left and social justice movements. They give the lie to the tabloid arguments about universal extremism in the Muslim community - but hey, we probably knew the Daily Mail wasn’t the best source on this. They’re working in community-based charities and are a new generation of leftist thinkers and leaders. Those younger, liberal, progressive, socialist leaders again have the ideas and the power to shape both their own faith communities, and the world around them, for the better.

The other is that faith groups in the charity world have a certain ability: they can talk about doing good things without speaking the language of commissioning, impact, and social sciences - well, to an extent. Faith charities get to talk about the human, even if there is added layer of God. But this strikes me as an area for potential resistance if we are going to take charity back for something more human and focused on love, care and community - not ‘the impact economy’.

And finally, another reason is that I don’t know enough about them. I’m not ‘illiterate’ on religions as I’ve heard faith groups say people are: in fact I was fascinated by religious philosophy, considered studying New Testament history at university (I was fascinated by redaction criticism, which began my interest in texts, iteration, and history), and studied world religions as part of my first degree. But as my research project continues, I’ve realised that I know more about the history of religious charity than I do about the present. So - what’s actually going on in there?

My second field trip

And so, last week I went to the Faith Charities Forum run by Civil Society Media Ltd. This was partly an ethnographic mission, and part of my determination to do more sector citizen journalism, by sharing what different parts of the sector are thinking.

My first thought on arrival was: excellent pastries. Even though they were vegan, which can be really dry. But my second thought was: cultural difference. I had expected to see some religious garb, and so I did - by which I mean, lots of grey suits and skirts, and possibly at least one twin set. Which you don’t see so much of in other places. One or two veils, but the vibe was very white and Christian.

Slightly out of place in full drag, I immediately looked for the nearest Quaker. The cool kids of the faith world, you can always sit at the back of the bus smoking with them. And lo and behold, a young man in dungarees with blue hair appeared. Target acquired.

Later, there was a fascinating question to the Charity Commission for England and Wales from Quakers in Britain about ‘offenders’ barred from being on boards. Problematic when you have a lot of extremely dedicated elders willing to hold placards supporting certain proscribed groups. ‘The law is the law,’ the CC was bound to repeat. And they’re right - so yes, it must change.

The second surprise - why was it a surprise? - was the wall to wall banks in the exhibition hall. Coming from other conferences with broader attendees, there is currently a preponderance of databases, usually AI-assisted, and fundraising products. But here, it was CAF, Reliance Bank, Cazenove capital, one or two high street banks, and several investment funds. Some of these were faith organisations themselves - for example, Reliance is the bank of the Salvation Army. A reminder that many faith organisations started their own banks - and that money, and lots of it, has always been part of the faith charity landscape. So much so, in fact, that Henry VIII did some extensive building/ demolition work to deal with it.

Perhaps this is why, overall, there was much less talk about money on the day - or rather, less talk about the lack of it. Faith charities very often have strong fundraising with a very strong donor base, and often endowments. These endowments, often through legacies and ancient bequests, have actually been the subject of the majority of charity sector regulation over the last millennium. (I have heard the Catholic Church has a bob or two, as does the CofE.) And of course, faith groups are the original motivated donor base.

Combatting hate?

As I mentioned, one of the ideas mentioned several times was ‘religious illiteracy’ and of a lack of understanding of faith, among society at large, and indeed, in charities and the social sector. But of course, as they readily admitted, this is not helped by the highest profile faith stories in the media being so appalling - one speaker showed a slide featuring cherub-faced-neo-Nazi faux-Christian-ethno-fascist-wunderkind Charlie Kirk and a range of hateful groups in the US. Spectacles in the Middle East do not help.

What drew me here was the fact that I think welcoming and loving faith groups could be a powerful vector to combat hatred within faith communities themselves. I talked to a couple of people who said there was a significant sense of shame about being a person of faith at this stage for that very reason: one person told me they had stopped wearing a cross because they worried that people would assume they were one of the bad guys.

When a CEO from a faith-based anti-VAWG group asked a question about what responsibility faith groups had to actively combat that intolerance and hate from within their own (or other) faith communities, it felt somewhat brushed aside. This, of course, is a delicate issue, since one man’s hate campaign is another man’s attempt to save humanity from immorality, especially in the world of faith. Another group I spoke to that day did the most delightful work with children, which then transpired to have been set up by an evangelist movement in the US who are certainly MAGA adjacent. Fixed grin, nice to meet you… The faultlines are strong. And these are often live debates within faith groups and communities themselves, of course. Conservative, liberal/ progressive and radical groupings fight it out constantly.

So if your faith group is looking at how to combat right wing intolerance, you’re not alone. But if you aren’t, why not? I had a drink on Old Compton Street on Saturday night and had to listen to a preacher telling me I was going to hell. It’s the eighties all over again. Which faith groups are standing up to him?

God loves governance

I also found it interesting that when the most controversial issues came up they tended to be explained away or handed off to managerial questions: for example, a talk about ‘misogyny’ and risk turned out to simply be a talk about risk management. Fear of the National Secular Society and the Charity Commission was more of a driver than tackling misogyny.

Governance was an interesting area of debate. Faith charities have particular issues, even if they are not unique. For example, sometimes there can be a very strong conflict between types of authority - administrative, regulatory, secular, and religious. This often clusters around highly charismatic and powerful leaders who can be hard to rein in, and who are very much known to use their power to abuse. I was relieved to hear this discussed very openly. Again, this is not unique to faith organisations, although in a sense the reason charities more broadly suffer from this is because they are based on what were originally religious models: the charismatic founder can have an almost priestly sway over their organisation and flock. As a leader of place-based charities I’ve always been aware of how much there is a level of trust and power that comes simply from being there and ‘ministering’ to your community, whether god is involved or not.

Faith or just good community work?

And it was in this that I felt there was a missed opportunity. One speaker talked about how faith charities presented a ‘unique’ opportunity for commissioners and the current changing landscape for services. That may indeed feature new possibilities given the principles of local devolution to communities.

What faith charities offered, they said, was not solely about ‘services’ but about whole communities and whole people. Faith charities had deep roots, were trusted, and were highly connected, and they gave people ‘hope’.

This is true of many faith charities, for sure. But it also describes a vast range of secular charities and community organisations. The more we’re ALL allowed to do that - to work with whole people, to build relationships of trust, to build hope in our communities, the better our work, and our society become.

We can do that based on faith, or on our common humanity, or indeed, both. What we need to see across faith groups and across community and wider groupings is that we can shoot for the same thing. Of course, we can only do that with a shared vision of a kinder, generous, welcoming and tolerant society. Neither faith nor secular statuses guarantee that. It’s not helpful to claim the status of wider community organisations as a unique facet of faith groups. Indeed, it may be somewhat divisive.

Subscribe now

Discursive whiplash

Finally, we come to the remarkable ethnographic experience of what I can only call ‘discursive whiplash’. That is, the sudden shifting of discourses - ways of speaking, ideologies, concepts, framings - with such speed that your neck cracks and your underwear steams.

What struck me in particular was not so much any change between religious traditions - that was barely noticeable in this context.

No, the real clash of religions I saw was narratives of faith, love, care and community and the equally totemic language of impact, efficiency, and effectiveness - the instrumental reason that took over the sector when philanthrocapitalism took the reins. As I mentioned, we moved swiftly from talk about creating hope, to talk about commissioning for preventative outcomes. The shift in discourses from the former to the latter may be counter productive.

When we take a social instrumentalist approach to our charity, and treat it as a way to achieve social outcomes, it becomes harder to focus on what really matters. One speaker, very much a Texan preacher, talked about the value of ‘the encounter’. One person, or many people, meeting an/others, helping or just connecting, is 90% of what charities do. Again, that connects faith and secular - but those ‘service based’ contracts and ‘preventative outcomes’ are buried in discourses and metrics that, even with the best will in the world, will close off those encounters and turn them into transactions. Discourses matter because they shape behaviours and beliefs.

What strikes me is that people in power often provide the benefit of the doubt to faith groups because they are pretty much the only people in our society still allowed to talk about the human, and about love, care and community.

But we need to extend and expand that discourse into the secular realm. This means resisting that instrumentalism just as strongly, with our own language.3

And so…

All in all, a worthwhile ethnographic excursion, an encounter of my own with how faith and socialism/ progressives can intersect - and sometimes not - and some decent pastries.

Thanks again to Civil Society Media (whose excellent news source I quote here every week) for allowing me to attend.

Can I cover your conference? Let me know!

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe and become a supporter!

Share!

Support!

You can help me continue this research and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. Could you buy me the tube fare to a conference, or a periodical?

Send me a (nice) message

I love hearing from readers. Drop me a line!

Work with me!

Check out my day job webpage.

Or don’t, see if I care.

Next week I’ll be back with a proper BCS, but for now, some media to keep you going.

Cringey self-promotion

First, the cringey bit. This is not a self-promoting consultant blog, but a brief interlude reminding you I’m available for weddings and bar mitzvahs in my day job as a consultant with UK charities and funders. And also strategy and change, learning, research and evaluation, and income generation. I know, sexy. Check me out here.

What To Do About….. Civil Society?

In July, I joined Peter Holbrook, CEO of Social Enterprise UK, Lord Victor Adebowale of the House of Lords, and Devi Clark, MD of Impact Hub King’s Cross to talk about ‘What to do about… Civil Society’. This is their regular podcast series where they talk to a different guest about a thorny problem. No prizes for guessing which one they got me for.

If you prefer your podcasts audio-only, find it here on Spotify and here it is on Apple Podcasts:

Fuller version of something I said:

There is an absolutely unintentional and obscene joke about a carrot at one stage which I wish I had made on purpose. Next time I will.

Thanks to Peter and Victor for inviting me.

Leading Social Change podcast

Meanwhile, just before that I met Anna Day on her ‘Leading Social Change’ podcast to talk about charities and, well, social change…

I suspect there might possibly be a tiny bit of Chat GPT going on in that blurb, but hey, it’s pretty flattering and honestly I need that at the moment. Thanks to Anna for inviting me on the show.

And here’s a flashback to my interview on charities getting political at the Third Sector Conference in June.

Coming soon

Next week, I will be reporting from the Faith Charities Forum, if I have not spontaneously combusted due to being a huge heathen. [Update: I did not, and just hung out at the back of the bus with the Quakers. The cool kids.] I do think this is a fascinating area at the moment, and indeed, spent a weekend reading a history of the Church of England recently. I think Tillich is getting to me.

Speaking of which, I am also attending the Alliance Magazine 30 Years celebration this week, which does indeed offer another chance to spontaneously combust as they are asking whether the last 30 years of philanthropy have been a failure. Given that philanthropists always get a chance to set the goalposts, I’m going to say the answer will be a resounding ‘No’, but there should be a good bit of masochistic hurt/comfort humble bragging about how ‘We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves even though we are not worthy of this gargantuan but essential moral task which has been foisted upon us’ talk. [Edit: I very nearly spontaneously combusted when the son of a billionaire who was only on stage because he was, erm, the son of a billionaire, told everyone that philanthropy had succeeded where liberal democracy had failed. And that philanthropists - like him - had the ideas needed for the future. I had to take four beta blockers.]

If you happen to subscribe to the magazine, you can find my previous article on Epstein and philanthropy here. Unlikely I know. But you can always see a similar one here:

Also, in case you missed it, this is one of my favourite articles I’ve written about philanthropy.

See you next week for a proper one.

- Alex

When I was a kid in the eighties, comics and kids’ magazines used to have ‘Summer Specials’ which were bumper editions that you would pester your mum to get you at the start of the holidays. Eventually, she would either relent, or decide to sell you to the circus, with spurious tales about your propensity for acrobatics, which later turned out to be epilepsy.

Anyway, that’s what this is: a quick signing-off before I take August and part of September off to recover a bit, and to do some other writing. So it’s the last day of school and we’re bringing toys.

Questions I have been asked this week: is this blog is making money? When people ask, I always ask them if they have a paid subscription, and then it gets uncomfortable, but the question is answered.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, I went to record a podcast in Canning Town. I was asked whether BCS had upset a lot of people. Tbh I don’t think so, except for once when I was mean to Debra Allcock-Tyler on Linkedin because my cat had really bad fleas. I felt terrible. But mostly, people either see it as part of the debate, or don’t care what I think.

Podcast time

Meanwhile, here is a podcast I appeared on (not the Canning Town one, that’s coming in October, from Social Enterprise UK). Big thanks to Anna Day for having me on this one. Still nasal.

In the News…

In case you have been hiding under a bush - not mine, get your own - Andy Burnham has been crowned.

Some were concerned that Burnham didn’t mention charities in his maiden speech. I hadn’t even noticed, and I think those expectations may be excessive. There are certainly bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, ending homelessness, for example, is not going to happen without civil society, and I’m confident he knows that. It’s also worth pointing out that, for all the people (like me) complaining he is New Labour to the core, New Labour invested the most cash in the VCS of any Government we’ve ever had since the immediate post-War period.

Starmer, you might remember, specifically courted the VCS before Labour’s win, and even mentioned it in his winning speech on election night. But the Centre for Social Injustice’s arguments around the time for more philanthropy instead of higher taxation was the key sign: what this was really about was unlocking the cash from ‘philanthropists’ to ease his planned austerity. Starmer had literally zero experience of the VCS in terms of actually delivering. That isn’t the case for Burnham.

Meanwhile, the Office for Impact Economy, I am told, is moving to the DCMS, under Lisa Nandy, who is continuing in her role. That move will ruffle a few feathers. (‘But we had finally become important!! Darren Jones was talking to us, and he’s weirdly hot!’)

But as I’m increasingly starting to think, maybe culture is actually where charity needs to sit (I think I argued that in the above podcast). Not least, anywhere else, and it immediately becomes a fig-leaf for austerity. That was for sure where Jones wanted it to go.

I think there is considerably more hope for the VCS with Burnham in charge, much as everybody seems to want him to fail on all fronts. The negativity about him (and yes, I agree with critiques on Israel, capitalism, New Labour, I know all this…) seems to me to be more driven by news cycles than anything. Getting drawn into social media spirals demanding he fails BECAUSE SEVENTH PRIME MINISTER LARRY THE CAT NATIONAL SHAME isn’t really helping anyone. Political nihilism isn’t the same as critique, but it does sell those boring bits on news sites between the adverts.

Meanwhile, all the usual industry Acronym suspects say Burnham needs to listen to them. But what do they have to say beyond ‘we are an industry and we are important’?

Someone who knows did recently tell me that the avowed main goal of one of the acronyms is to appear in a photograph with the Prime Minister in front of Downing Street.

EDIT 30/07/26: Success!

I just spat my drink out as I read my morning emails to find this from a certain acronym….

But the thing is, proximity is not power. And power is pointless when you have no values - as indeed, Starmer found out.

Anyway I guess the odds of that prime ministerial pic are getting better every couple of years at the moment. Eventually, there’ll be enough prime ministers for all of us to get a pic.

Share Barely Civil Society

Tough times at the Charity Commission

Meanwhile, it is likely only a matter of time before we see a resignation at the Charity Commission, after it was found to be in contempt of Parliament.

“The Charity Commission has apologised “unreservedly” after the Committee of Privileges found that it committed a contempt of parliament by seeking to block special reports from being laid before MPs.

The regulator was referred to the committee after it sought a judicial review in September last year against the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO).

While the judicial review was ultimately denied permission to proceed, the PHSO accused the commission of trying to prevent it from laying critical reports before parliament, which the charity regulator initially denied.”1

This is very serious, and I would imagine someone will need to go in the next few weeks…

Still, could be worse: you could be a trans person wondering where you can have a wee. If it’s in a charity, the Charity Commission has been clear that the EHRC guidance on trans people’s use of charity services (the Let-me-look-at-your-winkies Act 2025) needs to be adhered to immediately……

Fear not, they will publish guidance!

..Later in the year.

As Kevin Taylor McKnight points out, this is a great way to enforce ‘overcompliance’.

At the same time, it seems to point to exactly the problem with running to the regulator for help on ethical issues. The governance and the process is of little value when the Parliament to whom they are accountable is antipathetic to the rights of trans people.

I often worry that we have developed a weird blind faith in charity governance as something which enshrines justice. It doesn’t. It just reinscribes power.

But that blind faith, I’m afraid, is also the curse of the progressive centre (especially in the US) where faith in democratic process often blinds people to questions of moral legitimacy, power and privilege.

Breaking research news!

Some of you may have seen me say this on LinkedIn, but in the latest BREAKING RESEARCH NEWS, Oxford University has proven that doing something you enjoy is good for your mental health. Finally, we have the answers we have needed - but only about Salsa.

Next stop, Samba. Because it's important to separate out the Afro-Cuban 4/4 time from the Brazilian 2/4. What impact on the WEMWBS scale does the time signature have?

No, wait, I'm getting excited, because I dream of a world where, eventually, we will have HIGH QUALITY EVIDENCE on:

• Every type of Latin American dance, with the potential for expansion to Morris Dancing

• Every sport (boxing, fencing, water polo, cat wrestling)

• Every cultural pastime from oil painting, to beat making, to macrame, to playing the kazoo with your hindquarters

• Visiting galleries and museums, compared with the experience of being hit in the face repeatedly with a bin lid in the Job Centre Plus. (This is a double-blind trial, where one half of the cohort are literally blinded. By Dave at desk 3

• Going out in nature to look at squirrels and flowers, as opposed to sitting under the table in the living room eating a ping meal with a half-melted plastic spoon.

ONLY THEN will we have final proof we need that making life worth living is worthwhile. Only then.

But imagine: funding will flow! The cargo will arrive! The bankers and policymakers will see us! Accept us! Love us!

Meanwhile, I am doing a study on the excretory habits of Ursus Arctos Horribilis in a local nature reserve. It is important we finally clear this one up.

Charity CEOs, drink gin

As for proper jobs: I have been doing a deep-dive evaluation of a project I’ve come to care about deeply over the course. It is truly amazing. I also know how tough money is. It’s pretty galling when you hear all these public services waxing lyrical about them, and yet the money does not follow. I’m always reminded of the NHS commissioner I spoke to once who said “The voluntary sector is amazing! They’re so chea… Erm, good value.”

At least they caught themselves before it came out. Another time, a head of social prescribing literally said “And the best thing about voluntary sector is, it’s all free!”

I’ve also been helping someone deal with a major partnership - and seen not just how appallingly ‘partners’ can behave, but just how well it goes when you think your grantmaker is really ‘open and trusting’ and things get tricky. As if. Knackering. And yet: their resilience.

Meanwhile, I’ve been helping someone rethink strategy to deal with funding changes and a wholesale rethink as everything around them changes. It reminds me how hard it is to keep reselling the same thing, over and over, and yet with a new tweak, a new narrative.

At the same time, the organisation, like all of us, is so good at reinventing itself based on what its community needs. It’s part of the game, and sometimes part of the fun - but I can also see it’s why people burn out.

The sheer sense of Groundhog Day Sisyphean labour. And yet, we live to fight another day. And still ace it.

Charity CEOs (and everyone else), I feel you. Remember, ambition has to sit alongside acceptance.

Look after yourselves.

And finally…

We have a new logo for the Charity Formerly Known As British Wireless for the Blind. They’re now to be known as ‘Visably’, which is fine.

But, is it me, or does their new logo look like the original 1970s cover from the Joy of Sex?

Still, it is much less of a shock than my absolute favourite, and the most obscene logo in history which must surely have been created by a disgruntled designer:

I can’t even show you a corresponding photograph of that one without requiring age verification, so you’ll just have to let your mind wander.

Anyway, I started this column today by asking if I have ever upset anyone - that’s two more customers I can write off.

Back soon…

I’ll be back in the Autumn.

STOP PRESS: I have some space for new client work from mid-September. Drop me a line if I can help. I promise not to mock your logo.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe

Paid subscribers are BCS’s patrons - helping me and my interlocutors and fellow ornery people ask the questions about non-profits that nobody else will.

Share

Support this work

Could you buy me a periodical or a train ticket to write about a sector conference? Or indeed, a coffee…

Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! Only nice messages please.

Hello, and welcome to an odd mixture of self-deprecating humour, political analysis, and white hot memes, all themed around the incredibly niche subject of the nonprofit sector in the UK. I know, I’m really selling it. This was drawn from a two day research trip to the Third Sector conference. Skip to the ‘Civil Society Under Attack’ bit if you want to avoid the personal nonsense.

Today:

• Civil Society Under Attack

• Will Pluralism Unite Us?

• The Big/ Small Difference: who can afford to be brave?

• Funder/ Funded: A Coercive Relationship?

• Corporates Will Not Save You

• Me

• Andy Burnham

• Would you like to write for Barely Civil Society?

Introduction

Last week I turned up to the annual Third Sector conference, held at the Royal Society of Medicine.

Unusually, I had been invited, so this time there was no need to climb through a third floor toilet window over the sinks. I tried that once at a social enterprise conference in 2011 and I got coke all over my trousers. It was a funny time.

Even weirder, I was to be on a panel. I did initially think they had meant to invite the other whose many invitations I erroneously get all the time.

What would I say? When Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins turned up to present the Oscar for Best Editing in 1993, they decided to talk about the internment of Haitian refugees with HIV at Guantanamo Bay. Former Spartacus, and ‘Cold dead hand’ NRA member Charlton Heston said “It's like being invited to something and then pissing on the rug”.

They were banned for life, so the rug was a no-go, but I thought I could maybe do the equivalent of a fart in a lift. In fact, I think that was why I was invited. I am always happy to oblige.

Furthermore, never one to turn down free food, I stayed for the whole two days, unlike the big ticket headliner CEOs who turned up for their panel and left, presumably in a helicopter or a black limo.

I spent much of the two days with people looking at my name badge and saying ‘Barely Civil Society, what is that?,’ but the BCS moniker was better than ‘Alex Evans, Non-profit Consultant at Alex Evans Consulting’. This appeared behind me on the final panel and drew confusion, including literally a guy who had written “Alex Evans Consulting?” in his notebook, which he later posted on Linkedin.

I know mate, same...

But enough of this frivolity. I stayed, not because of a desire to hear about how to improve governance (have a board portal and fire your interim CEO when they disagree with you), how to do better fundraising (have a marketing department the size of San Marino), or how to do better finance (listen to your finance director, who knows everything, according to the finance directors on one panel), but to get a sense of where nonprofit politics are in the UK.

This is always difficult - trade conferences are mostly about industry. The day-to-day of doing what you do, but better. That indeed is why people get the time off work to go, and get the several hundred quid to attend. But those bigger, whole-world, why we are here, questions can be harder to find. And yet, those did come through.

Yes, Civil Society Is Under Attack

What came across most strongly was a sense of deep threat and fear, especially from charities supporting causes in any way exposed to the ‘culture wars’. It was clear that many charities are having to support staff who are fearful for their safety. And that there are sustained attacks on civil society itself, which may begin in the sphere of discourse and end in real physical as well as mental harms. The perils of social media as a place to drive hatred and attacks on charities was a repeated theme. But this was not just on specific causes - what comes across is that, for some, there is a deep antipathy towards civil society itself. This is being driven largely by right-wing politicians, but also online cultures driven by US fascist think tanks, Russian bots, and Christian Nationalists. None of them are very fond of democracy, and civil society, as we were reminded several times, is a fundamental part of how liberal democracy is supposed to work.

Dame Julia Unwin from the Charity Commission was sensible, sophisticated and said the right things, in as much as there was a strong sense of anything the Commission can say. There was a useful reminder that they do not report to the Government, but to Parliament - an interesting distinction, even if, of course, the reality of how that works may be less meaningful than the specifics. What she did say was that they saw their role as one of protecting charities. That is powerful and important, I think. I do think their comms need to catch up with that.

There was a constant refrain throughout the rest of the day of ‘solidarity’, but every single person who mentioned it also noted that charitable status often prevents it. The tightness of missions and charitable objects means you can only speak out or campaign on issues directly related to your charitable mission. That is a serious problem for any solidarity.

Will Pluralism Unite Us?

NCVO’s speech was energetic, and intended to be rousing, but it was hard to see what exactly they were rousing us about. That really sums up NCVO. One of the themes was about civil society being louder and more strident.

Look, cards in the table, I really struggle with NCVO because of the Linkedin post by the previous CEO which claimed that the Government should involve the voluntary sector to make sure that its cuts to disability benefits were made ‘humanely’, as if we were going to help euthanise tragic animals, and not that we ought to prevent them being euthanised. I thought that spoke to its lack of innate values. (The post was swiftly removed, and I need to get over it, I know.)

But I increasingly see the pluralism of NCVO without a true sense of values as their burden, but also one I think is self-imposed. [EDIT: literally the day I write this, they launched their new strategy which apparently talks about ‘backbone’ and not letting the Government off the hook. Intriguing and hopeful. I look forward to reading, sort of.]

There has since been an article saying that the test of the VCS is not how aligned we are, but how much we can tolerate difference. It sounds good, but it’s also classic bourgeois liberal ideology, and only works for those with nothing much to lose: trans people can’t tolerate anti-trans group Sex Matters demanding their erasure. At a certain point, even in a pluralistic democracy, you have to have actual values which cannot begin and end at the pluralism itself. That is a basis of true democracy; otherwise you just have a marketplace of ideas and survival of the fittest. That, of course, is one of the faultlines, and common critiques, of civil society itself.

I guess you could argue that NCVO’s role is to strengthen civil society’s role as a driver of democracy - but again, what if those civil society organisations are antidemocratic, and actively oriented towards the erasure of others? Disagreeing agreeably is fine until the other person actively wants to take your rights away.

Simon Blake from Stonewall sat there on the panel with Fadi Atani of the Muslim Charities Forum, and they had a huge amount in common, and Blake’s argument was that they can focus on what unites in solidarity. But if the other person there had literally set up a charity to demand the end of LGBT rights, where do you go with that?

Share

The Big (/small) Difference

On one afternoon, the conference had a specific strand for small charities. And the difference between big and small was incredibly visible. Again and again, we heard people from vast household name charities talking big and about deeper issues. For me, it was a bit of a relief. But the smalls can only really talk about day to day management - and endless complaints about funders. This drove me towards my usual question of who has the right, and who has the time, to think? In the sector, as in society at large, my sense is that the thoughts ‘from below’ are trapped where they are, and sometimes barely formed. What does a charity voice and an intellectual firmament from below look like? And where would it be?

[Edit: To be clear, I am not saying there are no ideas in small charities. I’m saying the opposite - there is a whole potential and actual wealth of ideas, not just practice-based, but theories, concepts, experiences, epistemologies and goddammit demands, that exist there. They need to be supported, liberated, developed and heard.

But they have 1) no time to think, and 2) no place at the table. Wherever ideas are discussed, small charities are excluded. You won’t find them at big conferences or summits or philanthropy theorising. They are seen as the little people who are too busy unblocking toilets to be able to think and speak, and therefore have no place to do it. That needs to change.

At the same time, there is often an outright refusal I’ve seen to engage with ideas - partly, I think, because of feeling pushed out by an elite, and because elites tend ti talk and do nothing for the communities small charities and nonprofits represent. But theory and thinking and talking is valuable to everyone. And if you don’t do it, trust me, someone else is doing it for you. And you probably won’t like what they come up with.]

And most of all I saw massive confidence and an ability to speak out, take an independent view, stick to guns, and speak in an intellectually-informed way, for large charities, and of course, less so for smaller charities. As the CEO of CRUK told us to be braver and more courageous, I would note that this often looks like bravery, but confidence also comes from power, independence, and your own assets. Even if I absolutely agree in principle.

At the same time, Stonewall reminded us that all these bigger charities started in rooms above pubs, and indeed, fortunes can shift rapidly, as they have found.

I think we also ought to note that there can be some independence that comes from being small - but only if you have financial independence. Which brings us to that funder problem.

Funder/ Funded: a Coercive Relationship?

I observed later on the panel, with something of a needle scratch, that hearing people talk, it sounded like funders and charities were in an abusive relationship. It sounds like when I’ve listened to people in community centres talking about financial coercion by their ‘partner’. (And we’re meant to partners, right?) Every dime is controlled, your behaviour and survival is decided by your adherence to strange and arbitrary rules. You can barely leave the house without asking for permission. And they may say that you can make all your own decisions, but everything you do could cut off your lifeline. The point is that a parental relationship of, even supposedly benevolent, paternalistic control is only okay(ish) when you’re a child. Once a relationship of paternalistic control persists into adulthood, isn’t it just coercive?

And this is the problem: we are infantilised - while doing all the work. Part of the master/ servant mentality is that all of the thoughts driving actions are how best to serve the people in charge.

Of course, with all this parent-child relationship comes explosive resentment towards the parent. And when, at one point, one of the finance bros asked who in the room was from a funder, I felt nothing but sorrow and empathy for the one poor guy who put up his hand and dropped his head, as if waiting to be slapped.

Obviously, I slapped him just to be sure.

But these kinds of toxic relationships don’t come from nowhere. They come from material relations. The individuals within them are buffeted by a system of thought, and structures of practice, which are designed to continue to justify control of assets. As ever, this does not come from an individual - the poor bloke with his hand up and head down. It comes from systems, structures, and ideology within which we are all embedded, and which require significant effort, thought, and eventually, action, to shift. Good luck with that anyway.

»Insert here something about ‘not all funders.’

Subscribe now

Corporates Will Not Save You Either

One of the most interesting panels looked at corporate funding. For once, it wasn’t the usual Pollyanna bullshit about how corporates are the potential saviours of the charity world. Global LGBT charity Kaleidoscope Trust talked about the overnight withdrawal of funding for their programmes from corporates within moments of Trump’s pronouncement that any organisation which was supportive of DEI initiatives would no longer be eligible for Government contracts. As Alex Farrow, their CEO put it, they were somewhat taken aback by the speed of it - it was pretty much overnight.

Another charity, Full Fact, which fact-checks politicians’ claims and provides the context they often leave out was, first, excluded from the US, and then, lost a third of its funding that came from Google. They had very recently been told that this was rock-solid and that fact-checking and democracy was at the very heart of what Google wanted to do. Well, things can change. And so they did, with immediate and total withdrawal of funds overnight.

But wait, aren’t Google supposed to be driven by the maxim ‘Don’t Be Evil?’

Alas no, that changed too - and some time ago.

As Kaleidoscope put it, they had fundamentally misunderstood the business model of those sponsors.

And that is the point: business model. All corporate grants are sponsorship, as I am fond of telling clients. They are simply purchases of a halo, or tax rebate, for the company. Again, the individuals may be very positive about this and care deeply, but that’s not the point.1

But it also goes beyond the business model, and the deal, again, to systems, and even legal strictures for the protection of Capital. Those public businesses in the US who withdrew funds are legally obliged to maximise profits for their shareholders. At all costs. If the Board had continued to fund those organisations despite any personal reservations, they would have been sued.

Again folks, remember: material conditions and relationships of extraction. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

The Important Bit: Me

And so we come to the final panel which I shared with the co-CEOs of Action Aid, who are honestly doing amazing thinking and doing around decolonisation and feminist leadership, and the CEO from UK stalwart Home Start.

What did I say?

Well, I was briefly interviewed by Third Sector Magazine reporter Lucinda Rouse after the panel I was on, about ‘Changing the rules’ in the non-profit world. They’ve very kindly let me use the full material here.

Lucinda: You were part of a panel discussion entitled “Rewriting the Rules?” You made a couple of interesting points. One was around “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Tell me what you meant by that.

Alex: I was quoting the left-wing historian Howard Zinn. I think it’s very relevant at the moment. There were a lot of people throughout the day who talked about “a world on fire.” And at the end of the day, we can all see the direction our world and our culture is going in. In terms of our national politics, we can look over to the US and see, in some ways very worryingly, what might be about to happen here [with the rise of the MAGA Christian Nationalist movement and the rise of Reform in the UK]. We also know that civil society is often a target for the far right, and we saw that already, in fact, with our previous government. [For example, with Suella Braverman using rhetoric that inflamed mobs and directed them towards law centres that worked with asylum seekers and refugees.] We may even have some of those people back again [Braverman herself] if things go badly in three years’ time.

So we’re actually in a position where we need to realise that the world is changing and going in a particular direction, and we can’t just sit there and wait for it to happen and say, “Well, we’re apolitical, so we won’t do anything about it.” You can’t be neutral, because the train is going somewhere, so you have to ask: are you on the train or off the train? I think we’re on our own train, trying to make things better. [Wresting control of the train?]

Lucinda: Comparing the discussions this year to previous years, there was a real sense that we are a sector under attack, as a reflection of what’s going on in wider society. But I found it quite uplifting. There’s a sense that civil society needs to be standing up and putting forward its position on why so much of what’s going on is so problematic.

Alex: Yes, we’ve gone feisty. I really wasn’t expecting that at all, but it’s almost like in the past we had this gelatinous, rubbery thing on our backs, and suddenly we’ve reached behind and gone, “oh, look, it’s bony.” We’ve found this… spine… There have always, of course, been people who’ve really fought for things in the voluntary sector; we wouldn’t have had many of the massive changes we’ve seen unless they had. I loved what Simon Blake was saying about the LGBT+ movement and how much they have achieved, from early starts in rooms above pubs to total legal change. There’s been a massive amount of change.

But in recent years we’ve also got very good at censoring ourselves and policing ourselves, even beyond what others are actually going to police us for. That’s how it works: you internalise that policing voice. [I described this in the panel as ‘the cop in the head’, after Augusto Boal.] We need to make sure we don’t do that, and that we’re realistic about what we are actually able to do — which is probably more than we tend to think.

Lucinda: There were quite a few discussions over the past couple of days on data and the importance of data. I’m going to read out a quote of what you said during the panel: “We’ve collected so much data, and nothing has changed because of it.” Why did you say that?

Alex: Let me clarify — it’s difficult, because when you’re trying to say something slightly outside of what the normal debate is, you can seem like you’re going too far. There’s no question that data [note: I was talking about numerical data] can be a powerful force that can shape what we do and make it better. But there’s also a danger that data becomes an end in itself. In my day job, I’ve worked with loads of organisations, particularly funders, who become hoarders of data and have no idea what to do with it — it’s a kind of cargo cult: “if we have the data, then everything will change,” even though we don’t know what to do with it. And we don’t know what it will change.

[I’d add here - I can almost understand this for Governments, but for charitable funders? My concern is data’s use to decide what is ‘effective’. Who determines effective? And how can we use these techniques at scale for the kinds of heterogenous, highly qualitative projects the VCS is designed it support? What then happens is that data-driven charities only support what can easily be measured, rather than what is worthwhile. Or right.]

The other thing I really think we should be worrying about is that in philanthropy we’re apparently [TBC] going to see a lot of money coming in from the AI sector. A lot of those people are advocates of things like Effective Altruism, which essentially turns people’s lives into metrics and decides who’s worth saving. I think we should be very anxious about the drive towards data as something that flattens everybody and lets us compare people’s lives and their quality and importance against each other. There’s something about the structure of thinking in data and metrics that can dehumanise people. That doesn’t mean data itself is dehumanising - the question is who’s using it, and why, and what for. And often we just don’t know what for at all.

Lucinda: The final question of the panel — and indeed the conference — was “what gives you hope in the sector?” and you gave a lovely response. I wonder if you could tell me again what you said?

Alex: I went back to a philosopher of the early to mid-twentieth century called Paul Tillich, who fled Nazi persecution. He talked about the need for what he called “a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality.” For me, I find that incredibly inspiring, because when I look around that room and hear what people are talking about, they’re talking about all sorts of things that nobody wants in a spreadsheet: love, care, community, hope. And they’re not alone in that. If you look across the world and the growing debates, there’s a return to concepts like care ethics, and to the idea of an economy of care rather than an economy of profit. There is lots of interesting stuff coming out of [socialist] feminist circles.

I think we are part of that movement, as a sector. We are a movement for love and care and community. That should be where our solidarity comes from. What Tillich says there — that we’re a resistance movement against the destruction of love — couldn’t be more apt, given where the world is going. The kinds of views we’re hearing now, some of which are, shall we say, quite uncharitable, and are indeed precisely about the destruction of love.

I think it’s more important than ever that we fly the flag for love, and care, and community.’

Here’s the podcast. There’s a load of other randoms on there - who invited them?

Andy Burnham and Civil Society

Andy Burnham is not coming to save us, but do not underestimate the potential for VCS support. Real support. Maybe even cash - not new, but redirected from elsewhere.

Maybe it's good news that the bourgeois liberal press are already gunning for Burnham to fail, with the Grauniad basically a list of 'he's not as clever as he thinks he is' articles today. They did the same with Polanski, did the same with Corbyn, so maybe he's more of a threat to the status quo than he seems.

Or maybe they've just realised if it bleeds it leads, and honestly every Prime Minister is bleeding before they've even stepped over the threshold at this stage.

One thing I think you can say about Burnham is that he is 1000% a supporter of the VCS - and with money. He was even talking about them in his big economic speech. Much as I fear talk about welfare-to-work given its very problematic history and ethos.

Don't forget, Starmer said nice things because he wanted philanthropists' money. He may be well-disposed to charity, but he's had zero real knowledge of it. He's a lawyer.

But Burnham was literally at a celebration event for learning disabled people when Reform descended unannounced with cameras. He spoke at the Locality conference, and meant it.

I have little hope economically for Burnham because he's committed to Reeves' dumb-arse fiscal rules. And most of the Manchester thing has been letting capitalist pigdogs do whatever they want. There has even been talk about private finance. Nnh.

But you know: the key is to manage expectations, critique with integrity, and seek out opportunities.

Meanwhile, the most important question remains: how has he got even hotter as he has aged?

Oh, and several people think Farage is in trouble. 🤞 Looks like the crypto donation may not just stand….

Internet pics…

Sadly, Instagram have broken Substack links and you can no longer embed them, which means most people could not see the internet awesomeness last time, so we’ll have to leave that for now.

I’m looking at creating a platform that includes other authors and essays with a critical (bur fair) political eye on the nonprofit and philanthropy world.

If that interests you, drop me a line and tell me what you’d like to write about.

I’m open to all sorts of subjects, but it has to go beyond ‘funders are mean’, ‘we need more unrestricted funding’ or ‘we need to improve DEI procedures’.

Tell me what is underneath things. Why are things as they are? How does it relate to wider society? Don’t feel the need to come up with a policy recommendation. We’re allowed to just think sometimes.

I’m particularly interested in any psychological approaches, accessible economic analysis, and anything that explains complex social or other critical theories relevant to our work in accessible ways. It has to explain what it means, and why it matters.

I’d also be interested to hear from people who might want to be on an editorial board.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Subscribe! Or become a patron!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. That improves the blog you get to read, a blog writing the kind of stuff nobody else does, completely in my own time and at my own cost. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical? Or a Jammie Dodger?

Hello, my Barely Civil Comrades, and welcome to the first June edition of Barely Civil Society, where good people come to hear bad things about good things, and leave demoralised and cranky.

The theme this week, I’m afraid, is rising authoritarianism, illiberalism, and eroding human rights. If only it were just this week.

Meanwhile, I have to apologise that I didn’t provide the ‘volunteering sucks’ special as promised. I looked at it again and it didn’t feel ready. So my new promise is no more promises.

When the Mob Descends…

Yet more evidence of Reform being shitty humans recently, as an electioneering mob with cameras in tow turned up uninvited to a celebration event for special needs kids in Manchester - largely, it would appear, to wrong-foot their political opponent.

I’ve spoken many times about civil society being a battleground for politics and ideology. This is why it is being targeted by right wing groups over things like trans rights and ‘DEI’ initiatives. But here it became rather thrown into relief by what I suspect was indeed a very intentionally intimidating visit. Honestly: this sounds like a mafia boss suddenly appearing at a place where he feels he hasn’t been invited, to make it clear he can turn up if he wants to. The fact this was such blatant electioneering is almost beside the point.

They, of course, had to accept the visit, and smile and chat at a table when the mob appeared. After the event, the charity rightly complained. Farage and Reform were surprised after they had had such a lovely conversation. This is like the school bully who claims you only had to say that it was your lunch money, and they are frankly hurt that you would treat them this way.

I’m pleased and proud to see that they have stood up for themselves, but there should be no uncertainty that any resistance will feel the repercussions from a corrupt and vengeful right wing government, local or national.

You may also have seen Reform now actively attacking Hope Not Hate over their charitable status and relationship with campaigning.

No denying this is a tricky one. But you can see again what is happening: just as has happened in the US, and indeed, previously happened in places like Hungary, and indeed under the Tories, civil society has become a battleground for the Far-Right who recognise its moral and political power - and its tendency to side against the very people who fund it.

Let’s be very clear: scores will be settled financially as well as socially by Reform when they come to power, as indeed we are already seeing as they strike Pride from local councils.

And so it raises questions about where nonprofits will put ourselves when the likely Reform Government appears. As Owen Jones (and others) point out, the British constitution (oops, we don’t really have one) will be even easier to dismantle than that of the US, which has been effectively upended by MAGA within less than 2 years.

My worry is that when the time comes, people will be asking - especially trustees and CEOs - ‘how would standing up to this, or refusing to collaborate with any future Reform government, affect our funding?’

Subscribe now

I know, I know: they will quickly add ‘because our duty is to look after our service users’.

But ask yourself about other moments in history where that might also have been the primary question for civil society.

As we exclude trans people, roll back on DEI protections, how far will we go to meet the needs of the latest political reframing - given we seem to be so very good at changing with the political headwinds when there’s money in it.

History shows that charities and caring civil society are relatively happy to drop support for some people using the logic that it allows them to still keep supporting ‘most’ of their clients.

The thing is, you can describe your charity as non-political. But what you consider non-political can become political very quickly. What is happening is precisely the repoliticisation of issues, rights and people that were in recent years considered beyond the political. That is what these people are trying to change.

And if you want to know what a Reform government’s relationship to charities who support those beyond the pale, well, you don’t have to look very far. Because one of their MPs is a former Tory Home Secretary, who pretty much wrote the book on attacking civil society, Citizen’s Advice Bureau burnings and all. Mob violence is very clearly part of their arsenal - as indeed it was for MAGA, and is for all proto-fascist uprisings.

Civil society as a whole is always oppressed and silenced by the far-right, by legal means, by threatening mobs, and by the baying hounds of ‘public opinion’. Meanwhile, caring charities will have to decide whether they will care for the people cast aside (or worse) by the new regime. And recognise that there may be consequences for them if they choose to do so.

You have been warned. And the choice is yours.

Habeas Corpus? Not for the likes of you

Meanwhile, another doozy from the Supreme Court on the rights of a vulnerable minority. Since 2014, people who do not have the mental capacity to consent to their care and living arrangements are considered de facto ‘deprived of their liberty’. This does not mean that is necessarily unjust, it means that there must be constant safeguards to ensure that this is just and in their interests. Extra-judicial imprisonment is a no-no for anyone, and this is in theory the basis of democracy and the rule of law. That means there must be ongoing checks on people’s welfare and tests must be met to ensure their circumstances and conditions are suitable, and that it remains necessary. These statutory checks have been undertaken by an independent assessor.

Now the Supreme Court has struck this down, meaning that there is no longer a statutory requirement to revisit this regularly or perform checks. It is highly likely that there will be few if any checks, and no way for people to challenge their circumstances as a matter of course. This is likely to lead to more cases of unjust long term incarceration in poor conditions. Once your lack of capacity has been decided, essentially, your carers can lock you up and throw away the key.

Share

This is pretty startling stuff. According to National Autistic Society at Austism.org.uk:

• “The Court implies that individuals with profound cognitive disabilities cannot be “deprived” of liberty because their condition limits their ability to experience it—a view that devalues their fundamental rights.

• The Court has suggested that in borderline cases, for a deprivation of liberty to exist, a care setting must closely mirror the extreme confinement of a prison cell.

• If a vulnerable person appears passive or does not actively protest their arrangements, the law may recognise this as “consent” — even if they are subjected to routine physical restraint or chemical sedation or have never known a life without a high level of restriction.”

This is bad enough as an isolated legal change, but it does start to speak to that wider pattern of removing protections, and decreasing the purview of human rights for some populations. We seem to be moving to a world where rights are no longer fundamental, but constantly shifting, and it becomes ‘reasonable’ to expect them to be reduced if you sit outside the norm. More and more, we are seeing the Supreme Court being used as a way of removing and limiting rights and protections for certain people. That is a dangerous world, and fits with the wider changes in society and culture that we are seeing.

The Most Charitable Nation

Last time we learned who the ‘most charitable person in the UK’ was. It was a bloke with more money than he had any right to have, which was still the case after he had given £1.4bn of it away. Apparently this makes him charitable.

But now we learn who the most generous country in the world is…. Drumroll….

It’s Nigeria! People give an average of 2.8% of their income. This compares to around 0.7% for the UK.

Hmmm, so let’s dig into this a bit.

Nigeria has a VAT rate less than half of the UK’s (7.5%), admittedly a corporate tax rate of up to 30% (ten percent higher than the UK) but also a maximum tax rate of 25% on individual income compared with up to 45% on UK incomes.

Now, the tax burden in the UK is significantly higher, but it has a high-tax, high service approach. UK tax to GDP ratio is 34%. Nigeria’s is 6-10%. They do not have a high-tax, high service approach.

A better comparator, perhaps, is the US, of course. We often talk about a greater culture of giving in the US (it’s a constant lament of fundraisers in the UK), and yet the US average giving rate of around 0.8% of salary’s divergence from the UK’s rate of 0.7% is waffer-thin. Meanwhile, the US has a 25% to 28% GDP tax burden, and they still get bugger-all healthcare or welfare: and one might therefore ask how much of it goes to bombs and subsidies for billionaires or UFC tournaments.

Overall, I suggest you might ask yourself whether you would rather have cancer treatment in the UK, Nigeria or the US, and then ask yourself again about giving rates.

Shop Talk

Reaching geographical communities - that is, local ones

The National Lottery Community Fund has sneakily changed what it offers in its incredibly important ‘Reaching Communities’ fund. I would wager that this funding stream, in its various incarnations, has been one of the most important funding developments in the charity sector over the last 20-30 years. The community and welfare landscape of the UK would look hugely different without it. And I’ve been clear elsewhere that I think the Lottery is a unique national treasure, for all that I have my frustrations (also covered elsewhere). It’s also one of the largest charitable funders in the world.

The change is to move the fund to place-based work only. Organisations who work across multiple regions or nationally will no longer be eligible. Now in some ways, I actually think this is very valuable and important. That place based work can be very hard to fund. And national charities on the larger side have for many years been trying to muscle-in and hoover up from place-based charities who are the real backbone of the sector. That includes many organisations which then secure funds at national level and then expect to waltz into smaller unfunded local organisations and use their existing work to meet their obligations. This makes me very very angry.

And yet there is one thing that really worries me. Communities are not only communities of place. They are also communities of identity and interest.

LGBT communities are a key case in point. Those communities have to develop over distances - unless you live in a city, you’re unlikely to find enough of a community geographically-based to create something. That is also likely to be the case for other cultural or ethnic, or identity groupings. Many of those communities have to exist online, or indeed, to travel distances to be together. So how does this work?

My suggestion would be to add the caveat that they will make exceptions in the case of specific dispersed communities of identity who may otherwise find it difficult to access funding.

Now apply the game theory: yes, I know people will come up with all sorts of ways to ‘get around’ the rubric, but they do that anyway. I can guarantee people are already rewriting their bids to only work in one of their areas, and not all 40.

But it is very important as our societies and governments develop in this direction of active persecution of minority communities that we recognise the importance of communities of identity and interest and the fact that they may be geographically dispersed. Not least, resistance against these powerful forces is going to be all the more important, and all the more about connecting across geographical boundaries.

Again, I come back to my own strong concern that LGBT+ charities/ people in particular are about to be in very serous trouble. And we have no infrastructure to deal with what is about to happen to us.

Meanwhile, as said, it’s no good doing this stuff on the quiet and waiting for people to find out about it. (On the other hand, if they’d warned people, they would have had 800,000 new applications for national work in the space of a month. And then what?)

As Jo put it:

“As far as I can tell there was no advanced warning nor phased communication plan with timely deadlines to help organisations manage this change.

“Organisations already in the process of drafting applications will have lost opportunities to make their case for funding, not to mention the significant amount of time and resources wasted while navigating an already challenging funding landscape.”

Then, under her breath, she swore like a sailor.

I’m kidding!

Or am I….

Share

Legacies

There was a (not very) fun article about legacies this week, and it did get me remembering when I worked in a community centre and decided to put a very nicely designed poster about legacies on the back of the door in all the toilets. ‘There you go: think about your mortality for a few minutes, and I’ll see you when you get out with a pen and a piece of paper.’

It didn’t work, just in case you were wondering; but people were noticeably quieter after using the facilities.

I am allowed in the house!

I’ve been invited to take part in the final closing plenary of the Third Sector Conference happening in a couple of weeks. This was a big surprise, and I am wondering if they have mixed me up with someone else, or it’s a trap and the ACF is going to whack me on stage.

But anyway, we’re talking about how we can transfer power closer to communities as well as new leadership models. It’ll be really interesting, and I might slip in a radical theorist or two and see how confused people look.

For me, this work isn’t like it is for people promoting their services with expertise - it’s more like activism. It’s highly tangential to my day job, even if it is informed by it.

But that also means I can’t really pay to play, which is why invitations like this are so valuable to this project. A philanthropy magazine I wrote for wanted me to pay £500 to remove a paywall to make my article available to a wider audience, probably assuming that this will be good marketing for me or my ‘organisation’.

Yeah, all those philanthropists queuing up to work with the person who said they were part of the same system as Epstein.

At the end of the day, I’m driven only by demons. And pure spite.

Meanwhile, I so hate calling myself a consultant. I just can’t get over it. The other people look great too! Co-CEOs indeed.

Huge thanks to Third Sector and Emily for inviting me. I really am looking forward to it.

Subscribe now

The funny personal bit

This week I went to see Masters of the Universe at the IMAX. In no universe, not even Eternia, can I claim it was good, but it was tremendous fun. At one point, Nicholas Galatzine’s clothes flew off in a bolt of lightning, and my partner violently grasped my knee in surprise and whispered ‘Oh my god, I think I’ve just gone through puberty again.’

I also greatly appreciated the cowardly green tiger, Cringer, which has long been the nickname of my equally cowardly tabby, Trevor.f

Adorable also to see who was there. Fortunately, a late showing, so no dreadful children to ruin it for the intended audience. Alongside many Gen X men who looked like they lived in their mother’s basement (yes, like me), there were a few fun exceptions. One was a tall, porcelain skinned red-headed young man with a Zara cardigan, who looked like he had got lost on the way to the Barbican, or possibly fallen out of an Ikea catalogue. I was convinced he was in the wrong place until I saw him having his photograph taken in front of the He-Man standee, with a huge grin and a box of popcorn the size of his head. His perfect girlfriend, who looked the spit of Coco Chanel, was amused but patient. Awww. That relationship will last.

On Reddit, somebody asked ‘Explain to me like I’m five what Masters of the Universe is about.’ This was pretty excellent:

On Saturday, I sat and read from Ernst Bloch’s Principles of Hope, fell asleep in the cafe because it’s very very long and Germanic, and then got asked if I was okay. Yes, I thought, I’m just old, dear, you’re lucky I didn’t just die here on the sofa with my oat milk cortado. But then I wandered off for a cocktail and to see He Man. See, I’m a philosopher and a man of the people. (Ignore the cocktail.)

In other news, a foreign interloper local cat tried to do a home invasion through the catflap at 3am this week. Given how the local high street is going, I think we’re lucky it was just a cat.

Well, I think that’s about it. See you in three weeks or so.

Internet picks

And finally…

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Subscribe! And become a patron!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

Barely Civil Society is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. That improves the blog you get to read, a blog writing the kind of stuff nobody else does, completely in my own time and at my own cost. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical? Or a Jammie Dodger?

Hello, my Barely Civil Comrades, and welcome to a new edition of BCS after a taking longer break than usual. I am barely refreshed, because the break in publication had more to do with workload than the week’s holiday I took, which made it all worse.

This week, a kaleidoscopic amuse-bouche of quick-fire news items that tickled my fancy, or triggered my gag reflex, over the last couple of months, offering more on the themes I’ve discussed elsewhere in the blog.

We’ve got Trustees, Think Tanks, Sunday Times Rich List, LGBT horrors, and Mamdani being awesome (so far…), then some boring work stuff like fundraising ROIs and grantmaker stuff.

Anyway, strap in for the latest chamber of horrors in our semi-regular/ occasional BCS Shitshow Update series.

The Trustee Tap on the Shoulder: Help or Hindrance?

Interesting speech from the new Chair of the Charity Commission, Julia Unwin, with an increasingly repeated refrain about recruitment of charity trustees: that one reason they are not representative or diverse is that they are not ‘openly’ recruited, but rather through contacts. This is in one sense true - the old boy network (which includes plenty of women) is a good way to ensure you always get the same people.

But we also need to beware the bourgeois fantasy of meritocracy that open applications present. We recruit ‘openly’ for people with a high level of professional skill. That’s what we ask for in the job ad, right?

We recruit for people who are good at application forms and interviews. We recruit for people who seem like ‘one of us’. We recruit, let’s be honest, for people’s contacts and access to funding (usually going nowhere) or influence.

If this is how we select, well, yes, open recruitment will still end up with people who are Dames or MBEs, (like the Civil Society Covenant commission committee thingy); we end up with people who are the great and the good, and can connect us to power. Those people may sometimes look a bit different, but they probably will have the same ideas, and often quite similar backgrounds, because whatever happens, we are still looking for the same things: the historical ‘overseers of the poor’ who can be ‘trusted’, and, more than ever, who can offer highly class-coded, as well as class-restricted, professional skills and perspectives.

What this does tend to do is to select for the bourgeois professional middle classes rather than the more traditional aristrocracy and clergy, but that is the whole story of ‘meritocracy’, and the move that Max Weber outlined more than a century ago. That is, towards an administrative culture that claims to remove favouritism for noble birth - but benefits the bourgeois professional classes more than anyone else. In some ways, I’m coming to feel that application forms and interviews can be even more restrictive.

The answer? Probably flexibility. Sometimes a tap on the shoulder might be exactly the right call.

But please don’t tell me that doing ‘selection days’ or ‘aptitude tests’ or longer interview processes and various games, is going to solve the problem. It’s going to be extremely tricky, and much of this stuff needs generations to solve it organically - or radical overhauls of the very idea of trustees.

Splitting the professional skill and governance requirements from the vision and mission requirements seems to me to be a matter of urgency.

But in that, I don’t mean final decisions by professionals who are informed by a steering group of service users. It may indeed look more like a reversal of that. But it’s not simple - because democracy isn’t.

You can read more of my thoughts on trustees - although they have moved on considerably since, and not in a good way - in the article below.

Are Think Tanks ‘Charities’?

Good Law Project has complained to the Charity Commission about Policy Exchange, the foremost right-wing think tank in the UK about what they allege is continued partisan political activity. This is their second complaint, when a previous investigation is already underway.

Charitable status for think tanks is a classic wheeze, and especially problematic given that some, for example, the neoliberal extremist Institute of Economic affairs (IEA), have actively argued that ‘charities’ should not be considered part of ‘civil society’ - and should not be permitted to push a ‘woke’ agenda or argue for progressive social and economic policy changes in the public sphere.

GLP are particularly concerned about policy papers by Policy Exchange that reference ‘Project 29’ - a nomenclature worryingly, and no doubt not coincidentally, suggesting reference to Project 2025, the devastating right-wing plan that elected Trump and has driven their extreme right wing agenda. Like Project 2025, it looks to centre power in the Government, make sweeping cuts to all social support, remove Net Zero targets, and a ‘stop the boats’ focus. It is clearly designed as a battle plan for Reform in Government. GLP is also concerned at an ‘unhealthy’ preoccupation with trans issues….

Not long before this, GLP were also taking to task the Commission itself, who very quickly threw out a complaint against the IEA - you can see GLP’s case here. They complained in 2024, backed by a cross-party group of senior politicians. The complaint was swiftly thrown out, and Orlando Fraser argued in a blog that think tanks do deserve their charitable status. The Charity Commission’s then-extensive links to the IEA (including said Chair having previously worked for them) were a matter of public record, and you can find more about that in my article below.

Some suggest think tanks and their dark money are a threat to democracy as a whole, as we have seen in the US. The Unlock Democracy Group - the All Party-Parliamentary Group on Fair Elections - has warned how vulnerable to authoritarian overreach our systems and democracy could be if an authoritarian government won power.

Policy Echange are also known for almost zero transparency on their funders - dark ‘charitable’ money, probably from the US, is shaping our democracy - and potentially eroding it. These kinds of issues have been covered extensively elsewhere but this Monbiot piece from a few years ago mentions Policy Exchange extensively - set up by Michael Gove and other Tory cronies in 2002. You can also find out a lot more about the history of think tanks in Owen Jones’ book, The Establishment.

Subscribe now

Sunday Times Scumbag List

Meanwhile, this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, which some fundraisers live and die by (how do you do it?? I start retching when I hear the words) has been released this year. Under no circumstances am I going to buy and read it and tell you anything about it. But their coverage was very special this year:

I find it interesting to see in Mamdani’s New York that some suggest there is no evidence of an exodus of billionaires, and indeed, news stories in the UK have otherwise suggested the same, for example this report by Tax Justice Network, Tax Justice UK, and Patriotic Millionaires - despite huge numbers of right wing press stories to the contrary.

But I also just find it astonishing that the Times thinks we should care. Oh no! Those billionaires are so important to our economy, what with all that completely dead money they sit on and assets they amass at the cost of everybody else. Whatever will we do without them?

But don’t forget, it’s hard being a billionaire. Your life is utterly meaningless. So the Times reassures us that someone can help:

Seriously, you could not make this stuff up.

What I will say is that Russell Henley’s Linkedin post pretty much sums up my feelings.

Meanwhile, Andrew did the honours this time of the contractually required ‘ITS MY MONEy!!! U CaNT HAV IT!! I WROK HARDR THaN U!!!!!’ reply this time.

The ‘Most Charitable Person in the UK’

Meanwhile, connectedly, we must send a ‘small gong or an invitation to meet a royal’ (as former Chair of the Charity Commission Orlando Fraser once suggested), to Chris Hohn, hedge fund CEO and now officially ‘the most charitable person in Britain’ according to Civil Society Media…..

They continue:

‘A charity founder has become the first British person to give away more than £1bn in a year, while donations by the UK’s 100 wealthiest have risen to nearly £5bn.

Chris Hohn, founder of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), reclaimed first place on the Sunday Times Giving List 2026, published today.

He donated around 16.8% (£1.44bn) of his estimated wealth in 2024, and in doing so, became the first British billionaire to give away more than a billion in a year.’

Second only to Mother Teresa and J to the C, Chris will be remembered by all of us for his deep love of fellow humanity. And money.

Meanwhile, the much-vaunted but wafer-thin increase in rich-list giving contrasts perhaps with reports earlier this year that charitable donations from the public in general are down by around 10%. Other alarm bells were sounded by the decline in on-the-night donations to Comic Relief (I would rather punch myself in the face with a sea urchin than watch that, so I suspect lack of charitable inclincation may not be the only factor). Some then lamented the lack of a UK ‘culture of giving’ among the wider public.

But here is something worth noting: Chris Hohn has given a total of around £1.44bn to charity. If ONE billionaires is able to give £1.4bn and it is only 14% of their income alone, what does this tell us?

And the wider public has given £14bn. Meanwhile, other major donors on the rich list have given £5bn overall, out of their combined £772bn.

Those people on the list hold around 25% of the wealth in the UK as a whole. And they ‘donated’ around 0.65% of their wealth.

You can either say this shows that the billionaire is disproportinately ‘charitable’. Or you can ask how this can be possible…

That starts to suggest where that wealth might be coming from in the first place - and why philanthropic donations might never work to sort this problem out.

Because if the rich can afford to give slightly more, and the normals can afford to give slightly less, this is may be because more of the money in the first place is being hoovered up the noses of the wealthy through rolled-up £50 notes. As ever, ‘growth’ is usually just further redistribution to the top.

Unless you’re very new here, you will know I have done quite a lot about billionaires and philanthropy. Here is more:

Subscribe now

LGBT Charities are a Special Kind of Shitshow

You may have seen the Pride London debacle a month or so ago, which featured the booting out of a CEO accused of spending £7000 of vouchers for volunteers on fragrance and Apple products (I mean, I’m with you on the second one), and of setting up his own Pride merchandise as a side-hustle. See! That’s the kind of enterprising cuture we don’t appreciate enough in the chartity sector…

Pride was also recently looking for a new Chair. Give that one a good sniff.

This comes after a series of disasters for other Prides, for example in Manchester, and indeed, previous debacles at previous versions of London Pride.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, a substantial LGBT charity’s Chair was revealed to have fabricated a great deal of information in their CV. That charity had significant issues with problematic senior staff in the past which I will not rehearse because they are too awful and I don’t want to further damage a charity who are desperately needed.

In both cases, there are significant questions about governance, getting the right people, and the sheer lack of stability of LGBT organisations and charities. LGBT charities are often highly politically unstable - even speaking as someone who miserably ran an LGBT society decades ago for less than a year, I can tell you that people are often very good at looking at what divides them rather than connects them. At the same time, LGBT charities have long suffered from the precarity of funding situations perhaps more than others - we are unpopular causes, originally because LGBT people were undeserving, latterly because they are considered to be people who have everything and need to shut up.

But my hypothesis is also that the sheer lack of reasonable, realistic, and solid funding for LGBT charities and organisations has often contributed to the most high profile issues and failures. Not directly perhaps - although certainly LGBT older people’s charity Opening Doors was left to twist in the wind. But because you need long term allies and solid ongoing funding to really bed-in governance, professionalism, and attract the right people. This situation looks in some ways similar to the issue of other underrepresented and underserved communities and their funding - they can’t build the solid governance and stability they need, or indeed, a pipeline of solid other funds, because they don’t have tentpole funders willing to support them.

A few trusts may have been long-term friends, but most will not see LGBT organisations as a priority. As LGBT causes become more politicised again (see next story), the likelihood is that this will only worsen. Of course, we have seen the end of other LGBT charities recently, including Metro, one of the largest UK LGBT charities. Stonewall has incredibly low reserves and has had to make huge cuts.

I have a special place in my heart and critical consciousness for LGBT organisations, and this is an area of some expertise from my past academic life. But it is ugly out there, and often, ugly in there You can see more about my take in the article below.

The terrifying impact of anti-LGBT lawfare

You will probably have heard about Girlguiding UK deciding to exclude and remove all trans girls from their services from September. There are many, many other cases where vile legal activists are hounding women’s organisations and demanding they remove trans women from their services, citing the For Women Scotland case and the decision on the High Court which does NOT decide on the definition of women, but does make life incredibly complex and difficult for everyone. The UK EHRC made life even harder by issuing crackpot rushed advice - which apparently is about to be updated, but sadly, because of the highly politicised nature of the Board, is likely to reaffirm their decision to exclude trans people. [Edit: I hear it may even be today, as I write.] This is especially an issue for charities who have single-sex objects - nasty, dark-money funded organisations are taking them to court, claiming that they are now legally obliged to exclude trans women. They claim ‘the law is clear’, which it isn’t, but their single-minded viciousness is.

The harrassment goes further, including activists and gutter press forcing the stepping down of the trans woman chair of Endemetriosis South Coast, the brilliant Steph Richards. Those who argued that no trans woman could ever understand the pain of this condition did not seem to have the same feelings about the female CEO of Prostate Cancer UK.

Meanwhile, incredibly upsetting news here about the withdrawal now of supportive public services as participants in Birmingham Pride.

(Not stopping delivering services there, let’s be clear - marching as people who care, and to show solidarity and diversity of their workforce. This is standard for LGBT supportive countries across the world). They have received the dreaded ‘legal advice’ (which is always ‘if you want to avoid any kind of legal risk however small, just don’t do anything’).

It’s an upsetting and rather terrifying prospect for those of us who find our very existence now rendered a political matter. Again. Let’s not forget that for many years, LGBT existence and lives were the subject of constant debate about whether we had a right to simply be who we are. Clause 28, the battles over age of consent, and of course, even our right to have sexual relationships, until 1967.

These battles are returning, largely at the behest of the Project 2025 global far right, and Trumpism and US right-wing think tanks are driving this, along with a huge amount of far-right dark money. They fund lawfare (legal attacks on strategic targets, often charities who can’t afford to fund their defence), which creates a climate of fear, and leads to a wider set of decisions to ‘avoid legal risk’. They are being extremely successful. And of course this is spreading to Government bodies and the public sector. The Government will not tackle the issue because they know how unpopular it is. So while civil society is one key target, a much wioder approach is focused on the public and private sectors.

These legal activists are well-funded and well-connected, and authoritarians who will take away all your rights - because make no mistake they have their sights on abortion, women’s and race rights, human rights, and indeed, your legal rights as relates to corporate and Government control more broadly. Those who are supporting only one strand - like the TERFs, often lesbian, who attack (only) trans women, or sometimes queer men - are deluding themselves if they think they are not next in the firing line. These so-called feminists think they’re this generation’s Emelline Pankhurst, but they are just the modern-day Mary Whitehouse.

Meanwhile, the majority of queer people and women in the UK want trans people to have dignity and respect. Queer brothers, sisters and others mostly care about the rights of their trans siblings, both in and of themselves, but also, because they recognise how quickly this spreads to all of us.

Somewhere up there. Martin Niemoller is sighing, “Oh for Christ’s sake. Welp, you only have yourselves to blame, F*ckwits.” Debra, you can just imagine this, right?

Kevin Taylor-McKnight and several others including Debra Allcock Tyler, Steph Richards, and Penny Wilson (I have had to step aside due to work pressures) have set up a vital group called Third Sector Against Transphobia. This offers support to charity CEOs and others who are being targeted by lawfare, as well as making the case for trans inclusion and influencing key third sector figures.

They have had strong support from some organisations, but notably not from others. Funders have been particularly uninterested; for example, as I understand it, the main funder infrastructure body has made clear that they won’t take a stand. But of course, most of their members are not the large progressive trusts - they are largely private grantmakers, especially family trusts, and are mostly no doubt on the right of the political spectrum. This of course is also why trans and LGBT organisations are chronically underfunded.

Please join TSAT if you can.

More detail on lawfare and charities can be found here in my previous article on the subject.

Share

Mamdani and municipal socialism

And finally, I have so much to say about what Mamdani is doing in NYC. But one particular thing that stuck out to me related to charities was this.

If you ever wondered what could replace ‘corporate donations’ and CSR, here’s an idea from NYC.

Instead of waiting for corporates to name a wing of a museum after themselves to launder their reputation, on May 7, Mamdani announced that $12 million is being directed to seven community organizations across the five boroughs to fund peer-led addiction recovery programmes.

The money comes from lawsuits. NY Attorney General Letitia James secured a $7.4 billion settlement against opioid manufacturers Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family earlier this year.

It’s part of a broader picture: as of last June, NYC had already received $190 million from various pharmaceutical settlements, with that total expected to grow to $550 million by 2041.

The $12M specifically funds peer workers — people with lived experience of addiction leading recovery outreach.1

More of this please, and fewer minuscule handouts to launder reputations.

My friend has talked about the power of these ‘legible’ reparations for corporate wrongdoing in his blog.

More broadly, take a look at this article from my favourite magazine currently, The Jacobin, the US socialist magazine.

Plug!

And speaking of magazines, you can find my article about Epstein and Philanthropy in the June issue of Alliance magazine - my argument being that he is not a bad apple, he is emblematic of the whole damned thing. It’s in the print issues - I’m not sure if it’s also online. Thanks to Editor Elaine Stabler. I like the fact that Alliance is a ‘critical friend’ to philanthropy. (I’m not sure I’m a friend at all at this stage….) But it does make me think I don’t there is such a magazine I could point to for charities in the UK.

If you can’t access it, you can get some general thoughts from me on Epstein in the article below.

Some notable professional stuff around this week.

Fundraising ROIs

Caroline Richards (who I keep nearly looking up on Linkedin because she has changed her name, and I’m used to her being called Danks, which is inconvenient and confusing, please change it back) of and The Nest Egg fame -has produced a fantastic fundraiser’s ROI report which yoi can find here. Check it out - this will really help your fundraising if that’s your bag, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Nest Egg while you’re at it.

IVAR’s Leaky Lifeboat Survey

IVAR, a UK charity research consultancy firm, and progenitor of ‘open and trusting’ grant frameworks, has produced its annual survey of charity funding experiences. Tellingly, it’s called ‘Searching for Life Rafts: The Funding Experience Survey 2026’.

It’s a mixed bag but honestly I find much of it a bit encouraging - full marks to people like and, to hell with it, me, for putting some pressure on funders to change their practices. And credit to them for listening.

Some things have improved. For example, some feel that funders are expecting less in terms of insane applications, and are more willing to do multiyear unrerstricted funding at higher amounts.

What I also note is that people feel finding funding is more competitive than ever, and they feel that funder restrictions are becoming more intensive.

I would suggest everyone in and out of funder circles is honest with themselves here.

If funders offer higher amounts of funding, for longer, that is going to reduce the number of grants. If they reduce the friction of application processes - especially when AI is in the mix - that is going to raise competition and the number of applications.

It’s not so much ‘be careful what you wish for’ - because these are the right things to wish for. But I do think we need to recognise that what is often holding all of this back is the size of the market, and the large-scale disinvestment from the third sector of governments, corporates, and indeed, cash-strapped indidivual donors.

And if we do ask for larger, longer, grants, that does mean fewer grants unless the sheer size of the pot is increased. And easier applications mean more applications.

We’ve also seen strong calls from fundraisers for grantmakers to provide ever-tighter guidelines and rubric to increase chance of success and wasted time. But for me, that also seems to risk chilling creativity and openness to new ideas in funders. And it also means that you will inevitably see funders focusing myopically on whoever their trustees consider to be the deserving poor of the week. It also cuts out most generalist work and the glue of society.

Deeper questions, which I want to pose are all extremely important too. Who gets to decide, how much money should be a minimum spend for trusts, and indeed, what should happen to those growing donor-advised dark money funds? But nobody wants to have those discussions.

Nor, indeed, do they want to ask why the money is held by people who aren’t doing the work, and what this tells us about the asset class and its role in the third sector….

That’s your lot, folks.

Don’t forget to come back next week for a ‘Volunteering Sucks’ special.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Subscribe! And become a patron!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. That improves the blog you get to read, a blog writing the kind of stuff nobody else does, completely in my own time and at my own cost. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical? Or a Jammie Dodger?

How I got on people’s nerves this month

In the UK, we have had a flap over the restructure of our membership body for charitable organisations - the 100 year old National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Apparent cuts to its small charity support, and the hiring of 6 Directors on high salaries set the cat among the pigeons. The open letters, and fur, were flying.

The NCVO backlash reveals a sector faultline that only direct workforce representation can bridge

Never one to avoid wading into a crisis,I decided to emerge swearing from my cardboard box under a bridge, bottle of meths in hand. Writing in the best third sector organ nobody can afford to read, Third Sector magazine, my argument was that, first, NCVO has always had this big gulf at the heart of it - small and large, public and private, who is at the table? Different kinds of organisations who think they are not being heard or represented. Their history (on which there is a full book) shows that this faultline has always been there.

How, we might ask, can we bring together so many different causes, interests, ideas, cultures, under one umbrella for the sector - especially at a time when people are always competing, fighting, focused on their own interests. (I’m sorry, but it’s true - the poorer the sector gets, the more cut-throat and fragmented it becomes. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.)

So I suggested we sidestep this. Because honestly, if we want to get beyond narrow sectoral and segmentary interests, we need to turn our attention to the bigger gap in our own industry.

My argment was that we need an individual membership organisation (where people join, not charities) for the whole nonprofit workforce. That would give us more democratic representation for the sector, starting from the workforce up.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. First, a democratic membership organisation of individual workers could better represent the true views of the sector and those in it than solely managerial levels who must be bound by institutional politics. CEOs are gonna CEO, and trustees are gonna trustee. They will put industrial interests first, because it’s their job, if they are drawn from institutional members. But take them out of that space and you may find they take different positions (I know I have). Even if they don’t, look at the balance of numbers: what may work for charitable businesses may not work for workers and clients. That is a discussion and debate worth having, on a more democratic basis.

It could also span the divide between people in funding organisations and the funded - grantmakers and grantees have a lot more in common when you take them out of their immediate professional roles. It could move us away from the anxieties about political alignment that constrain organisations.Create a new body drawn from their membership, and their voices are liberated. As a force for the people of the sector, it would be free to take positions in tune with our values – not with the business interests of larger charities, philanthropists or government.

It may also provide an outlet for all of our deeper concerns about how this industry works, and even a restorative for the morale of the sector. After all, my argument has always been that silencing critique is what damages morale and stokes burnout. Gaslighting is exhausting.

In this, it’s important to note that the two best known membership bodies in the nonprofit world in the UK are NCVO and ACEVO (the Association for Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations). One represents businesses, and one represents CEOs. This is basically a VCS version of the CBI (Confederation of Business Interests, I mean, Industry), and the IoD (the Institute of Directors). Neither of those proivate sector anaogues claims to represent its workforce, either in worldview or industrial matters, so assuming that NCVO and ACEVO can do so in the charity world seems excessively hopeful. Not because they aren’t decent people, doing good work - they are. But because they have to represent the interests of their members, and their members have the interests of the industry and the market and economic forces that drive it at heart. With that comes ideology, whether overt, or, more likely, unconscious.

So, “without something that allows us more directly to represent the voices and values of the vast majority of the charity sector – its workforce and, by extension, the people and communities it supports – these organisations risk becoming, in effect, liaison with governmental ideology, B2B commercial services bodies and federations of the largest corporate charities,” was what I said in Third Sector. (Shit, did I really say it like that? I don’t think I’ll be getting any invitations to NCVO or ACEVO’s after-work drinkies any time soon….

[Edit: somebody suggested today I need to point out I’m not actually actively hated by most of the sector - it’s just schtick. Because, let’s be honest, most important people don’t really give a shit what I say or even know who I am….]

Isn’t it time for a union?

So, following this along, what could such a democratic membership body be?

There was some positivity about the proposal, and of course, a few objections or alternatives suggested, with some good debate on social media. Many of the immediate responses to the article focused the need for more, smaller infrastructure bodies with memberships of organisations. That was where the current energy was, after all.

Others suggested that exactly such bodies already existed - none of the ones proposed seemed the same to me at all. (There were quite a few indignant responses: ‘How dare you! That’s what we do/ what we want to do/ I haven’t really read the post but we might do and I feel threatened by someone potentially competing with us’ - good old LinkedIn).

But some of the more thoughtful comments were union-related. I Sony have space for some of my thoughts about unions in the article - but it is obviously the most immediate response, and in the comments on Linkedin, people were quick to ask ‘why reinvent the wheel? Why not just join a union?

Subscribe now

Well, yes, unions like Prospect union or Unison or Unite the Union or Community could potentially fulfil part of this need. And I was quick to respond that, on the one hand, that was exactly what I was suggesting. But on the other hand, I don’t think charity workers joining existing unions works terribly well beyond the matter of better working conditions for individual workers (which, admittedly is the case for most unions now), in larger charities. And even there, much as I dislike the exceptionalism pushed by the great and the good of the sector, there are some very specific barriers.

Unions are tricky on the Left

There are also wider problems with unions as whole, which the left has struggled with for many years. Bureaucratised unions have tended to focus more and more on their members alone, rather than creating blocs to struggle for the rights of working class people as a whole. US activists have been criticial of the roles of organisations like the Teamsters, who in fact most recently supported Trump: ‘Unions became narrowly focused on serving their existing members and making backroom deals (‘Politics is something we do’, Jacobin issue 60, 2025, Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara). (Another note: union members overwhelmingly supported Thatcher in 1979. Now that is a LOT of leopards and faces.)

What we have to remember - which is difficult these days - is that unions were at one point seen as a way to create radical, revolutionary change in all of society, starting at the root of economic production.

As one activist and unionist put it:

“When workers form these organizations whose job is to deliberate and get the best deal out of the system, they become invested in the system if they can get a good deal.

This is what happened to the trade unions in the lead-up to WWI and WWII. This is sometimes referred to as “golden handcuffs”. The more unions allowed themselves to be constrained by the benefits of the fordist era, the less they acted as organizations where the class struggle happened and the more they opporated like an insurance company for workers. In fact, a lot of unions advertise themselves to workers these days like insurance companies—you’d rather have it and not have to use it. They’ve also become modestly lucrative pension funds. Why spend money on a strike that could get your local decertified when you can take the same money and ensure a decent retirement fund for your members?” - Techno Femme, Reddit/ Marxism

There has also always been the problem of unions focusing on work, and employment itself. But what of all the people who work in other ways? Freelancers aren’t allowed to join many unions, but even if they do, they can’t be very well helped by them at least day to day. People who work as unpaid carers, parents, even the ‘unemployed’ for whatever reason, may be technically allowed to join unions, but they are very clearly not designed for them.

And we have to remember that one of the original plans for democratic socialism (and indeed, the undemocratic kind…) was to form many unions and then unite them to force larger scale political change. This was often through the mass withdrawal of labour - coordinated general strikes. (Which have now been outlawed for many years in the UK, btw.) Indeed, this was how Solidarność managed major change in Poland (albeit for complex political ends). But when you don’t have as much in common as you once did, economically or indeed culturally, all of this gets trickier and trickier. And unions are in many ways designed for a simpler economy with vast industries of fairly homogenous workers in factories working for large employers. They are a model formed in industrialisation - but we live in a post-industrial world. The model of many trades, industries and crafts then uniting into a larger union - as indeed the TUC does in the UK is much more limited these days, and harder when there are actually much more complex political and economic factors at work.

‘I just can’t see it,’ said one person in response to my modest proposal: ‘There just isn’t that solidarity’. Well, first of all, the point of unions is to create it, not just act on what exists. That’s like saying ‘we can’t have unity because we’re not united’. But is it an uphill struggle? Maybe so. Others said they were having to actively try not to immediately write it off - not a good sign, but their concerns are realistic. How do you organise this with the sheer lack of time people have? Well, yes - and that is very much the issue for union organising across the board. I don’t have an easy answer to this, because I don’t have time to do it either. (I barely have the time to write the articles.)

The standard in the VCS is to suggest a sugar-daddy funder might want to help. But why would they pay to organise, essentially, against themselves, at least at a corporate level? And there is a strong belief more widely that charity workers are not in any way deserving of even fair conditions, never mind charity or investment.

Why a union might not work for nonprofits

But beneath all of this there are even deeper problems. The charity sector is, on paper, organised labour. We have workers, employers, and the beginnings of collective organisation, at least by institution. But the conditions that make trade unionism work elsewhere simply don't apply here, and understanding that is fundamental to the nature of our sector and where power actually lies. When we’re looking at apocalyptic funding cuts, low pay, precarious employment, burnout, and the horrible awareness of all those people left behind by our existing political economy, the obvious response woould be collective action. But the charity sector's relationship to power makes that harder than it looks - and as I traced that out for myself in writing and reading over the last few weeks, it reveals something uncomfortable about what charities are actually for, and how it also makes them poor candidates for unionisation.

The problem is, a huge amount of the sector is not only small, but also funded by discretionary giving. This shapes everything about our power - or lack of it. When unions representing charities stand against public sector funders, or corporate charities who mostly spend individual giving money, there is more of a chance of success. For example, in Scotland, there are new sectoral bargaining rules coming which apply to commissioned organisations as well as direct employees of the state. Oxfam and St Mungo’s have seen industrial action. Charitable housing organisations too.

But for many of us, these relationships of industrial scale and a relationship to income of ‘services at a price’ simply doesn’t translate. Pulled together from a patchwork quilt of foundation grants with restricted funding, a few local authority crumbs, and maybe a bit of CSR cash, there is little opportunity for industrial action because the income is not related to a direct profit motive. Indeed, restricted funding is probably the greatest barrier to just payment and treatment for staff in our sector - and that, of course, is decided by trusts and foundations, who do tend to represent (and be steered by) the wealthy. (Note: the insistence on Living Wage by the largest funders is to be welcomed - and yet, their pots of funding have not increased to cover that… Charities are simply subsidising that from other sources, usually by taking more time from staff than they can pay for.)

Our bargaining power is limited because we serve at the pleasure of the king - we aren’t even part of an industrial system that needs us to survive and make a profit. We are not like factory workers or even nurses dealing with a huge employer that needs to make ends meet at a reasonable cost. We are ‘voluntary,’ and our income is too. It is easily possible for the people whom we rely on to pay us to simply stop doing so. That is not something that other workforces suffer in the same way.

Why? Our relationship to power is much more tendentious and vulnerable than that of people who are directly ‘profitable’. Someone who owns a factory for profit needs their workers to make that profit. They need to pay as little as possible to make the most profit. But if at a certain point everyone walks out and says they won’t work until they raise wages, that employer will need to come to the table. The law of extraction - we pay you less than you generate for us - is direct, which means that there is a clear reason for employers and shareholders to want to keep their workforce at least minimally happy.

But in the nonprofit world, our extraction is buried at multiple levels of ideological deployment and financial transaction. If the financial transaction were visible it would be less effective socially - the fact that nobody can see we offer real value to those making a profit somewhere is partly how charity works, and how it gives moral authority to the people who fund it.

But the burial of that transaction - in many cases probably even from some level of the consciousness of those who undertake it (fundraisers, donors) - is not just why it works but also why unions struggle to work for us. In the nonprofit world, our production is even more complex, even more bound up in cultural signification, in multiple power relations, and a hidden ‘deal’ between wealth and work, to fit neatly into a model of collective bargaining which reaches an agreement between capitalist extractor and the producers they extract from.

They don’t rely directly on our labour for profit, but for ways to support their profit-making that at some kind of wider cultural and social remove. For example, for their own sense of moral authority. For political access and expediency. For management of reputation and image. And for the management of ideology - and minimal, grudging, support of the ‘deserving’ poor. And indeed, for helping the dominant powers look ‘humane’ when they do terrible things. It’s part of the compact between state and governed - and also increasingly between public and private, and social compact.

There is, of course, also a very basic structural problem: you can’t collectively bargain with 160,000 businesses. Overall, in a sense, the shape of the nonprofit world industry is a great way to atomise us. Thousands of small supposedly value-led organisations being pitted against each other in competition, as we have seen since the marketisation of the sector since the 90s, is a great way to ensure that people don’t come together for a cause - or more broadly, a picture of a more just world - and focus on their own little organisation and getting in the cash. Let’s also remember that this is part of the same ideological and political trajectory of Thatcherism and privatisation (and taken forward at speed by New Labour).

Subscribe now

What people often don’t tend to recognise is that one of the key reasons for Thatcher’s privatisation agenda was to neuter unions. With private companies, there is far less reason to worry about industrial action than with public sector workers (because your workers don’t have to vote for you). Unions could no longer hold politicians to ransom if they were successfully atomised across providers. (Clearly this has not worked so well in transport…) But that same process of privatisation and atomisation is part of what happened to social and health services as they have been farmed out to the voluntary sector. We are part of the same movement of privatisation that neoliberal statecraft and economic dogma has pursued for its own reasons of atomising a workforce, through competition and marketisation.

So what can connect us?

You might then wonder what connects us, and how we could develop solidarity and a louder, more powerful voice?

Well, I find it interesting that over the course of the last 30 or so years, as nonprofits have taken on much of the work of the public sector, it has also taken on the dogma of New Public Management. And that, in the end, what the Acronyms and think tanks teach us is that all that can connect us is managerialism in the name of whatever branding there is at any one time: Impact. Efficiency. Social change. Positive Outcomes. Data, theory of change, all of that management sector stuff that we have imported from the public sector, which in turn imported it from the private sector. These usually have little conneection to the work that the vast majority of frontline staff do, and are generally bureaucratic, managerial, financial and data-driven. In a sense, sector solidarity, our shared values, and workforce representation has been replaced by managerial techniques, led by sectoral industrial bodies who must present themselves sometimes as uniting us through a technocratic philosophy rather than a culture of practice and principles.

My sense is that a new individual membership body would need to focus on values, principles, and a vision of a better, more equal world.

Share

You see, people say we won’t agree on anything because we are not aligned and so different. But hold on - really? That sounds like a bit of a confection designed to keep us competing. How many of us believe people should get welfare benefits if they are sick? That we should support people with disabilities. That we should tax the ultra rich. That we should be supportive of minority communities, and avowedly anti-racist. That we should not plunder the natural resources of the planet and destroy its ecology. That we should be kind and welcoming to migrants. We should hold resources in communities and not sell them off to the highest bidder. That we should take a holistic view of the quality of people’s lives and not reduce them to outcomes and interventions. That arts and culture are important to the quality of people’s lives.

In that comes the potential for us to act as a moral voice - perhaps, in a secular way, as something like the Church of England does. It would allow us to speak out about the issues we face and what connects them all - economic extraction, atomisation, cruelty and exclusion - and argue for the things we believe in. A profoundly humanistic, holistic voice of care, love and community in a world which has thrown such things aside as surplus to requirements - or rather, of no use to Capital.

That would also need to include a fuller understanding of ourselves as people involved in this. Our own workforce needs are not beyond the purview of such a voice, because we are people too (well, most of us), and, especially at the lower levels, and in concert with our colleagues in areas like care work or unpaid care, we are a group largely left out of demands to a more egalitarian society.

What I want to ask is: what kind of power do we have, or could we have? Withdrawal of labour is difficult in the traditional union model for most of us. But there must be other kinds of power, and charity workers and nonprofits demonstrate this every day. We organise change, as well as provide care, for a living. How can we use that power, that latent capacity, to make broader social change?

And as my friend Hannah Kowszun from pointed out to me, it has worked for sex workers. We may not be sexy but we know how to hustle.

The Sex Workers Union in the UK is a branch of the Bakers, Food, and Allied Workers Union. No jokes - I’ve been trying to find a dedicated branch of that type for nonprofit workers and I can’t. Can anyone help me? Shout if it exists!

Are we revolting?

I would go one step further: I’m very taken with David Graeber’s idea of ‘the Caring Classes’. Graeber, involved with the Occupy movement, noted that the majority of those involved in movements for social justice and change were from the ‘caring’ or ‘helping’ professions. That is, a

“class of caregivers—that is, in the broadest possible definition, as anyone who saw their work primarily as helping, caring for, or furthering the development or flourishing of other human beings (or, arguably, living beings)—what I called the caring classes, or the class empathiques (Nafe Krandi-Mayor) or courgeoisie (Holly Wood).” (David Graeber, ‘The Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019)

Health workers. Teachers, Nonprofit workers. Universities. (He also noted that many of them were middle class professionals - there is much to say on that, but no time here.) In this, he suggests, the ‘caring classes’ may be a locus of social change, rather than a traditional unionised industrial labour force. The idea is complex and evocative - and attractive, I think, in societies where love, care, and community are forces actively controlled and minimised by our most powerful social and economic forces.

Could a union of sorts that brings together all of those of us in the nonprofit world contribute meaningfully to what Graeber calls a ‘revolt of the caring classes’? Not alone, but in partnership with other groupings, as part of a wider set of movements for social change? There will be faultlines - I can see them already - but there always are, and they are standard left faultlines. And the levels and degrees of all these things are debatable. Welcome to democracy. Everything is a negotiation.

If your answer to all this is ‘Erm… blimey, I dunno’, then you’re doing the right thinking. Or about to. I don’t propose this as a solution to the world’s problems. Graeber suggest it has revolutionary potential, and I’m not sure I’d go that far.

But I do think that a uniting force - through democratic membership and individuals united by purpose, born of a certain view of the world driven by their work relationships and subaltern relationship to power, might not be trivial. If nothing else, it could provide a better way to organise a sectoral voice with shared values, rather than shared techniques of measurement and management. That, I’m afraid, is all the unity we have in our sector relationships at present.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think.

Interventionitis Let Southport Down

With the devastating report from the Southport inquiry this week, I’m posting a link to my article in Barely Civil Society about this last year, when the first evidence started to be heard.

My views haven’t changed, much as new details have emerged - and, I fear, neither have the prevailing ideas about what I call ‘Interventionitis’ - pulling issues from the headlines and throwing money at them to fix their surface manifestations rather than any deeper thinking about people and societies. I first wrote about this in 2020, coming out of a role where youth violence was a significant focus - and none of us really believed it was the right one.

The chair of the inquiry said it best: there was an “inappropriate merry-go-round” of state bodies passing the buck and their “frankly depressing” refusal to accept responsibility, saying: “This culture has to end.”

And this is not just cultural but structural. Removing the glue of person-centred support leads to exactly this.

Until we start to recognise the need for deeper, holistic approaches to care and community, and funding those, we will keeping wasting a fortune on things that are easy to count and so far from the humanistic values and approaches our social and community care need.

Meanwhile the knife crime units, the vast money spent on researching each ‘intervention’ one by one ad-infinitum, and of course, billions on one-off quick fixes like National Citizen Service, which draw money away from communities and services that - let’s be clear - I don’t suggest would have prevented this case. But they could have created better environments for our kids to flourish and not treated them solely as clusters of social problems needing a pathway and a referral.

Interventionitis: Why Headlines Don’t Make for Good Social policy.

The funny personal bit

This week my most popular post on Linkedin, by a factor of three, was one about Hot Cross Buns, where I proclaimed that I had eaten so many, my nipples were now raisins, my blood was infused with the heady aroma of mixed spice, and my face was imprinted with a cross like an Essex roundabout. Everybody loves to watch someone rave on a professional network about quasi-religious confectionery. This buit on my previous posts about Jammie Dodgers, a personal obsession, more so since I no longer get to eat them much.

But then something evenmore amazing happened, and my mate Luds let me know about this in Aldi.

I literally ran out of the house in between meetings and got one. Yes, it was amazing.

But this is all part of a personal quest to ensure that when I turn up to meetings, people have read my posts and prepared a selection of declasse British patisserie for my personal delectation. It already works with workshops, although sometimes they provide fruit which is like, WHAT?

Meanwhile, after being cruelly spurned for funding for Barely Civil Society by a charitable funder - one of the few I’ve never pissed off yet - I have been continuing to work nonstop and try and get various articles written and meetings and conspiracies happening alongside a pretty full workload. It is knackering, but it could be worse.

I would like to make some comments on the current world political sitch, but as for all satirists, it really is just at the stage where you can’t be satirical when the reality is beyond satire. I just can’t compete with the Fat Orange F**k Show.

And thus ends our work here today.

Oh wait…

One Instagram post very worth watching

See you in three or so weeks.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Subscribe! And become a patron!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical? Or a Jammie Dodger?

Welcome to this week's Barely Civil Society, where we talk about society, politics and non-profits. After a longer piece kicked off by the NYT article on the Giving Pledge, we move on to the usual quick fire news and nonsense from UK philanthropy and charity. But we’re starting in the US - where the power and the money is.

Pledge? What pledge?

The New York Times [paywall] recently published a remarkable piece on the collapse of the Giving Pledge - the commitment set up by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates for billionaires to give away most of their wealth before death. Not only are people failing to sign, they are unsigning. This week, I’m looking at the article’s import, and looking deeper into the structures of thinking it reveals.

Despite Buffett’s claims to the contrary, the shifting sands are real, and they offer an insight into how people of a certain class are thinking. What I want to argue is that the collapse of the Giving Pledge is a window into the moral logic of the oligarchic class at the precise moment that logic is most nakedly exposed. It shows a developing structure of thought, and of power, in our society and economy. It has changed a good deal in 15 years, and more so since the second coming of their enabler-in-chief, Trump who in many ways espouses the same values – albeit without the same pretence of intellectual justification.

“The Pledge,” Theodore Shleifer reported, “became a way for the uber-wealthy to announce they’d arrived.” After all, what could be richer than someone who could afford to give all their money away?

A succession of billionaires signed. As the Times has it:

“People like Mr. Gates epitomized a humanitarian culture that espoused both big capitalism and big philanthropy. Being seen as a good billionaire who gave back was important. Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Gates Foundation’s priorities - U.S. education, global health and gender equality. Now, it’s stylish, in a Silicon Valley contrarian sort of way, to bash the Giving Pledge.”

Where did it come from? Lest you think it merely the cynicism of socialist philanthropy critics like myself to suggest there was an element of self-interest in this, even Scott Bessent (Trump’s hardly left-wing Treasury Secretary) put the Giving Pledge down to “panic among the billionaire class” during the financial crisis.

As the Giving Pledge has evaporated, we need to ask what has led to this. It shows us how much the structure of thinking in the US, and by extension the world of the ultra-wealthy, has changed in that time. My sense is that, fifteen years later, billionaires are more confident than they have ever felt. Just as Trump has recognised that his global hegemony is total, and that the rule of law holds only as much as anyone upholds it, so the billionaires have realised that they can simply release themselves from social responsibility. Philanthropy is only necessary when they feel under threat. And they don’t. I imagine them suddenly noticing that the door of their gilded cage was open all along.

Might is right: a repudiation of empathy - and the ‘woke’

And while some have decided not to sign, and others have ‘unsigned’, Peter Thiel has gone further still - actively persuading people to unsign the Pledge, wanting that money redirected to his for-profit businesses. This is, let us not forget, Mr Sovereign Individual/ kindness is the antichrist himself.1

As the Times reported: “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Mr. Thiel said. His own charitable philosophy is centered around for-profit businesses; his foundation principally funds those who drop out of college to create start-ups.”

His concern is that money will be used to support left-wing causes chosen by Bill Gates.

Meanwhile, Marc Andreessen, the tech right’s leading ‘intellectual’, has spoken against “introspection,” much as Elon Musk has railed against empathy. This is a macho, bullying, quasi-fascistic approach where ‘might is right’, and, as Thucydides put it, recently quoted by Mark Carney in discussions of international politics and economics, ‘the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.’

For many on the US right, power without mercy has become a badge of honour - it is Trumpism, fascism and hypercapitalism all at once.

And for tech billionaires, it simply does not compute to support anything that goes against their belief in the total domination of the weak by the strong. “Woke” is empathy. How could acting for the good of others be accepted by those who have made a philosophy out of denying the value of empathy?

And beneath the arguments piling up against the idea of helping the ‘weak’, can we not see an implication of something almost eugenic? The suggestion that helping the weak does not actually “help” after all?

Thiel is a devotee of the cultish accelerationist movement, with the Sovereign Individual - written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father - as its lodestar. Made even more aggressive by his bizarre beliefs in mystical soi-disant Christian eschatology and the role of the Antichrist, the idea is simple and chilling: that a coming crisis will allow the wealthy, strong, and powerful to take full control of the planet, with the remainder of humanity serving as cheap labour. In that framework, solving crises and helping others may delay the reckoning. That is not good for them, or for the other oligarchs who expect to survive and rise from the ashes.

As the NYT article shows, for many of those figures, the belief is that “woke” leftism has taken over nonprofits. Well, of course it has. Wanting to share resources and help people does tend to be more of a left-wing impulse. Wanting to do it for people who might not look or act like you is, of course, “woke.”

(This reminds me of someone who complained that Substack was full of left-wingers, only to be told that this was inevitable - since, by nature, it tends to favour the literate.)

Those who see Nietzche in here are probably right – he’s always been popular with autocrats, oligarchs and crypto-fascists. But my sense is it has a much lesser intellectual pedigree – probably closer to Ragnar Redbeard and the ur-text of social Darwinisim, Might is Right.

Leo Tolstoy described, with horror, this idea:

‘Right is not the offspring of doctrine, but of power. All laws, commandments, or doctrines as to not doing to another what you do not wish done to you, have no inherent authority whatever, but receive it only from the club, the gallows, and the sword. A man truly free is under no obligation to obey any injunction, human or divine. Obedience is the sign of the degenerate. Disobedience is the stamp of the hero. Men should not be bound by moral rules invented by their foes. The whole world is a slippery battlefield. Ideal justice demands that the vanquished should be exploited, emasculated, and scorned. The free and brave may seize the world. And, therefore, there should be eternal war for life, for land, for love, for women, for power, and for gold. (Something similar was said a few years ago by the celebrated and refined academician, Vogüé.) The earth and its treasures is “booty for the bold.”’

Philanthropy as a now-unnecessary moral legitimacy

The key function of philanthropy, as I have discussed previously, is to launder reputations - or at least to provide a patina of moral legitimacy. As Andreessen puts it, it “reclassifies you from a sort of suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist.” Let us be clear: when those of us who are critics of philanthropy have been saying this is how it functions, we have not been going on hunch alone. These people are very open about it. The fact that they feel more than ever able to say so is itself evidence of their sense of absolute power.

Philanthropists have come to realise that their giving is, as Schleifer describes it, “little more than public relations.” The deal was this: people would be grateful for your wealth, and question less where it came from and how you acquired it. But the deal broke down. People started asking why anyone had enough money to give half of it away. Whether this was the best way of doing things. Even worse, they started asking whether philanthropy was the best route to greater equity - and recognising, plainly, that it was not. (As I’ve noted here before, fundraisers and charity are dangerous - they show where the faultlines are. There is always a danger that people will start to ask difficult questions if they follow the logic - and the money.) Where billionaires were once targeted with lavish praise, that is (in some rarified spheres) no longer the case. And at that point the deal collapses: it is only of value to give if others lavish you with praise and acknowledge your moral as well as financial superiority. And a polite silence.

Philanthropy buys something. These people do not give things away for nothing. It is, as someone once said, the art of the deal.

Philanthropy as intellectual power

As I mentioned last time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently lamented the end of philanthropy in this class, true to his emerging role as the bleeding heart (comparatively) of AI oligarchy. He is the brother-in-law of one of the leading lights of effective altruism. Effective altruism, as I have argued elsewhere, is an outgrowth of the idea that the tech billionaire is not merely wealthy but an intellectual giant - a further intellectualisation of the Carnegie-era notion that the person who extracted the wealth knows best how to spend it for the benefit of those they extracted it from. Participating in philanthropy, in this framing, demonstrates that you are an intellectual as well as a financial genius. But even this is no longer sufficiently attractive. And believe me, when I am suggesting EA is at least a more morally defensible better position than the current one, you know something is wrong.

Even EA cannot hold their attention now. They got bored when they realised that dropping pocket change to solve problems they had created could not fix the world they themselves had ravaged.

When their intellectual gigantism was punctured, philanthropy lost its interest for them. Because one of the things they most wanted to prove was that the problem of inequality was not a moral one but a failure of intellect - that by solving the intellectual problem, they could fix everything, and demonstrate in the process that their greed was not the issue. They wanted to show that a mechanical, capitalist-instrumentalist approach could “solve problems.” There is surely an element of boredom in the collapse of the Pledge - and a growing, deeply unwelcome realisation that philanthropy cannot solve the problems. That is a dangerous thought they do not wish to countenance. Because if it cannot - what are the alternatives?

Philanthropy as capitalism, and capitalism as philanthropy

And so they are all doubling down on capitalism as the solution. What has really changed is not a loss of faith in charity. It is a renewed and total faith in capitalism - well, it has worked for them. In the end, it was only a hop, skip and a jump to realise that philanthrocapitalism was just more capitalism. And if so, why did you even need the philanthropy? If giving can mirror the market, why not cut out the middleman: capitalism itself is philanthropy. How very convenient.

What the Trump and oligarch era has brought us to is a belief that there is no morality beyond Aleister Crowley’s dictum: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

What they have finally realised is that there is no longer any need to hide what they have long suspected and believed: power is its own morality. The masks are coming off. Their power is now so absolute that they have understood, as Trump has in the field of world politics, that with absolute power comes absolutely no responsibility and and no accountability. Where might is right, money, and desire, are the only real morality.

Subscribe now

What now?

What all of this tells us is that billionaire philanthropy is a direct reflection of the structures of thought of the American oligarchic elite. We are living through a field day for narcissistic power with nothing but its own naïve self-justifications as its moral compass.

And so what? Well, I’m pleased to see a few people in the philanthropy sphere reacting – more so than they did over the Epstein revelations, at least. And yet, the danger is that we find ourselves, in response, arguing for more philanthropy - pleading with these people to return to their giving. But this collapse cannot be solved by persuading billionaires to change their minds.

We need no more billionaires.

We need tax, of wealth as well as income. That likely includes a one fell-swoop windfall tax, as well as, later, on an ongoing redistributive basis.

And we need an end to voluntarism on this scale. Once we have that, philanthropy becomes a pleasant pastime for the community. Not a matter of survival for many and justification for extraction by a few.

We also need to look at how we return wealth to communities we have taken it from. Ongoing taxation cannot solve this problem at root – and nor indeed can welfare or piecemeal programmes of reform and redistribution alone.

And if any remain of that class who are serious about real change and redistribution, every part of their effort should go into arguing for the permanent end of obscene wealth and its destabilising plunder of the planet and its people.

Meanwhile - yes, give the money. Give it all. And give it now.

More comments

Paul Klein made an excellent series of Linkedin posts looking at this, with thoughtful comments from a range of smart people. (I say that because they agree with me, that’s how you know they’re smart.)

Overall, I think what I keep coming back to is that I am not necessarily a ‘philanthropy abolitionist’. I am a ‘philanthropist abolitionist.’

That may be a slightly different thing.

In UK Charity news

The Charities Aid Foundation published a report last week showing that Uk individual charity donations are down by ten percent. We’ve had a lot of worrying about that, and questions as to whether people are becoming ‘less kind’, while I’m just wondering what it takes for people to notice that nobody has any money. Or to ask exactly why we think a wide range of basic care initiatives should be reliant on voluntaristic contributions, especially with UK taxes at their highest level since the second world and services on their knees. I also think it’s very hard to explain to most people that they should have an ‘embedded’ culture of giving, as one commentator put it, when billionaires don’t want to ‘give’.

As ever, the charity sector’s ability to cast aside any questions of political economy and focus on protecting its own industrial concerns is pretty embarrassing. Let’s just talk about donor journeys everyone!

Following on from that, BBC Comic Relief/ ‘Red Nose Day’ has seen its income fall again by £4m. (American visitors, I am so so sorry to tell you about this weird British hangover of the eighties telethon - you have enough to worry about culturally without bering subjected to this). I think the above issues with giving go double for that, but also - who watches this stuff? I would literally pay money not to. This is only on-the-night takings, so perhaps others will contribute later. [Actually someone on Linkedin said they watched it and got very emotional, so I am actually just a horrible person… I don;t really do charity AV.]

In incredibly upsetting news, Girlguiding UK has decided to exclude trans girls from September - giving them a few months to say their goodbyes. This is the latest win for Lawfare against UK charities, about which I have previously written extensively. The monsters of the hate groups have been out in full force to celebrate. I simply cannot understand why people would go out of their way to do this - except, of course, that this whole campaign is funded to the hilt by extremist Christiano-fascist Project 25 groups in the US, not to mention a certain children’s book author. If you care about this, please join Kevin Taylor McKnight’s Third Sector Against Transphobia group on Linkedin (search there.) If you don’t care about this, fine, but remember, whoever you are, you are probably on Project 2025’s list eventually.

In more terrible news for LGBTQI+ people, Metro UK, a 40 year old charity for the queer community, is to close down due to lack of funding. It had been on the cards for some time. It will not be the last - Stonewall seems to me to be on very shaky financial footing. For both, anti-trans activism has probably played a part in their decline, if nothing else making public sector organisations feel emboldened to discount the needs of queer people. The shrinkback of public sector funds - and especially the massive cuts to Integrated Care Board budgets - has taken valuable funding away from health work, which was always an area that LGBT work relied on for funds.

This is bad enough now, but the real problem comes later. Campaigning work is not enough alone. Support services are still needed for LGBT+ people. And those have been largely blasted away over the years as the overwhelmingly metropolitan middle class people in commissioning and foundations people naively read queer equity as a battle that has been won. The more of these organisations we let die, the more it will be nigh-on impossible to restart them. With the possibility of a Reform government on the horizon - with Project 2025-style plans for the UK, we cannot afford to wait for a crisis to help.

Foundations, where are you?

Meanwhile, I recommend on trans issues on Substack.

And finally…

Well, those of you who usually come for the witty and ascerbic critique/ dick jokes will be disappointed this week, but I promise to return to comedy soon. I had a good conversation with fellow substacker this week about all things philanthropy, US culture, and political economy. None of which is to suggest he agrees with me here (or otherwise). Subscribe to his substack, though. Lots of interesting stuff.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Become a patron and subscribe!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical?

The only good billionaire is, erm, nope.

Asif Aziz, billionaire landlord and owner of Criterion Capital, was standing on a podium, next to Mayor Sadiq Kahn in London. They smiled for a photograph. Above the assembled crowds, the Ramadan lights Aziz funded through his foundation twinkled.

What a scene. A great business leader and philanthropist giving back to his community. Celebrating the diverse population of London. What’s not to like?

Well… Not long before, in another part of the city, doors had been knocked on, and notices pushed through letterboxes, as Criterion Capital had begun turfing out tenants just before the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force. According to London Centric,

“Money from the housing blocks affected was then flowing directly into the Aziz Foundation, the family’s PR-friendly charitable arm. The Aziz Foundation then funded the capital’s Ramadan lights and launched a partnership with the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint, who today distanced themselves from the family.”

Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz’s mass evictions? Jim Waterson, Cormac Kehoe, and Liv Facey, London Centric, Feb 27th 2026.

London Centric

Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz's mass evictions?

Early this morning I found myself standing in front of the south west London home of billionaire landlord Asif Aziz. I was there to make a last-ditch attempt, after all other avenues had been exhausted, to get answers f…

Read more

8 months ago · 157 likes · 28 comments · Jim Waterson, Cormac Kehoe, and Liv Facey

Even better, they report that the mass evictions are happening in order to allow Criterion to offer the properties to local authorities as lucrative temporary accommodation. Solving homelessness perhaps?

Aziz’s philanthropy has put him right up on a literal London pedestal, all the while his actions make Londoners homeless.

Shocked, perhaps, Khan then made a public intervention, calling for the evictions to be withdrawn. Reports suggest that residents were bizarrely told face to face on their doorsteps by a mysterious man that if they recorded videos asking to stay, they would be allowed to do so. Criterion denies this happened. And the evictions, as of last report, are continuing. Centrepoint, the homeless charity for young people in London, has cut ties.

I can almost imagine Khan, crestfallen at his desk, shaking his head: ‘But I thought he was one of the good ones…’

The brilliant broke this story. They called the fact that money from evictions is flowing directly into Centrepoint and the Ramadan lights a ‘dark twist’. But this is anything but a dark twist - it is part and parcel and standard practice for elite philanthropy. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Another reckoning for elite philanthropy?

The Epstein files release showed perhaps one of the most blatant and overt cases of elite philanthropy as reputation management, and an enabler of access to power. That was wide-awake bad faith and cynical manipulation. Most philanthropists are not Epstein. Perhaps Aziz and others like him believe deeply in solving homelessness. Perhaps his giving is truly a matter of humanitarian intent. But it would not be unreasonable to question whether there is a level of hypocrisy here – or something even more cynical at the heart of elite philanthropy more broadly.

And how could we not see political influence, status management, laundering of reputation and redirection as a central part of this process in the philanthropic work of Carlos Slim, the Qatar Foundation, the Dangote Foundation? There are countless stories of this kind of practice across the globe. It is likely as old as wealth itself. And yet the sheer level of denialism in the sector takes my breath away. Talk of rotten apples, otherwise ‘pure’ sullied foundations, the endless cry of ‘not all philanthropists’, become louder at these points.

The problem is that these moments of the greatest apparent hypocrisy open up fractures and faultlines in the fictions and mythologies we have to tell ourselves to make peace with our work. To me, there always seems to be a radical, perhaps hysterical, blindness to this in the philanthropy sector, at least in terms of our day-to-day discourses, and on the part of its cheerleaders. Is this in good faith, or just matter of people keeping on trucking and mouthing the right words?

If’s almost as if, if we talk about it, the money will all suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. And indeed - it probably would.

This blindness, or at least, silence, seems to be something largely confined to the ‘funder’ (supply) side of the equation, and particularly of course to those whose work involves taming, tickling and chucking under the chin those who have proven just how good they are at holding on to money.

In the day-to-day non-profit sphere - the people doing the actual day to day work - I think we are all too aware, and, at least among ourselves, fairly open about these issues. We know what is happening. And in terms of study and discourse, antipathy towards philanthropic donations is common amongst radicals in the nonprofit sector, who see the money in many trusts as ‘twice stolen’ - once through profit extraction, and once, in many cases, through tax avoidance. Indeed, they then often spend a lot of this on the people who stole it - e.g. at the opera or with a new wing of a gallery. (See Ruth Wilson Gilmore in ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 2007).

Share

But my sense is that the ‘philanthropy’ industry, especially as it relates to the ultra-wealthy donors of philanthrocapitalism, has to internalise those values much more. It would be hard not to. It probably is required for success. And for sheer mental health - better to truly believe the lie you tell yourself.

My sense is that many people working in elite philanthropy have persuaded themselves that their job is actually to secure and spend money to do good. But I think we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that that is only half of the job.

Because surely much of the job is to promote and justify extreme wealth and class privilege. Alongside a good deal of flattery. We are integral parts of the propaganda and PR machine for some of the worst people on the planet. We are not just ‘doing the good work’ with money from ill-gotten gains, but acting as propagandists and mythologisers of the elites that the rest of the world is increasingly coming to realise are parasitic, pathological and near all-powerful.

My question is this: can’t we at least be honest with ourselves? Be honest with our communities and colleagues? And ask ourselves, can those of us who truly believe in ending such rank inequality ever feel right about actively promoting their mythology?

Maybe this ideological work, not a new water well in a Global South village, is what their money is really paying for?

At a structural level, one of the key social, cultural and economic function of philanthrocapitalism - and, I think history shows, its antecedents - is to promote the ruling ideas of the ruling class. As I’ve noted before, whichever class is in charge in society also rules philanthropy. Not just because they have the wealth to give, but because the practice is of greatest benefit to them, in their attempts to ensure society puts their economic interests at the top of the pile. Philanthropy helps shape the ideas of the world to naturalise, to cleanse, and to offer a patina of moral justice to their power. Religion, aristocracy, the rising mercantile classes, the industrial bourgeoisie, the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the technocrats of the state-industrial- nonprofit compacts, and latterly the rise of philanthrocapitalists and tech billionaire oligarchs: all have used ‘philanthropic’ giving to naturalise and justify their privilege.

And that means that as any challenges to the current billionaire plutocracy come up, philanthropy is highly likely to be harnessed to control problematic ideas that may come to challenge their hegemony.

What next?

This maters because times are changing - maybe. Philanthrocapitalism began at a time when the new tech elites were shiny, new and disruptive. They seemed exciting. They seemed to offer prosperity for all.

That is now where we are now. The rise of what the ruling class mouthpieces of the press and politics are derisively, and strategically, calling ‘left populism’, is making more and more people aware that this is a deeply suspect structure that is in no way in their interests. And the ultra-wealthy know it.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic AI, recently reiterated (in a long, involved state of humanity essay about AI and social change) that he believed that philanthropy should play a larger role than ever. He noted with disappointment that the ultra-rich were becoming disillusioned with the idea and its effectiveness. (Almost as if just dumping pocket change on a problem you created turns out not to solve it better than taxation or shared wealth. Imagine.)

Subscribe now

But he was also clear that it is important that the ultra-rich are seen to act generously so that any changes to their status or contributions to society (tax!) are reasonable, and not decided by ‘the mob’. You can imagine who ‘the mob’ is here. (Yes! It’s you and me.)

So, just as people eventually turned on the robber-barons of the Gilded Age, despite their supposedly selfless philanthropy, it is quite possible that this new age of plutocratic empire is nowhere near as permanent as those people would like - and indeed, may be as impermanent as they fear. Gramsci’s insight, among many others, was that hegemony is always retained by the ruling classes partly by giving things away. At its worst that may be taxes. Better if it is an opera house, better still if it is training for people to work better on your coca plantations. Some have recently noted that the ultra rich imagine taxes are the very worst thing for them. But there are much more dangerous (for them) options that go far beyond redistribution through taxation, after all. That, perhaps, is the ‘mob’ they truly fear.

What will this mean for philanthropy cheerleading? I suspect that the defences and defenders of philanthrocapitalism will become more and more shrill, more and more likely to resort to ideas about high-minded transhistorical notions of ‘love of humanity’, just as the global population’s calls for control of the extractive ultra-rich become louder.

I’m not seeking purity

This is not about purity. As I’ve noted before, purity is just not a reality - the whole of the world is trade-offs. Power is everywhere. As Mani Hothi, CEO of Trust for London pointed out, even long-established independent foundations are capitalist enterprises. Trust for London are extremely progressive. But as he notes, they invest their portfolio and rely on the stock market for giving. So does my pension. Nobody is ‘pure’. It’s not even ‘a thing’…

But although being an adult is understanding that the world is about conflict and compromise, that does not mean you can act without a moral compass or a system of ethics. Indeed, what I’m finding increasingly interesting is that philanthrocapitalism has centred consequentialist ethics (what matters is the end result – the consequence).

Because of course, ‘impact’ is all about a focus on the end result. I can’t help feeling that focusing on impact is very helpful if you don’t want anyone to think about what you did to get it. Perhaps, for example, you evicted half of London to donate some pocket change to a youth homelessness charity and then focused on social ‘impact’. I can see how you might want to focus at the end of that chain. No doubt it is part of the reason instrumentalist, impact thinking has been at the dead centre of philanthrocapitalism and its destructive influence over the last 15 or so years.

None of this has an easy solution. And the solution to billionaires does not lie with us. But if there was any interim direction of travel worth pursuing within the world of philanthropy itself, it might be toward tighter regulation of donors - which we often resist tooth and nail at their behest. - Amd perhaps most important of all, discouragements from direct control of donations by those donors. Look forward to squeaking from the foundations, the wealthy, and their promoters if anybody mentions that.

Foundations long-removed from founders and with more democratic structures are usually a much better way forward, but the least democratic and founder-driven are among the loudest, wealthiest, and best represented in the world of philanthropy as elsewhere.

Whatever, perhaps the most pressing need for better philanthropy - pending NO philanthropy as I propose - is to pry open the death-like grip of the philanthrocapitalist. He believes he best knows how to spend the wealth he stole - all for the benefit of the people he stole it from.

And we might also ask: is it perhaps time to refuse to lionise and mythologise these people?

No more gushing plaudits. No more press releases and ad campaigns.

A note in the annual report and a polite thank you.

Maybe a badge. Not enamel; one of those cheap ones with the pins that give you tetanus.

And that does raise again the question: if we stopped worshipping, mythologising, and doing the propaganda work for these people, would the money dry up?

I suspect we would very quickly see who ‘the good ones’ are.

A quick reminder

I have no idea where these (below) came from, but they’ve been on my phone for years now. Time to give them an airing.

DEVEX: Epstein, Philanthropy and Hypocrisy

I was in DEVEX Magazine last week talking about the Epstein fallout, which led to a really interesting and enjoyable meeting with the CEO of a large sexual and reproductive health foundation. We had a great conversation about how to deal with all this stuff. (Did we find the answer? Yes of course. Send me a cheque for £500 and I’ll tell you.)

But if you’re up for a chat about it, drop me a line. I’d like to see how people are parsing this stuff beyond ‘being extra careful with due diligence’.

Meanwhile, DEVEX is super expensive and I can’t afford it, but I’ve pasted my quotes below. Because obviously those are the best bits.

The Thanks to Subscribers Bit

Last week I asked people to consider a paid subscription for the specific purpose of helping me access more periodicals, both to keep up to date, and to look at where I can share more of this work to get beyond the current (wonderful) audience. A handful of people obliged, and I’ve been able to find lots of very interesting general material I will share in the future. Next is an academic library subscription. Thanks again!

Guess what - maybe YOU are the good philanthropists….?

Internet Nonsense

This week, a recommendation of one of my favourite Youtube channels, Scroll Deep. I’ve always been fascinated by the absolute insanity of the internet, and it’s great to find somewhere others are too. Every week it blows my mind…. This one has an adorable surprise at the end too.

Until next time

I think I’m going to give philanthropy a rest for a bit now as I’m also writing an article for a philanthropy magazine. I still have like 5 essays I never manage to finish because topical things always come up first. We’ll see.

Notably though, I tried to interest some mainstream outlets in the Epstein and philanthropy story, but no dice. I suspect the invasion of Iran killed that story - which of course was Trump’s intention….

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Become a patron and subscribe!

Barely Civil Society needs patrons to stay active. All the content is free, but if you’re able to support this work, it means a lot if you can buy a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Buy me a periodical!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals/ libraries access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical?

In a week where the news choice was between Bad Bunny and Jeffrey Epstein, I chose Bad Bunny and his hypnotic jiggling every time.

But, much as every fibre of my being pulls me the other way, we need to focus on the Epstein elephant in the room, and not the elephantine assets of everybody’s new Puerto Rican crush.

After the discussion of appalling philanthropy, we end with some Bad Bunny memes and other frivolous nonsense.

Epstein, Politics and Philanthropy

The Epstein Affair: Is it about sex?

Now, let’s get the caution about legal things out of the way. We must be very clear here: the fact that someone visited an island and/ or knew Epstein and Maxwell doesn’t mean they broke any laws. Some were quite deliberately caught up in the snare. Some were fellow travellers. Many should have known better. And far too many, but not all, were doing terrible things.

But anyway, I want to take this away from individuals to look at a class of people.

And as I want to be clear, I think there is a problem with the whole narrative around the Epstein case: that we are treating this as a ‘sex scandal’ as opposed to as a window into the lives and powers of an elite often invisible to us. And the unexpectedly open revelation of structures of power and privilege that some (not all) had imagined were in decline in the age of capitalist democracy - as if.

There have been different approaches in the - rightful - moral outrage in the press. For example, in the Guardian, Marina Hyde and others connect this with the Me Too moment - that this is yet further evidence of the systematic and appalling abuse of women and girls. She worries about shifted focus: “Obsessing over individual players and political chaos leaves less time to focus on the misogyny. And that’s for the best, isn’t it guys?” She’s right that this does take the focus away from the appalling treatment of women and girls, and we cannot lose sight of this horror. Furthermore, she is right that focusing on individual actors isn a distraction - everyone suddenly discovering Peter Mandelson is a bit of a sleazy shit (no!) isn’t really politics at all in any meaningful or critical way. It’s gossip, horsetrading, machiavellian soap opera. All of which draws us away from the much larger political critique we need to make about democracy and elites. This is politics as sport, not as politics.

Meanwhile, there is Heather Stewart’s approach: that this scandal, epescially where people like Mandelson are involved, is "‘laying bare the dark allure of the “filthy rich”, [and] it also underlines the need for tougher constraints on money in politics.” Like her, I feel we need to focus more on how these elites of fabulous wealth and prestige gain access to political power, and indeed, to make sure they make the political and economic world in their image.

If this model of power ever went into recession with the rise of 20th century liberal democracy, it was brief, shallow, and clearly on its way out again already, like democracy itself. Much of what we are seeing now is a mater of just that: what we are seeing.

The fact that they buy and sell and trade women and children as resources is no surprise at all - to them, everything can be bought, sold, traded, and used as a resource to buy favour or power - as well as something they can use and abuse to gratify their own desires as they see fit. To them, women are like any other resource: theirs for the taking, or to be used as a commodity for their own status and power. So, patriarchy.

Hyde and Stewart’s perspectives are far from incompatible. It seems to me that nowhere do we see more clearly how capitalism/ economy and patriarchy are utterly intertwined.

Philanthropy and class war

And so, we come specifically to philanthropy.

First, let’s be clear: philanthropy is an area where abuse of women is part and parcel of the game. So many of my women colleagues have been abused and harassed by ‘philanthropists’ and potential donors - so much so that I remember having to send a male chaperone to any corporate events where a female fundraiser would be present. Others on Substack have spoken about their treatment, for example, the brilliant . The well-known scandals are the tip of the everyday iceberg.

But as for the the wider issues about power, money and democracy, Alliance magazine very neutrally reported on the prevalence of some of big philanthropy’s top names in the Epstein files. Among the names were Bill Gates, Richard Branson (not known to have visited the island) and Howard Lutnick, all noted for their philanthropic work and prominence in ‘global giving’ circles. All deny any wrongdoing - and that is not really the point I’m making.

Gates is of course founder of the Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations with an endowment of around $77 billion. Through Virgin Unite, Branson has worked with other philanthropists and leaders on initiatives such as The Carbon War Room (market-based solutions to climate issues, but of course!). Howard Lutnick’s net worth is around $2.7 billion, and he set up the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which raised $180 million for 9/11 families and other disasters.

Oh, and let’s not forget noted philanthropist and humanitarian, Donald J Trump.

I’m not massively interested in the individual motivations for giving, even if those will range from the truly charitable to the grossly self-interested. Most will be somewhere in between. What I’m interested in is exploring the strange coincidence of wealth, power, secrecy and anti-democratic influence and philanthropy. Because it’s almost as if philanthropy is just one instrument in the toolbox of global elites for getting what they want, often secretly, surreptitiously, and frankly, for a song.

What we know is that philanthropy was a key part of Epstein’s life, fortunes, and network. As reported in the Guardian, one exchange in the files was between the vile Steve Bannon and Epstein: “First we need to push back on the lies”, “crush the pedo/trafficking narrative”, and “rebuild your image as philanthropist”. There is no beating about the bush here. Philanthropy is front and centre, and well understood by the most devious people on the planet, as a royal route to reputational rehab.

Subscribe now

Now, there is little point here in further making the argument that ‘some philanthropists are awful’. We know. Brian Souter is a particularly loathed home-grown example of mine. Richard Desmond is another. (Neither of whom have been accused of any wrongdoing and have no connection to the Epstein case - my point is simply that some people who claim to be philanthropists are just horrible people). J.K. Rowling is spending millions on hurting trans women because they gave her naff crime book bad reviews.

As for those in the files so far, the Gates Foundation’s philanthropy has been controversial, and the allegations of use of ‘philanthropy’ to feather nests by writing off economic development costs to benefit corporate interests, or bend agriculture out of shape in developing nations are pretty grim, much as they are denied by the foundation itself. We know much donor-advised fund giving involves highly devious ways of maximising corporate profit and minimising taxation.

And many individual philanthropists and corporations are clearly using their wealth to launder their reputations because they have done dreadful things. The Sacklers practically have to beg people to take their cash at this stage.

We can also see that philanthropy can get you access to the people you would never consider possible. Noam Chomsky, an intellectual hero of mine, (incidentally, I’ve always admired his refusal to claim he is a saint) was partly ensnared by Epstein by offers of money for his philanthropic ventures. Having access to Chomsky, with his stellar reputation as a humanitarian, leftist critic and great intellectual, of course gave Epstein more credibility in circles he would never normally have. (As well as one more person he had kompromat on.) Philanthropy was one of the key ways he got into the room with the right people - and what Epstein and his type are best at is finding what people need and what makes them tick. Donations to pet projects are a better route to influence for some than, say, payments for one’s husband’s osteopathy course.

So what’s new?

These are all well-worn critiques of big (and sometimes small) philanthropy itself. You may remember me ranting about this around this time last year. So what does the Epstein case, and his involvement with philanthropy and other philanthropists tell us more broadly?

Share

I think it tells us that the structures of philanthropy mirror the wider problems in our world with massive, unaccountable, amoral elites. We see that the abuse of women is endemic. We see that global elites of the ultra wealthy have as much influence as, if not more than, states. We see that behind the facade of our democracies, there are more powerful alliances and allegiances which make decisions without reference to the people. That in itself is far from new: this is all patronage, privilege, the giving and receiving of favours. And let’s be clear: while the most profitable playgrounds of philanthropy may be reserved for the very top elites, none of us who has worked in fundraising is unfamiliar with all of these issues writ small and local as well as large and global.

And it tells us that much modern ‘philanthropy’ can only thrive in a world with massive inequities of power, prestige and wealth. But more than that, philanthropy helps to prop it up.

Seeing such philanthropists in proximity to this mass of influence, secretive, conspiratorial deals, and lavish venality tells us, not (just) that they are bad eggs, but what so much philanthropy is really for.

The point is that elite philanthropy is forms part of the horse trading, buying, selling, and exchange of political economic and social power between elites. It tells us that philanthropy is a weapon and a tool of the ruling classes. Because let’s be clear - philanthropy is not something that is just available to anyone.

At best, philanthropy is just another ride in the playground for the ruling class. But it has greater instrumental value than this: it launders reputations. It gives people access to political power and opens doors. It buys credibility and ‘favour’, both political and economic. It throws the plebs off the scent of fair taxation, or worse. It acts as a mythology of the largesse and intellectually superior supposed forward-thinking of a class of people who most often are lucky, greedy, or both.

And it confirms again that the issue we are dealing with here is not just a matter of goodies and baddies and individuals who are gold or brass. This is a systemic issue, not just individual morality. The ruling economic elites, with their shared interests for profit and power, use philanthropy to grease the wheels and reinscribe their hegemony - that is, their dominating influence, especially at the cultural and political level. We must stop believing their mythology.

The Epstein files should act as the starkest possible case study of how philanthropy serves as an ever-present tool in the undemocratic power-broking of the ruling class in late capitalism.

What to do?

So everyone always wants a simple solution. This is people’s most common objection to these critiques - we know all this but what are we supposed to DO about it? (‘Waaaah’ is also often involved.)

I think the answer is fairly simple - I’m a strategist in my day job, and we’re weirdly resistant to long term strategy in the leftist world. Flooding the zone with shit, keeping everyone squawking and running around is part of the strategy of our enemies.

And everybody in the sector and beyond constantly wanting immediate fixes is part of the problem.

So my solution is a simple phased strategy. Over maybe 20 years. (I will be pushing 70, but most of you will still be plugging away and may even have survived the MAGA era.)

• Short term: MORE philanthropy

• Medium term: BETTER philanthropy - democratic philanthropy, in particular.

• Long term: NO philanthropy

Can we get our heads around that? It’s not rocket science is it?

But if you have a strategy in phases, you have to plan for all of them, and work out how to get to each one.

I’m most interested in the last one. And yet, our whole world of philanthropy and charity simply refuses to consider it.

Meme time

You’ve been very good and now deserve the Bad Bunny memes.

Meanwhile, I do love it when Americans are so batshit insane they make that Megatw*t Piers Morgan look reasonable.

Other Internet nonsense

And finally…

I can still barely feel my nose after my return from Copenhagen, which was honestly a bit dismal, apart from the pastries, and a fantastic museum called the Glyptotek. Ironically, set up by a philanthropist of the Carlsberg empire. Great museum, crap beer, not my first hypocritical brush with philanthropy for sure.

Anyway, I shall see you again in a week or three with one of the essays I have been piling up, if I can finish them…

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

1. Subscribe - and consider a paid subscription!

2. Share Barely Civil Society: Lord knows the algorithms are not in our favour.

Share Barely Civil Society

3. Support!

There are practical reasons to chuck me a fiver: I’m saving up for journals and periodicals access so I can keep better track of what is happening in the sector. Can you chip in and buy me a periodical?

Wvery

Hello everyone, and welcome to nearly February. I’ve spent the last week doing grant application interviews and have learned a lot, not least that vodka takes the edge off, but it’s best not to start before11am. Also, don’t mix it with anti-dizziness medication. Oh, and people are doing amazing stuff - probably too much, which is also the case for me. Apart from the amazing bit.

In general news, democracy strikes again as Andy Burnham is prevented from returning to the parliamentary Labour party. Suella Braverman joins Reform, which is not the coup they think it is because everyone knows she’s mad as a f*cking brush. Same with Jenrick. It’s bad for the Tories but not necessarily good for Reform…

America has descended into total fascism and quickly discovered that people aren’t just going to quietly accept that, especially in a place like Minneapolis. This is really interesting: Minneapolis is what they call Mall of America territory - this is not Portland. Go Prince fans!

Next week, I am off to Copenhagen, which every single person I speak to tells me is the best place they have ever been, but also, not to bother with the Little Mermaid. I’m looking forward to it, albeit wrapping up warm….

Liberal Democracy Returns to the Third Sector

Charity Commission CEO David Holdsworth spoke this week at the annual charity conference of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. (Wow, I can’t believe I missed that no doubt Bacchanalian celebration.) I’m quoting it at length because it was sort of buried in reporting, but I think it was the most important thing that he said.

Charity not expected to be ‘fluffy’

‘Holdsworth discussed the distinction between public trust and approval, saying that “none of us will support every single charity on the register”.

“We all have different worldviews, passions and interests. It’s one of the sector’s great strengths - how broad the sector is. And as regulator, we don’t expect charities to be uncontroversial,” […]

“In fact, it’s my personal conviction that societal progress over the decades has come about precisely because of the work of charities whose missions have been at odds with what was, at the time, comfortable, respectable or common ground amongst the general public.” […] “We shouldn’t expect charity to be fluffy. Sometimes charity is and must be disruptive, but – and this is an important but – the ability and freedom of charities to pursue controversial charitable aims rests on a collective commitment to integrity in how charities are run.”

David Holdsworth, quoted in Civil Society, 23rd Jan 2026

I cannot stress enough how heartening I find Holdsworth’s speech - compare this to the insanity and intense politicisation of the Orlando years. It fits with the notion of the Civil Society Covenant. It acts as a reset. This is all the more important in a week where another conference found larger charities (always the only ones who get invited to talk, of course) were talking about the ‘self-censorship’ of charities.

Make no mistake, this goes down to the level of individual censorship of those who work for charities daring to have an opinion or a persona beyond their work one, as we have seen with those struggling with trustee disapprobation if they speak out of turn.

Let’s be clear: This is the speech the CC needed to make, and I’m impressed that they have done so.

Stress test: trans inclusion and the law

Meanwhile, in the same week, the Charity Commission asked theGoverment for guidance on how they should deal with requests to include trans people in charities whose objects state they are solely for women. This is absolutely predictable but also likely to have a very bad result for those trans little girls who want to go to a youth club with their friends, given the Government and the EHRC’s outright hostility to trans rights.

At the end of the day, this is a moral, ethical, and political question about kindness and inclusion - and the Labour government and the EHRC have been hostile to trans rights for some time. So this is like the teacher asking the bullies whether it’s okay to bully you. But what else can they do? They have to apply the law - and indeed, their interpretation has to rely on the interpretation in turn of hostile actors and judiciary. My take: we are going to hasve to win hearts and minds and build a groundswell here, in the charity sector as much as anywhere else. Fiddling with governance and the law is not going to cut it alone - because governance and the law are currently on the side of the most powerful.

Overall, the Charity Commission is setting out a pluralist, dialogic, highly liberal democratic vision of charity. But the reality of the climate in which that is taking place is increasingly fraught - and all the benevolent and democratic will in the world can’t help when the judiciary and the interpreters of the law are powerfully hostile to certain aspects of justice.

Why Lawfare Has Charities in its Sights

Meanwhile, working with colleagues opposed to anti-trans bigotry, we’ve been shocked, if not entirely surprised, by the weaponisation of the law to intimidate and frighten enemies. This is not just about charities and civil society per se - it’s making me think about the wider impacts on law in the world and politics as it changes, where we have to decide between law as dsialogue and law as a weapon.

The growth of ‘lawfare’ in the charity sector is frightening. Test cases, appeals, and various other legal instruments of change are one thing. The Good Law Project is doing an excellent job here, and of course, the Mumsnet Meanies backed by Wizardy Enid Blyton are doing a great job of, not winning them (because in fact often they are losing and spinning it as success), but of presenting victory.

But there is a more sinister kind of lawfare happening, where legal threats - and people’s fear of legal attack, and inability to legally defend themsevles - is being used to frighten, coerce and blackmail people and organisations into positions they don’t want to take. Small charities and individuals now being approached by anti-trans legal activists and told they will be personally sued if they don’t comply in advance with excluding trans people is a somewhat different thing than a discursive process of legal argument in the courts.

This is just a type of juridico-legal violence, where the process is used to terrify and intimidate. This is deeply sinister.

You can see the law as a set of fixed rules that govern behaviour and apply punishment or favour based on absolute moral precepts handed down from a higher power. You can also see law as a kind of neutral umpire for managing conflicts, and avoiding the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. Since the Enlightenment most of all, it has been seen as a place of dialogue where we slowly come, through discourse, debate, and rational argument, to new agreements of social and moral norms. In this, we find the fundamental belief of liberal democracy: respect for the rule of law, and the ability to challenge and change society through legal discourse and legislation. But that model only works (if it does) when institutions accept the premise of social progress as dialogue - and in good faith.

Marxist approaches to the law have always stressed the idea that laws are outgrowths of the ruling class (those who have the greatest share of the wealth) at any time. Alongside this we see the insights of things like Critical Legal Studies which developed in the US in response to new social movements and indeed their experiences of the limitations of legal arguments in the context of civil rights. Both approaches were sceptical of liberal democratic claims about the law, to my mind rightly, at least in part.

But there is a newer approach to law (well, newer in focus), very much born of the aggressively litigious culture of the US, and of the increasingly emboldened New Right: law as a matter of explicitly asserting dominance and exerting power over its enemies. It does this through terror and intimidation, leveraging fear of personal, financial and reputational ruin. It is basically using the law as a weapon of blackmail. In a sense it is seeing the law as part of the ‘war of all against all’, not as a way of avoiding or overcoming it.

This has grown out of political ‘realism’, very much the core belief of the right in the US since at least the 1980s, and most of all in international frameworks - essentially the idea that ‘might is right’. 1

Subscribe now

The end of law?

As Mark Carney put it this week, quoting Thucydides from the Melian Dialogues (no, I just looked it up) we are approaching an international legal order where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The rule of law is evaporating at an international level (let’s be clear, that was indeed largely the international ‘law’ prior to the 20th century). But evaporating that law is also a key strategy on a day to day, micro and national political level by the rising right wing forces across the globe. Authoritarians despise the authority of ‘law’ as a social and civic function of democracy, because they only love their own authority. As Judge Dredd would have it: ‘I am the law.’ Laws just get in the way of authoritarians - unless, of course, they make them. Project 2025 and its various local implementations are precisely designed to erode the rule of law and put in its place authoritarian executive systems which act purely on coercion and might.

At the same time, the attack dogs of the New Right know that law, including civil law, is a powerful weapon. The New Right treat law as something that is useful in as much as it can be used to command and coerce, even if in its liberal democratic form it is also a barrier, if it can be used to temper their power. They attack ‘the law’ but replace it with laws of their own, and stuff judiciaries with their own people, to enshrine their own authority (see for example the US Supreme Court). Access to vast funds to do so is almost always a pre-requisite.

In this mode, law usually attacks the ‘other’ and protects the ‘us’ (per critical legal studies views), supports the wealthy and their property (per Marxist views), and more generally, allows the absolute power of fascists (per realists). And its only purpose is instrumental: to reinforce or take power. There is a famous recent quote about conservatism:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

— Frank Wilhoit

For democrats, liberals, and even leftists to an extent, dialogue, debate, and rational discourse are goals in themselves. They are not just instrumental in achieving a good society, they are a central part of it.

But for political realists, process has no inherent value; all that matters is whether it gets you what you want. This is the approach that lawfare takes, and the scorched earth tactics of the anti-trans meanies’ legal strategies are designed to do nothing else but destroy their enemies. These are two different ideas about how we approach law and social change in a liberal democracy.

At the same time, I am not arguing here for a naive return to a politics of liberal democratic process. AIDS, LGBT activism, and any number of other social and justice movements suggest it is not enough. For all the Neocon political realism, there is a left, progressive, and anti-authoritarian tradition of realism too. I’m reminded of Michel Foucault’s take: “Shall we say, politics is war pursued by other means?” A Machiavellian streak runs right through any movement that plans to make change.

Nothing is simple.

Why charities?

So why are these attacks are coming for charities? Well, because, whatever people like the IEA and Orlando Fraser will tell you, charities are a fundamental part of civil society. And civil society, central to flourishing liberal democracies, is where norms are formed, dissent is organised, and power is either normalised or challenged.

Italian Marxist theorist of culture and politics, Antonio Gramsci, whose work has now been explicitly co-opted by the New Right, was very clear that civil society is not a sideshow to state power – it’s where hegemony (dominating influence over society) is made, normalised, and contested. Civil society is not peripheral to politics but one of its central battlegrounds.

What could help?

Well, clearly, I’m not going to suggst how to fix the decline of liberal democracy - although Edward Luce has written an excellent book about that. You may also want to take a look at the work of Thomas Piketty.

But as for UK civil society, I’ve talked a lot here about the problem. I’m not one for easy solutions. And yet, I do think there is one very brave but potentially powerful solution that could happen in civil society and in the shape of our market, where funds are held by massive unacountable (but hence extremely free) foundations.

Charities in particular fear legal action, and easily-triggered trustees fear litigation and the costs it will bring - and indeed, are bound to do so by law. So non-profits will remain an easy target, and indeed, a prime target, for those who are looking for a place to attack.

If there was anything that might help, it is simple: a legal fund, from several of the major UK funders to decentre risk, to defend charities who wish to protect trans women’s right to exist. Perhaps even the biggest cannot compete with the resources of JK Rowling (what kind of a world do we live in?). But a sense that somebody with money and power has their back is something that charities need to feel at the moment.

STOP PRESS

YAAAAAAASSSSSSSSS!

Quick bits

Is the Government a Charity?

Surely the most bonkers story in the last few weeks has been the decision that a charity set up in the early 20th century to pay off the national debt - yes really - has to close, and give its money direct to the Government to be used to pay off £600m of the national debt. Of around £3 trillion.

But this is like using your Auntie Brenda’s 50p for sweeties to help towards your deposit on a house. Just buy some sweets, FFS.

Even the Government has said “thanks, but it’s not even worth getting out of bed for”. Oddly, they didn’t say ‘the national debt is just money we’ve made up anyway because national debts don’t actually exist if you have currency sovereignty.’ Which they should….

Meanwhile, what I noticed was how quickly people jumped to say that the judgement had been correct because it very much was what the charity’s objects said. Of that, I have no doubt - my question is in what universe this is a charitable object in 2026, even if people were dumb enough to think it was one 100 years ago. This also struck me as the classic problem again with regulation, governance, and the law in charities: we’re very quick to affirm that if the process has beeen followed, the end result must be correct. Why? Is this not an absolutely obvious case of the process being followed to arrive at an utterly pointless outcome?

It also worries me that we are allowing the blur of boundaries between the statutory and voluntary sectors again. This always makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Of course, others were quick to suggest that the Government should simply put the money directly into the charity sector where £600m would go down very nicely thank you. And voila, a few days later, the Government announced a new ‘covenant fund’ for chaarities. Aha, I thought!… This is it!

Checks headline….

£11.6m….

So, that’ll be some cola bottles and a jelly snake for me, please. Thanks, Auntie Brenda.

Meanwhile, I guarantee this will go straight to local authorities to pay for their existing local grants - if not directly, it will just be used to replace them. (You’ve got that bit of funding so you don’t need our grant…)

More charities - seriously?

Meanwhile, with another increase in the number of charities registering (although not a massive one, it must be said), we confront the ongoing mystery. If such a comparatively large number of people in the public does not trust or like charities, why does everyone want to set one up?

I can only assume that people are doing this because, as we’ve said before, existing charities have set themselves apart from social movements, and turned themselves into factories for volunteering or donation gathering, taking away people’s sense of agency for doing ‘charitable’ work.

But another question is, what is so attractive about charity status? Is it just the access to charitable funding thing? The tax break? Business rates? A lack of awareness of other models?

I’d like to see some proper research on this: can the CC shed light on it, or help arrange some research to understand what the drivers are for so many people?

High streets are a life or death issue for democracy

You’ve seen my long lament for the death of high streets, especially in my local area. This article confirms that the loss of high streets is a matter of national and political life and death. The thing that most confirms a sense of national decline for people is looking at a place that used to be a place they felt they belonged, and could spend time interacting with others, and seeing it decayed and dilapidated - and therefore increasingly empty. That fact that often, in the place of larger businesses, small migrant businesses start up in their place, only adds to the tendency for people to wrongly blame those ‘others’ for the decline.

My take? All this ‘social investment’ nonsense going into charities is often quite damaging. If you want to invest in society and the economy, with low return but high social impact, start higher risk investment with patient capital for independent high street businesses. Sumerian and the rest, Office for Impact Economy, are you listening? (Erm, nope…)

Or, you could just use the money to pay off the national debt.

Or maybe some of those foam bananas I used to love?

Thanks especially this week to Civil Society News whose daily email updates are a lifesaver - their reporting has been really helpful here.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe!

Share!

Support!

Buy me a coffee or even a pint of gin. Either way I need substances to get me through February. Actually biscuits. I need biscuits.

Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

Work with me!

Check out my day job webpage. No politics, just 25 years of knowledge and expertise.

Or don’t. See if I care.

Okay, so I lied, it’s a shitshow. But hey, that’s what you’re here for, and indeed, what we kind of signed up for. Just keep on keeping on. Have fun when you can. The most formidable CEO colleague I ever worked with, Jacky, used to say, “It’ll be alright. And if it’s not alright, it’ll be alright.” That is the best advice I’ve ever had for this game.

So I ended last year with a fairly popular (4000+ readers) review of the year. And now it’s time to draw some of those observations into the future. Not predictions, so much as analysing trends and trajectories. Because honestly, who can possibly hazard a guess about what is going to happen, even in nonprofits, in a world where the US is about to invade Greenland? Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

The thing is, we’re in a very difficult place, which even the Guardian has now discovered. What they have noticed is that, positive as the Civil Society Covenant is, what charities really need is, erm, cash.

It gives a good historical and political perspective as well as a demand for change. But what we perhaps need to further emphasise is that the cultural ‘glue’ of community charity does not appear magically between interventions for diabetes or cancer or parenting workshops. Fund the glue, and then force the state to take back its role in creating interventions to solve problems it creates and maintains, often by refusing to challenge exploitative and antisocial economic forces.

Now is the time to put aside our obsessions with intervention and focus on what voluntarism is really for: bringing together communities and society.

Anyway, nice for us all to be in the Grauniad, innit? It’s like being famous.

DYNAMIC CEOS AND THEIR MASSIVE HARD IMPACT

It’s a new year and the ‘up-for-it’ dynamic hard-ass charity CEOs are setting out their warplans on Linkedin with speeches worthy of Henry V via Chat GPT. They’ve always got a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the latest Stephen Bartlett crayon-masterpiece in their back pocket.

‘Hard decisions’, ‘tough times’ ‘massive impact’, and ‘dynamic power of charity’ are everything, and you’re sometimes hard pressed to work out if it’s Barry’s Bootcamp, Harvard Business School or a Grindr profile.

The promise is always, ‘This will be a difficult year - this is what you can do.’

But strangely it’s exactly what you’ve been doing for twenty five years, repackaged with all the same mix of solemn-yet-bloodless charity jargon and business babble that seems to be the only way we can speak now.

There is always a list of great sins that ‘we’ must avoid, always written from the perspective of some almighty powers who must be appeased. One such speech I saw this year told us that we will see “reduced tolerance for unclear impact.” Who exactly is doing the tolerating here? Who gets to choose the level of tolerance? Is Daddy watching? Do you secretly enjoy that?

Then we will hear the old saw “collaborate more!” - always especially popular for larger charities who are really saying “don’t compete with us, or we will crush you.” Or perhaps like the Borg: “You will be assimilated….” One very special post even then wheeled out “work smarter not harder.” If that’s the best you can come up with, I doubt smarter is on the agenda. Others tell us that technology will solve our problems. But AI will not unblock that toilet.

Much of this is like being told to levitate through the power of pure thought. What we are doing is packaging endurance and acceptance as change. And it’s the same old prescriptions for the same problems, albeit writ larger and deeper than before.

Isn’t there a future beyond the next funding round?

What I would add is that it may be time for us all to start asking whether, at the start of such a year (that, fortunately, most of us will survive and occasionally thrive through) there might be genuine or deeper change. Perhaps even in another 25 years - which could be a radically different version of the current reality we see. If nothing else, the order of the world is being thrown up in the air.

It’s not going well, have you noticed? But if in the wider economy there is to be what Resolution Foundation calls ‘creative destruction’ (see later), perhaps it’s time to think about what could come after. That goes double for our little corner of the economy and the world.

In so many ways, the current crisis is just business as usual. But wouldn’t you like a sense of a future beyond just that?

This week, I’m going to give you a sense of what I expect to see this year, especially in terms of wider politics and economics, and how that is likely to affect UK nonprofits.

In the following issue, I want to look far beyond the next year and offer some ‘What ifs.’ What ifs are not about predicting the future - they are about imagining possibility. And it’s remarkable how much nobody wants you to think about that.

A reminder:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

— James Baldwin

The economy

This year, we have to remember that we’re not the only ones in a recession. Before people pile in and tell me the definition of a recession, come off it: look outside.

The Resolution Foundation, Torsten Bell’s economic think tank which is sort of what passes for centre-left-ish if you squint, is going for the glass half-full approach. But even if this glass is half full, it’s a reminder you need to ask what’s in the glass before you drink it.

“Experts have warned for several years that Britain has been held back by so-called “zombie firms” – companies which barely make enough money to cover their costs but just about stay in business – preventing the allocation of resources to more productive sectors of the economy. […]

The Resolution Foundation said there were early signs that Britain’s productivity growth was being boosted by “creative destruction”, whereby newer and better firms, products or processes replace older, less-efficient, ones. Adoption of artificial intelligence technologies could also be playing a role, it said.”

But there is a problem here: market capitalism’s survival of the fittest takes no account of the value of a business beyond its financial value.

For example: the Costa coffee (yes, owned by Coca-Cola, but a franchise, remember) in Catford, rammed every day for ten years but apparently unable to make sufficient profit, has just closed. The community cinema went last year, as did all four pubs, all because they were financially ‘underperforming’. But these ‘zombie’ businesses were not crowding out alternative, stronger businesses. Not least, nobody else can afford the rent. And the impact of their loss to the community is vast. Furthermore, the loss of those businesses impacts the wider local economy - the death spiral of the high street continues. What replaces them is usually zombies of even greater putrescence - more money-laundering phone shops or ‘club venues’ that strangely never open.

All of this can be reflected at a larger, national/ macro-economic level as well. The underperforming productive economy will continue to be replaced by an AI bubble and more and more financialised zombie speculation and private equity firms. What is really ‘productive’ here? We should also note that the death of all these ‘zombie’ businesses, as the report makes clear, means unemployment - bad for charities who look after poor communities. We risk dead zones of social fabric, with more and more people falling into greater poverty.

So even the case for a clearout for private enterprise is far from clear-cut.

Zombie charities?

But what of charities then?

The idea that ‘zombie’ businesses going under is ‘creative destruction’ is also often used to argue for the death of many struggling charities, by charity hawks and, essentially, those who are doing well. Are there zombie charities who just need a well-judged headshot to bring the tender mercies of oblivion?

We;ve been here before. People who go under are not necessarily the ones who are not needed. Sometimes they are just unpopular causes. Sometimes they fall foul of the desire to fund only targeted interventions - community centres, for example. And sometimes, they just have a run of bad luck, often following a run of good luck (time for a ‘break’ from all the big funders at once). I’m still reeling from the loss of the only UK charity for LGBT older people - dropped like a stone by its parent charity and cut adrift by all its funders at the first sign of trouble. That was desperately needed.

Let’s be clear. Charity business strategy is a big part of my day job. (I’m a Marxist who finds business really interesting.. Like Engels…) If I’m being brutally honest, there are a few charities which are absolutely zombies whose time has long past. I can think of organisations who have spent literally 10 years of not just dwindling resources and finances, but also, dwindling effectiveness, and indeed, usefulness. The financial and the ‘impact’ are intertwined, but there is often a particular kind of death spiral in which complaints about lack of income conceal the fact that other things are very wrong. Youth charities, for all the desperate need, are often problematic here. Years of dwindling attendance and a failure to change has combined with the lack of income in a self-reinforcing spiral for many. That ends in disaster.

So, much as I want to offer encouragement, I always encourage perople to ask themselves: as you approach the new financial year, is it really worth it? We can never take out personal needs entirely, and it’s scary to lose a job, but a graceful exit is much better than a crash and burn with staff (including you) heading off to government compensation schemes for their redundancy pay. But people can be incredily resistant to hearing this.

At the same time, we can celebrate the resilience of what former Lloyds Foundation CEO Paul Streets calls not zombies, but ‘cockroaches’. Small charities, he famously said, are like cockroaches - you can’t believe they’re still there, every year, surviving beyond all expectations.

So, if things are a nightmare this year again, you probably need to work out whether you’re a zombie or a cockroach.

I expect more charities to close but I suspect more and more will start shrinking services instead. And they should. Meanwhile, those doing well will do well - that is the ongoing pattern. The larger and most government-focused charities will either hoover up, or go under. Much of that will depend on their location and the particular poilitial stripe of their local authority or relationship with the NHS.

Meanwhile, with some of the big grantmakers reopening, there may be hope for some - but many have pivoted. Is the funding matched to the needs? Are you the new chosen ones…? And can you get through the front door when the queue is this long?

Other 2026 predictions: key trends

Politics and power

Expect significant turmoil with May elections testing Labour’s position as anti-migrant rhetoric follows Reform rightward. Starmer is unlikely to survive those elections unless there is a surprisingly good result for Labour. In this crazy world, the latter is still not unthinkable. But more likely, there will be a huge crash and we will see someone else in charge until the next election. Who? There are no good options. Meanwhile, if more Reform councils appear, bad things will happen for a wide range of services for people who rely on charities. The old pattern of increasing need, dwindling public services, and charities without resources will play out even stronger than before. You can also expect anti-DEI and anti-migrant sentiment to infect commissioning as it has in the US.

At the same time, politically, it’s far from certain that Reform’s resurgence will continue - for one thing, their clear fecklessness is becoming more and more apparent, and if they do win more councils, that will be difficult to ignore for all but those who literally vote for them because they’re nutcases. The Greens may do well, or it may be still disappointing. The Lib Dems will stay the party of ex-Headteachers and librarians. Some claim the Tories are in a final closure stage. I’m not so sure: we thought that in ‘97, and people forget very quickly. So the question, then, is where will people turn? One danger may be that they turn away from party politics - and to different kinds of political action. Everybody I know expects more civil unrest this year.

Meanwhile, in the charity world, the Civil Society Covenant is likely to face its first real tests of tolerance for challenge of the Government, as migrant rhetoric, and indeed, likely cuts to welfare, directly impact charitable missions. How brave charities feel will be a big decider. With a new Charity Commission regime, there is testing to be done.

On this note, I think we should be braver. But I also realise how dangerous openness is for charity leaders: what I have recently found is that CEOs who speak out politically (on a clearly personal basis, even) are not so much at risk from funders, as at risk from their own trustees. This tells us a lot about how trustees work to contain discourse in the sector.

Culture wars

On that front, I’m expecting the culture wars to intensify in the charity sector, particularly around trans inclusion and who counts as “deserving” of support. Make sure you join Kevin’s Third Sector Against Transphobia group. And look, you don’t have to be a radical trans activist (whatever that is) to think it’s just mean and shitty to boot out some poor kid from their Brownies group because somebody has decided they’re too ‘manly’. Just don’t be horrible.

A previously quieter far-right wing in the charity sector is already becoming more visible - that includes people raising extremist anti-migrant views openly. The danger, conversely, is that a true anti-authoritarian left wing, beyond pronouncements about deserving ‘vulnerable’ people and DEI industry talk, has been very effectively silenced over the last 15 years.

The rise of Christian Nationalism (really ethno-nationalism) should be of concern to Christian charities (and indeed, the rest of us). It will be all too easy to find boards being infiltrated as they have been so effectively in the US.

I highly recommend this video by the brilliant and adorable Tom Nicholas.

Community and society

Libraries, cinemas, pubs, shops, all manner of social spaces closing, is probably driving more people into the arms of the far right as they become more afraid and distrustful of others. What the far-right in the US has realised long ago is that they can offer the sense of comfort and camaraderie that people are losing in their communities in an age of ‘bowling alone’. The latest discovery by the Guardian and indeed some funders is that community centres and other types of third spaces (including in the private sector) are vital. But I fear we can expect more talk about shared community spaces without actual funding - the eternal expectation that if you fund interventions, community glue will miraculously transsubstantiate around it. Promises of Government investment will be backed only by money already earmarked long ago.

The further rise of strategic grantmaking is only exacerbating the decline of whole-community support and development. Whether some of the larger funders can pivot meaningfully to support this will be the make or break. But it can probably only happen if multiple funders collaborate strategically, and if funding is not only short term or project focused, or indeed, capital only. We do not need another white elephant communiy asset in the bottom of a tower block that nobody can afford to do anything in. And no, children’s parties or a barely-open cafe will not pay for it.

As I write, trying to find somewhere to have a coffee in Catford instead of the now closed Costa, I decided to go to the cold, inhospitable new community/ social enterprise ‘not just a pub’ which the council has given to a shake-and-bake community ‘regeneration’ CIC. They were the first to post on Facebook that those who lamented the loss of Costa could come and support a real community venue. That’s something, I thought, and turned up. D’oh! They’re closed in the daytime all week…. Of course, they got capital funding, and then zero revenue funding for a from-scratch new venue with uncertain purpose. Sigh.

Let’s be clear: the new social clubs and so on that are opening and developing need to make sure they have a purpose. Community centres without community activities are just empty spaces. Libraries without books are just empty spaces. Socila enterprise coffeee shops with horrible food and coffee that are never open are just empty spaces. There is no way to avoid revenue funding for 99.9% of ventures with any kind of social goal.

Economic trends

And on that note, there has been a clear increase in talk about social finance recently, and the development of the Office for the Impact Economy (seriously, for what, now…?) is part of this. It is certainly no coincidence that such talk comes at a time of massive charity sector collapse, as indeed it it did in the Big Society crunch of 2010-11. Social finance for actual businesses and private enterprises seems to me to be a potential positive - so many of the basic social fabric businesses we need are now incresibly high risk and need patient capital banks refuse, especially in poorer areas. But the push towards further social finance for genuinely charitable projects has the opposite effect, as we saw the last time. This creates capital projects with no revenue funding, or underfunded ventures on ridiculous timescales doomed to fail within two years. The failures are then used to justify further cuts or refused further lending for similar work. ‘People just don’t want it. It can’t work.’ But charities are charities for a reason. They cannot just fund themselves - otherwise, they can just be businesses.

This article is well worth a read. I don’t necessarily agree with it all - I think the grey area might actually be exactly where it is most helpful (for example, funding low-profit but high community regeneration value retail, leisure or hospitality ventures with truly patient capital). But in spirit, it squares very closely with my own experience.

The ‘impact’ data lust in the sector seems to be continuing, with ever more talk about having to ‘demonstrate real impact’. And yet, I do think I am seeing (and I hope, in some way modestly supporting) a growing schism between those believing in perfect data and total surveillance, versus those who favour doing good stuff because it’s the right thing to do. Clearly neither approach alone is helpful. But ask yourself, what still needs to be statistically proven about most charity work? And in that case, what is the point of simply proving it again? And who really wants this data? What change will it actually unlock? What are we doing with this data apart from putting it in a database and wondering why it still doesn’t tell us anything of value?

Technology

I imagine funders will be using AI to sift applications by year’s end. We’re also seeing a burgeoning of ‘innovative’ fundraising databases from fundraisers who fear the collapse of the bid-writing market. They’re right to worry! But how many more databases do we need? One good one would be a start.

More generally, especially around AI, I’m seing more predatory sniffing around from private sector rip-off merchants who see charities as easy marks. Beware people using pretend ‘donations’ to lock organisations into subscriptions for later enshittification. The last charity tech boom was 2010-11; economic drivers suggest another is coming. It achieved very little and saddled a lot of charities with systems that never worked and wasted millions of pounds.

In an age of enshittification and data piracy, you should also watch for systems hoovering up all VCS data across the UK. When these businesses have your data which they are helpfully organising for you, what are they doing with it? Many fundraising databases seem to be now using the research you input as a fundraiser to crowdsource their own databases and trade their own services. What is remarkable is that this is exactly how a collaborative, crowdsourced service like Jo Jeffery’s The List works. But in a classic turn around of capitalist extraction and techno-feudalism, some companies have learned from this and used them same model to extract value and generate profit for themselves.

Charities need computer-literate ethics and healthy cynicism. Being luddites is stupid. Being credulous and inviting in predators is equally so. Charities need to develop their own skills and knowledge - enough at least to know when they are getting a good or bad deal.

As for the wider world of technology: is that AI bubble really going to burst? I’m not sure now. One of the things that is becoming more and more clear is that so many people have a vested interest in not blinking first. Why would anyone be the one to start selling off in a fire sale? Why would anyone pull the plug on credit to these massive ventures when they know that in itself would damage their own assets? Perhaps what we are seeing is the final absolute triumph of fake money and fake assets. Maybe our whole economy at this stage is basically a load of Bored Ape NFTs - and people have just agreed not to let this one die. In the case of NFTs, those were after all ‘memestock’ - and sold mostly to credulous/ defrauded individuals, not banks or major investors.

As for replacing people with AI: I know a friend working in qualitative research for a major bank has just seen her team of 75 people made redundant and replaced by AI. We’ll see how it goes. What I might say is that the kind of qualitative research done in commercial settings is really the kind of stuff that lends itelf to automation.

Certainly, middle management losses and cuts in marketing, research, and coding will happen. And yet, my sense is that people will quite soon discover that there are things humans can do that AI can’t. But first, they will indeed have to learn that. It may be a few years for the full learning to take place, and in the meantime, a lot of people with good jobs and good degrees are going to find themselves picking fruit.

So much more to say here, but I have to start proper work. Expect more predictions and analysis of trends as time goes on….

General news

Sackler Trust

Two charities that received £1.1m from Sackler Trust kept anonymous to prevent ‘serious prejudice’ | Charities | The Guardian

This is so interesting: where once charities would be asked to keep their donors secret, now donors are being asked to keep their recpients secret. Hilarious. Of course, it doesn’t really make any difference to the laundering of reputations since even the headline guarantees a virtuous sparkle.

What is worrying, however, is that this comes alongside a wider rise in anonymous donations. In the US, foundations, and increasingly the UK, donor-advised funds, give hundreds of millions to extreme-right think tanks and cultural associations, often without any information on where that money was directed. Dark money has its own dangers.

And what of taking money from Sackler? Would I take their money…? Would you…?

I’m honestly not sure I know…. I think I would advise small charities to just cash the cheque and pray for the death of capitalism.

Have a read of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara’. Don’t know if the film has the same message.

Meanwhile, more bad news for Stonewall, whose reserves, at £100,000, are now lower than those of any of even the smallest charities I currently work with (eg. one with a £200k turnover...) I have a bad feeling here….

“Stonewall’s income and expenditure both declined by more than £2m year-on-year to £4.74m and £5.65m, respectively, in 2024-25. Corporate donations to the charity more than halved in 2024-25 to £143,000 while programmes income declined by 48% to £254,000. The charity’s events income fell by 42% to £331,000 while fees from organisations subscribing to its various programmes declined by a quarter to £1.82m. A Stonewall spokesperson said it underwent a “significant period of transformation and change” in 2024-25.”

See more at: https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/stonewall-reports-44-redundancies-and-drop-in-reserves.html#sthash.HCweLuzQ.dpuf

Internet nonsense

If small d*ck energy was a job advertisement

Amazing CEO job…

I actually worked with people like this in my first CEO job….

They even left the Chat GPT options in at the end.

Godspeed, guys.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon

Love this=>

Zack Polanski

And finally…

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe!

Barely Civil Society is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Share!

Thanks for reading Barely Civil Society! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Support!

Buy me a coffee and keep me anxious and crabby. Although now Costa has gone, I’ll be having to go back to a lunchtime can of Merrydown from Londis.

Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

Work with me!

Check out my day job webpage. No politics, just 25 years of knowledge and expertise.

Or don’t. See if I care.

It’s nearly Christmas, most of us are sick as dogs, half of us have lost our jobs.

Even I’m not reading so much social theory and hardcore politics at the moment. So let’s just say it’s end of term and we’re bringing toys - and booze. I think Foucault would approve anyway. A largely frivolous end to a rather serious year.

As an update: I decided not to announce the last edition about Trans issues on LinkedIn because of the nasty bunch on there. You’ll be horrified to hear, however, that I suffered the biggest ever loss of subscribers - 4! Yes four. So I didn’t lose too much sleep and good riddance. Back to the bogs with them.

We start with a somewhat acid review of a challenging year. And then move on to a Christmas treat in the form of an absolutely totally real charity sector party which totally happened and is pretty much the nichest bit of puerile comedy ever written. But hey, why not.

If you just want the funny bit, I don’t blame you - scroll towards the second half.

Well, That Was a Shitshow 2025: a review of the year

Much like in many company parties, you now have to listen to some Berk tell you about the past year before you can shake loose and start eating the free food. So I’ll try to keep this short, and light on SORP.

Winter

So in January, the oligarchs took over the US and a mentally-addled satsuma and Commander Data from Star Trek (if he was much less convincingly human and a Nazi) took over. They quickly froze the USAID budget, which hit a lot of nonprofits (and just as many public sector handout-hoovers from the private sector, admittedly). This hit UK charities as well, not just those in the international development space, but even domestic, including Stonewall, which was forced to make significant redundancies.

That helped pile the pressure on a UK charity industry already reeling from many of the big funders deciding to ‘pause’ for a little rest the previous year (and continuing into 2025).

Meanwhile we all started railing against growing fascism in the US, despite having kept fairly quiet when Suella Braverman was actively trying to get mobs to set fire to community and law centres in case there were migrants in them. That was different, we said, because, you know, it might have affected our funding.

Subscribe now

It’s been a big year for the Charity Commission. The Torygraph published an article about senior charity pay, making it seem as if every charity CEO in the UK was earning a king’s ransom. The Charity Commission then responded by not really denying it, and saying that some of the big wigs (nb. mostly men) deserved stellar pay, but they expected most people in charities to be ‘selfless’. Charity leaders ‘criticised commission chief’s tone-deaf comments on senior pay’, by which we mean, did a primal scream in their office and had to be talked down off the roof by the caretaker. But it did emphasise the yawning gulf between the vast majority of the voluntary sector, and a different breed of massive, essentially, corporations and cultural behemoths.

The Commission began the year still Chaired by a politicised Conservative called Orlando who seemed preoccupied with crushing ‘woke’ and believed charities should stay quiet on politics. Unless, that is, they were an extremely right-wing neoliberal think-tank (charity) called the Institute of Economic Affairs; for which, coincidentally, he and several other former CC trustees appointed by the Tory Government used to work. He had spent several years decrying the ‘culture wars’ in charities, especially when the wrong side was winning. This was always much like Russia claiming it is trying to end war in Ukraine - by winning it. Fortunately. Orlando lived up to his Shakespearean nomenclature and exited stage left. Even on his way out, he stressed that “If a charity decides it’s not so much a charity but an engine for social progress, we can step in,” he said in a valedictory interview in, of course the Times.

The following interim Chair seemed much less ideological, and the new one, Julia Unwin, who arrived in November, is from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. This may be the end of the Tories’ 14 year attack on charities, which they saw as dangerous obstacles to ideological total domination. Fingers crossed.

In November the Festival of Trusteeship had a speech from David Holdsworth which was widely respected. (Meanwhile I hinted it was time to get rid of trustees in the ‘Radical ideas for trusteeship’ session I compèred with Penny Wilson and Eastside People a few hours later. Don’t think he was there. 😎 )

Back to the timeline. By February, Wes ‘I will fight you’ Streeting was saying he wanted to “break the culture of the voluntary sector”, which was nice of him. I still think he looks like his eyes stick on in the morning.

Meanwhile ACEVO and NCVO (the Acronyms™) came together to create a new ‘Civil Society Covenant’ which agreed that the Government would not ask for community centres to be burned to the ground, and that charities were allowed to question Government policy. For now. It took a while, but it finally got signed off. The sheer effort of getting that signed was by all accounts monumental - it’s not like the Government didn’t have other priorities. Meanwhile, while many are sceptical about its likely longevity or effectiveness, there’s no question about the amount of work it took to achieve it.

In youth work, when Axel Rudakubana was convicted of the horrific murders of three schoolgirls in Southport, everybody started asking why ‘Prevent’ hadn’t prevented it by bundling him into a high security prison as an extremist. Reasonable to ask, but also, nobody asked whether the decimation of CAMHS and youth services or chucking everything into ‘knife crime’ might have been unwise. The Government has spent a year on its new strategy for youth and, well, when it finally appeared in December, it is basically what you would expect - and what was there before Tory destruction. But with much less resource, and of course in much worse times economically. In a sense, people are more relieved than anything that there is a strategy at all: because it’s proof of life. Our expectations are that low.

Incidentally in BCS that month, I used again a term I’d first used years ago, and first wrote about in 2019 to describe these failures: ‘interventionitis’. Interventionitis is where we throw tiny interventions at individual symptoms and social ills, usually drawn from newspaper headlines, without ever thinking about the whole problem or considering prevention, maintenance or a holistic view.

Weirdly this has now appeared in an academic paper recently where some academics ‘coined’ it. Oi! Ah well, great minds think alike!

In March, ‘leading UK philanthropists’, including the homophobic activist and businessman Brian Souter (who ran a campaign in the 2000s to keep Clause 28), and that bloke off Dragon’s Den who runs some hotel gyms, wrote a barnstorming introduction (intro-suction?) to ‘Supercharging Philanthropy’ by the Centre for Social Injustice, set up by Iain Duncan Smith, (whose Big Society-era welfare cuts led to thousands of deaths). They claimed that they “stand ready to respond” to the challenges faced by the UK and to “propel the nation forward”. Indeed, they told us that “Philanthropy can do far more than the sum of its parts, taking risks and driving innovation in a way that taxpayers’ money cannot.” [My emphasis.]

Not subtle is it? Meanwhile, public sentiment against oligarchs, broligarchs and billionaires was rising, and people started burning Teslas, with people like Patriotic Millionaires suggesting that throwing a few coins might be less helpful than paying the tax you owe. The discomfort of philanthropy in a world of billionaires and oligarchs was a key theme for me at least in the year, but very much swept aside for the mainstream of the sector, as indeed there seemed to be more enthusiasm than ever for asking rich people to tell us all what to do.

Spring

By mid-March, as I went to my Mum’s wedding, the ‘Labour’ government’s new budget decided that disabled people seemed like a pretty decent target for welfare cuts, presumably because they thought they were less likely to be able to run with a pitchfork. Swingeing cuts were proposed, eventually reversed, but not before one of The Acronyms™ had posted on Linkedin that they wanted the Government to involve the voluntary sector to make sure cuts were made humanely. That post disappeared fairly sharpish.

April was a weird one, Trump’s insanity with tariffs had started to hit trusts and foundations’ investments and there were worries - later proving unfounded - that their income was take a huge hit. Just wait ‘til the AI bubble bursts and see how that feels. Meta gave a grant (or did it?) to the charity suporting kids bullied on social media, set up in memory of Molly Russell. Then a London trust turned out to be fighting a legal case against freehold reform because it would give it less money to spend on grants to the poor. Better to uphold feudalism than reduce your grants for kids’ football, right? Then the National Lottery Community Fund launched their new priorities. Big Local finally closed, having spent a quarter of a billion pounds on Big Society boondoggles. With all this said, the NLCF’s importance, not just for our industry, but for the kind of things we need to achieve in our society, only gets stronger.

Later in the year, Henry Smith became a Foundation, and launched a new strategy, moving towards strategic grantmaking in common with many others in the sector, and the first ever grantmaker I’m aware of that explicitly included LGBT youth. I have concerns about losing responsive grantmakers, but nobody could deny their new focuses are good areas to focus if that’s your approach.

Sadly, the charity sector recession continued, and Jo Jeffery published her ‘A Very Quiet Crisis’ blogpost looking at the wide range of charity closures. Some have continued to deny this process, but even some funders, such as Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, have noted that they have seen substantially more closures than ever before. Infrastructure charities were among them, and are struggling, but even some larger charities have disappeared unexpectedly. By June it was being reported that nearly half of small charities were facing closure. People then started claiming there were just too many charities. The question remains, too many for whom? Or what?

As for trusts and foundations, they had come in for significant criticism in 2024 (guilty), and even more worryingly for them, in the US there is a new drive to make foundations pay tax on their interest (they also have minimum giving rules in the US). These things make UK foundations anxious about their ‘autonomy’, so a funder-focused acronym mounted a fight back, along with 360 Giving, and set up a new ‘UK Grantmakers’ platform. Their first report claimed that for the first year ever there was more money in grants from philanthropy than the Government. Only partially a cause for celebration, because the cuts in Government were no doubt partly the result of private donors avoiding (or being allowed to avoid) taxation.

The danger was how this may contribute to the narratives of generous philanthropy which are being used for political purposes (cf. Supercharging Philanthropy). This was not growing philanthropy so much as a shrinking state. The two are far more connected than either would like to have you believe.

For some, it wasn’t really clear who they were trying to persuade - for many charities, such brazen self-promotion at a time when there was a huge crisis, and many of the funders had been closed, seemed rather tone deaf. And nobody had claimed they were giving out less money - a straw man they invented and repeatedly returned to, perhaps to obfuscate the disruption they caused, the effects of which the sector (and they themselves) are still feeling.

Then Captain Tom’s daughter, the rich woman with the same perm everyone in Preston had in 1980, got done for building a swimming pool with the money from her Dad’s fundraising. Everybody in charities shook their head and said, ‘No. You think? I never expected it.’

Summer

Honestly, I’ve no idea. I wrote some big essays about socialism and queer civil society. I might have been drunk. There was a lot of Foucault and Marx and Wilde and Kropotkin. And gin.

Autumn

The rise of the the far right continued across the globe, and activists here were emboldened and whipped up by the field day for morons in the US. By the time we were having marches of the Far-right in central London, moving in from the burning trash fires outside hotels housing asylum seekers, charities were of course finally, rightly, speaking out. Nobody in mainstream discourse however had noticed that slashing and burning all kinds of community assets and support across the UK might have contributed to this along the way.

By December, the Guardian had set up a telethon fund for local community charities, and Labour had decided youth work might be a good idea - with funding from, well, somewhere. The Rayne Foundation had set up a fund for community centres - very positive indeed although £2m and vast numbers of applications of course. We can only hope the NLCF continues to make multipurpose community organisations a central part of its work, even if it means creating more committees than communities.

It was a bit galling people realised this was a thing after years of trashing community centres as surplus to requirements, and with trusts and foundations and public sector alike refusing to support anything but care-based interventions. What was considered ‘nice to have’ suddenly seems urgently necessary when there are Nazis marching on Whitehall. Perhaps that glue was needed after all?

In October, CAF revealed that only 25% of UK companies give anything at all to charities. This was surely a surprise to no-one except all the people who have been singing the praises of corporates who gave them a packet of mince pies and good vibes for running their staff christmas party on the cheap (see below).

In policy, two of the remaining major think-tanks in 2025 underwent big changes: one merged with a philanthropy brokerage, and in another case, made massive cuts, and was badgering Government to create another What Works centre, about six months after those had all been closed down. Again, the goal was to prove the worth of charities. The data mountain grows and still nobody knows what to do with it, like the cans of just-in-case chickpeas I amass at Tesco every week and never seem to use. The worry is that all of the policy and think work in the sector is essentially shaped by philanthrocapitalism. Part of the goal of the less satirical parts of this blog is to change this.

On which note, me and Felicia Willow and Dorothea Jones set the cat among the pigeons by finally talking about class in the voluntary sector on a well-received podcast. It was a good programme, I loved talking to them both, but I did have a bit of an ‘am I completely insane’ moment of when I saw how in the later commentary everyone ignored all the Marxist and political change stuff I talked about. (Which Felicia also noted.) Instead, while further discussion on class is vital, it’s a shame we’re broadly focusing on a version of identity politics, DEI and not being judgey about people’s accents. That isn’t going to change much, I’m afraid.

More charities were closing by October, with Scotland worst hit in a ‘slow-motion apocalypse’, while Oxfam and other majors made mass cuts to their staff - cuts which had far-reaching consequences.

Jo Jeffery’s list website went live, which meant you could finally see all the opportunities for funding that weren’t there…

Freelanceageddon really got going. Over the course of the year, mass redundancies led to what apeared to be a massive growth in charity people taking ‘the exciting and brave step that they’d always wanted to take’ of ‘launching out on their own journey as a dynamic independent charity consultant’.

‘So brave!’ ‘Congratulations!’ the Linkedin followers say. But what we all knew was a lot of people were being forced into a gig economy, as the middle was hollowed out of the sector. This mirrors wider patterns across society and the economy in a ‘k-shaped’ recovery…

Third Sector reported on this workforce development in their podcast with an excellent interviewee called Alex Evans - oh wait, me!! And we talked about Blume’s survey which showed both how much people enjoyed the work (which probably has a lot of survivor bias), but also having a stark picture of their previous work conditions in employment. Meanwhile, others were upset at being treated like money-grabbing monsters as a freelancer (what money?) - especially when they had not chosen it at all….

Winter

Throughout the year, UK foundations were themselves under massive pressure, with between triple and in one case almost 200-fold increases in applications. Many were hit much worse by the result of their own previous closures, but others were put under pressure by the reducing pool of alternatives, with knock-on effects of reduced individual giving and public sector contracts. This created a perfect storm when it hit technology: over the year, AI and chatbots had continued their ascendancy in the charity sphere, especially as relates to fundraising. Few could deny by the end of the year that AI had played a role in collapsing the fundraising applications system. Bid-writers probably have good reason to be worried in the future, not because they don’t write better than an AI, but because people don’t really care if they do. The same race to the bottom is hitting journalism and all other writing professions of course.

This does raise the question of whether most of the crap we write in businesses and bureaucracy needs to happen - and many of us have said for years that bid-writing may be one of those things. This is unfortunate, as bid-writers are a creative bunch. Their skills will still be needed - but their paymasters will need to be educated aboiut what the real skill is. A sector obsessed with price and not value will be tricky to navigate.

By December, nasty meanie Tory leader Kemi Bad Enoch had decided that it was unChristian to pay taxes and that charitable giving on a voluntary basis was better - based on her own D grade GSCE version of history. Of course the main reason these kind of people like voluntarism is because they would never, ever volunteer anything. Hopefully she’ll be gone, likely with Starmer, by the next Christmas Shitshow edition. The replacements may be ten times worse, however.

As a special early Christmas present, the EHRC’s prejudiced and ideological overstep of the For Women Scotland judgement about women’s human rights (which led to the exclusion of trans women from basics like toilets in some cases), came to visit us like the curtain-twitching ghost of Christmas past. Girlguiding UK, and quickly, the Women’s Institute, both previously trans-inclusive, decided to exclude trans girls and women from their services. This was followed by much delighted ululation and gleeful stabbing of voodoo dolls by people who have nothing better to do with their time - the same people who would have been writing poison pen letters blackmailing the local queers in the 1950s. The two charities both claimed it was legal threats that had forced them to do this - but some doubt this.

Suffice to say, the Third Sector Against Transphobia group on Linkedin (and soon beyond) set up by Kevin Taylor McKnight, and which I’m happy to be part of with Penny Wilson, Felicia Willow and Debra Allcock-Tyler among many others, had double the number of members within a week than the one set up by the Mean Girls who want to look down people’s pants and bully them. Penny Wilson wrote an excellent letter to the Charity Commission asking them to make a series of changes - and the CC at least clarified that it did not see holding charities to the equalities laws as part of its remit. That has upsides and downsides.

Overall, what this tells you is that yes, the charity sector is full of decent people. But we have to be brave. If you want to help, join the Third Sector Against Transphobia group and give to the Good Law Project. We need to get these monomaniacs of mean-ness and small-mindness out of the charity sector (and beyond) for good.

Bringing things full circle, by the end of the year, reports apeared suggesting that thousands of people had died as a result of Trump and Musk’s cuts to the USAID budget. As I go to press (which sounds very professional…) Oxfam’s CEO has been forced to resign, partly (it’s is said) because she lost the confidence of her staff during the aforementioned redundancies. According to the Guardian, ‘a restructuring of the organisation she led had created “widespread animosity”. They claimed it created an “intense climate of fear” that had become “deeply rooted in Oxfam, including a very real fear of retribution from senior management”.’ Some claim she is the victim of racism and sexism, some that this was a bullying culture and a badly-run change programme. None of which is good news, however you cut it: big changes often lead to a febrile atmosphere in a sector which is in significant recession.

We need to end on a high. Well, a high based from the viewpoint of a mouse’s nethers. I’ve been enjoying seeing small acts of resistance in civil society. So for me, perhaps the most uplifting story of the year is the success of the Everyone Hates Elon campaign, which raised £100,000 for causes hated by Elon Musk: asylum and migrants, anti-racism, trans people and so on. They did this by getting people to pledge money every time Musk wrote a hateful tweet. A roaring success of course….

It was a year of the rise of oligarchs, a return to the worship of philanthropists alongside a shrinking state, and rising intolerance, enabled by transatlantic far-right nutcases, as well as a year of massive economic uncertainty and rising inequality, with a hollowing out of the middle class. Alongside that, a failing, flailing left has allowed much of this to go unchallenged - and people desperately need a new vision of a fairer, kinder and more just society.

All of this impacted - and perhaps was impacted, in its own small way - by the UK nonprofit sector. There is a rethinking and restructuring underway driven by all of these forces, but it is mostly unthinking, and as ever, drivne by ideas and ideologies form outside our own culture. It’s up to us to fight to make sure whatever new shape we see in our work, not just as an industry, but as custodians of social and cultural practices of love, care and community, finds us on the right side of history. There is no room for complacency, and everything to play for.

And now the party…

And so, well done everyone for listening to that. The bar is now open and there is some free food, but I would give it a sniff first. As the youth workers among you will know, make sure you get to the buffet before the kids do. Otherwise you’ll be munching your way through piss-contaminated vol-au-vents and dodging licked sausages half-submerged in the hummus.

Anything in packets is safe.

WELCOME TO THE ANNUAL UK CHARITY SECTOR CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!

Hello, hello, hello! Come in. Before I take you through, just to say I’m contractually obliged to tell you this is sponsored by a leading database company, and some techbros are going to be using your personal data and selling it to Peter Thiel for unknown purposes. But they do have a LOVELY website. And 150 quid is 150 quid.

Anyway, would you like the tour first? Well, as you can see, this is a delightful community centre with attractive period features like bars on the windows and toilets from the Victorian era. We’ve gone for a particular look: think ruin chic.

So come this way.

Just leave your coat there - don’t leave anything in the pockets though.

And then come through to the main hall. Shall we find you somewhere to sit?

So, as is traditional, we’ve separated people out so they can talk to their own social class, I mean, subsector. Yes, funders, policy, delivery people (don’t make eye contact with them) and some trustees. There’s an MP too. Yes, he’s pissed again.

So, over here we have the funder table. Yes, they needed quiet space so they could talk about how hard their role is. Don’t let them think you’re going to ask for money though, they get frightened. Approach them calmly from the front and don’t smile, it makes them nervous.

So if you fancy a game, some of the biggest funders at that end are playing that game where you stick a post-it on your forehead and have to guess what you are. It is a bit strange, yes, all the post-its say ‘CLOSED’ and they don’t seem to have noticed that all their friends have the same thing on them. There’s a fundraiser trying to reason with them. I think she got in through the window.

That’s the ACF. They’ve been changing the text on the post-its to say ‘PAUSED FOR REFLECTION.’

Yes, you’re right, they do seem a bit ensconced in their own thing. Well, at the other end, if you fancy a bit of glamour, there’s a guy from a local corporate. Arrived in a Jag. He’s always up for a free christmas party run for him by charities. He does keep shouting about how much money he’s given, but so far it seems to be a fiver.

Oh but there have been lots of offers of pro-bono advice. Most of which has been, ‘Get a better job’.

He’s a bit of a character, he started urinating in the corners to ‘make sure people know he’s been here,’ and I think he’s been sexually harrassing the Christmas tree. Then he was hanging around the coats. Eventually he’ll make a really big donation, I’m sure of it. He’s already announced it in the press, although no cheque yet.

He says he’s ‘supercharging philanthropy’ although he seems to be mostly supercharging it up his nose in the bathroom. He’s waving that fiver again isn’t he. Yes, he’s very proud of it.

Now over here… Ah you’ve noticed. Yes, I would avoid this table if I were you.

They’re the delivery people. You know they do that stuff, like, in rooms with kids and old people and… well I’m not really sure to be honest. What is it, workshops? Bingo? But they’re so dedicated, you know. Yeah, so we didn’t give them any food, you’ll need to take some from another table, although not from the funders, or you’ll be filling in forms til tomorrow morning.

Yes, they do seem to mostly be crying and drunk.

Share

Not that table then? No, well, I quite understand. Well you’ve got one more option. That one there is the top table. It’s where the policy people are, you know, the “clever” ones. I think we could sit you there, yes, no problem.

So at that end you’ve got the think tanks. Yes, in the crèche, they’re the ones with the crayons. Tell them you like their drawings, I mean, diagrams, they like that. They keep showing them to the funders, they’re the only ones who like them really. They’re not allowed out very often because they just keep going around shouting IMPACT in people’s faces and then asking for money.

Oh and that guy’s from Bayes. I know, he just keeps shouting EFFICIENCY at everyone and rattling an abacus.

Yes, there’s the Acronyms. I’m not sure, they’ve just been going around nodding and agreeing with everybody.

So, which one tickles your fancy? You have to pick one, they all hate each other and once you’ve chosen you’re stuck there.

Oh… the table in the hallway? Oh that’s the trustees. I know what you mean, they do look a bit confused. And they’re quite, um, mature… We’ve written on their hands ‘CHARITY’ so they can remember why they’re here, but it is tricky. They’re mostly sleeping I think. Careful not to wake them up though, that’s even worse...

So, where do you fancy? Which table?

The bathrooms? Oh, yes of course, I should have shown you - just out there. Yes, next to the women with the Harry Potter books. If they ask to see your genitals, you’re better just letting them; you don’t want to get sued.

You’re going to just wait? Well, if you can. The Girlguiding lot have just gone in the bushes outside. Easier, I suppose. But if the neighbours see them, we’ll lose our late licence.

Oh, running off so soon? Another appointment, gotcha.

Got your coat?

You’ve lost a fiver? Ah. Well, I did warn you to empty your pockets… At least he’s going to donate it. Eventually.

Well, toodleloo. Lovely to see you.

Yes, next year. We’ll probably be here next year, or, well, you know...

Have a lovely breakdown. I mean break.

Merry Christmas from Barely Civil Society

This has been an especially frivolous edition. But there are big plans for the new year, which I look forward to sharing. I dream of a world covered in bunting.

For charities and society there has to be a better way - and there has to be a place to say that. That’s why I’m planning, with some good people, to expand this work and really change how people think about nonprofits, philanthropy and a society where care for people and community is the norm, not just an industry. Are you in?

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help

1. Subscribe!

Barely Civil Society is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

2. Share!

Linkedin recently removed 1,500 followers from my account (apparently it’s happening to a lot of people). Please share to give me a chance of anyone seeing this.

Share

3. Buy me a mince pie!

Iceland have won best mince pie again. Can you sub me a pack? That way you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. And keep me overweight.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest edition of Barely Civil Society, where UK charity people come to drink and forget.

This week: I’ve been struck by how many absolutely terrible meanies there are out there. It is painful to watch. And several of those meanies have washed up on the charity news shores this week, so prepare to hold your nose.

I fully expect to lose some readers, but you have to stand for something. I’ve (we’ve) seen all this before…

The Meanie Mummies Strike Again

It was with some horror that I saw the headlines relating to Girlguiding UK deciding it must exclude trans girls from its services.1 Then, not long after, the Women’s Institute did the same.2 Both have been powerfully inclusive to now. What this tells us is that the vicious anti-trans movement has moved on to attacking charities as one of its key battlegrounds.

Apparently they won’t exclude existing members - that is something. And I see how they have been pushed into this by incredibly powerful and well-funded legal bullies. As the Good Law Project explained,

“They say this is because of the ruling of the Supreme Court earlier this year on the meaning of sex under the Equality Act 2010. Both have said that they do not want to exclude trans people – but feel that they have been forced to by legal threats.

Perhaps they’ve got the law wrong – it doesn’t require trans women and girls to be excluded. Indeed we think that a change in policy to exclude trans members may well be unlawful. It is unclear, for example, how the inclusion of trans girls in Girl Guiding can have been impacted by the decision in For Women Scotland. This is because the decision was about whether the definition of sex under the Equality Act 2010 included trans people with Gender Recognition Certificates – something under 18s have never been able to obtain. But it is more likely they have been bullied into submission by the costs of defending their policies of inclusion – they have decided they have no financial choice but to give in to the bullying.”3

Sometimes I wonder how people can manage the sheer level of spite. And I wonder why this issue of all the things.

Hate and disgust

But there’s a myth being pushed at the moment that all social hatred eventually comes from fear. I’m not sure. If it is fear, it isn’t fear alone: it’s disgust, quite a different emotion. Disgust is, quite literally, a gut feeling, and happens that happens to all animals in response to a pollutant:

“Disgust is typically said to be a bodily sensation experienced as nausea: repelling and expelling that which causes the nausea is its chief goal. People respond with disgust to things that will supposedly taint or poison them.” The Power of Emotions: A History of Germany from 1900 to the Present

Look at the faces of transphobia. Look at the screwed up face and the upturned lip. That is the face of somebody disgusted, not afraid. People are selling this as fear because they know that in our culture these days, fear denotes victimhood. But this is just a strategy.

Disgust is what happens when humans feel there is a threat to their purity. Those instagram videos of cats who retch when someone puts food they don’t like near them - that is what humans are doing when they are disgusted. The goal is to purge and refuse the contaminant. Shit, blood, body fluids, vermin. The strange thing about the human animal is that in our development of social and cultural imaginations, we developed the same response for our sense of social contaminants - those things we perceive to be fundamental really damaging to our shared cultural beliefs. And indeed, that tends to map onto ‘others’ - those who may threaten ur way of life.

Disgust, therefore, is the greatest dehumaniser. Disgust reduces the disgusted themselves to animals (that is, an animalistic response), just as it reduces the objects of disgust to something less than human: Jews, gay people, other races, trans people.

Share

Much of the work on propaganda and disgust comes, tellingly, from studies of the Third Reich. It’s no surprise to discover that Hitler was a germophobe. His disgust at the idea of contaminants mapped from the biological to the social and racial. Then comes the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich: rats, vermin, filth, disease, pollution, are all harnessed to transmit the disgust to others, and on-to ‘others’. (Not new to the Nazis - building on ancient myths - for example the ‘blood libel’, itself designed to evoke disgust in the name of hatred.)

As a sidebar: there is a rolling anti-trans oh-so-innocent claim that they are not hateful at all (they just love ‘real’ women and want to protect children from being allowed to act out their mental illness). The claim isn’t going to wash with queer people who have spent decades hearing evangelical Christians say they’re not persecuting us because they hate us, but because they love us.

Trans toilets

Perhaps the most evident mobilisation of disgust for trans people has been around toilets. There’s a powerful human disgust about toileting, and toilets can be used as sites to differentiate and ‘other’ human beings unlike us. I’m sure many of us remember the jokes about the French hole in the ground toilets. I remember foul mythological stories told about Indian people’s toileting practices when I was a child in a racist northern town.4

But it’s not just the fear of contamination by excrement - the fear we developed as a species to ensure we kept our waste separate from our food in order to avoid infection. Toilets are also a site of one of the most fundamental oppositions we perceive in our society, of man and woman. Perhaps one of our earliest memories of sexual difference is when suddenly we have to go into separate toilets with a parent - male or female. When we are told that mysterious others inhabit the opposite side, just on the other side of a wall. When we are told of the palpable threat that exists there. But we are also told that there is something unspeakable and dirty on ‘the other side’. The toilet wall is the seventh veil.

Meanwhile, the privacy and seclusion of toilets makes them sites of dangerous unknowing. What might people get up to in there? We want to know, it’s an object of fascination, and yet one of profound disgust. Remember, disgust also has a fascination - humans are also strangely drawn to the things that disgust them. Toilet humour, obsessive jokes about sex and sexuality, all betray an innate fascination with what we render abject. The horror is thrilling. And destroying what disgusts also helps to alleviate the sensation.5

Note also that disgust, contrary to our general beliefs, is not ‘natural’. Humans’ natural disgust at, for example, excrement, is taught: children are initially fascinated by it; we just teach them not to be. But we learn early to feel disgust at certain abject objects deeply, physically, so that it feels as natural and absolute as possible. That is its social function.

Toilets have long featured in the dehumanising mythology of gay men: cottagers, toilet traders, the fear of the dangerous others floating around filth.6 In the AIDS crisis, blood, semen, excrement, drug use, prostitution, the dark continent of Africa and its horrors of impurity and pollution were all used to dehumanise sufferers, and to justify their abjection and ejection from society to die. Their impurity was evident by their disease, but their disease was seen to be caused by their impurity.

Sexual difference, contamination, and the terrifying liminality of private and public spaces enmesh around toilets for trans people just as they did for gay men. This meets infantile enculturation around the banal rituals of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality.

And of course, the deep belief that fundamentally, boys smell worse than girls. Disgusting and dirty, they must be separated from girls who are clean and pure. Boys and girls alike are fed this utterly banal and infantile myth in our culture.

Again what goes here is not fear, but disgust. Keeping the two ‘sides’ separate is about purity. And this reinforces the idea of purity and separation between sexes. When that boundary is broken, something disgusting, emetic, nauseating, and disturbing to the core, literally to the stomach, happens. This is how trans people are seen, and toilets are the theatre of this lame psychodrama.

Subscribe now

These infantile responses have been weaponised by right wing forces, as they always are. What is perhaps most horrifying is that they have done so so successfully for grown-ups who should know better.

Threats to children

And speaking of grown-ups, another common trope of organised social hatred is the threat to children. As toilets have taken a no doubt temporary back seat, children and their protection has taken over in the latest flap.

(Although ‘how would you feel if a trans woman followed your little girl into a publc toilet’ is a pretty common ‘what if’ raised by transphobes on social media. The weird thing is their genuine expectation I would say, ‘Ooh, now you mention it, yes, I would be terrified and immediately shoot them, like in a really bad 1980s Brian De Palma movie.)

Protecting the children is one of the oldest strategies in the book. (As indeed is protecting womenfolk: witness the vile history of lynchings to protect the purity of white women in the Deep South.)

“What intrigues and worries us is that, as it brings children into the picture to construct an exclusionary “us”, the far right heightens the ostensible innocence and vulnerability of the nation as well as the apparent ethical righteousness of those who claim to be its protectors. Children, therefore, have become a powerful instrument of the far right.”7

Protecting children has been used by every right wing authoritarian group. We see it happening across Europe and the US now. Children are harnessed to the lurid fantasies of their parents - and often, not even to their own parents, but to other members of the moral ‘majority’ who think they know better. Indeed, children whose parents do not make their children beholden to this ideology are seen as substandard, unparental, and dangerous.

Most of all, what we have always seen is that those who demand the protection of children have precious little interest in children they consider ‘other’. Brown children on small boats are not included. Jewish children in the Third Reich were not included. Queer kids going to prom were not included. Trans kids going to their girl guiding group are not included.

In this case as in many other, the protection is not of children, it’s a protection of wholly constructed and culturally imagined purity. Children are useful as the symbol of that purity, but real children who don’t appear ‘pure’ are of no more value than the adults who inspire such direct disgust. Perhaps some can be ‘saved’. But if not, they are not real children at all; they are unworthy of protection - and worse.

So we infantilise a society demanding protection, and render real children something less than human if we think they threaten the purity of the social body.

Subscribe now

Hatred and civil society

Back to charities. What we know is that social hatred works its way through every aspect of society and develops power through threats and intimidation. The hateful appear in all manner of spaces. In the Third Reich, for example, hospitals and nursing were involved in euthanasia for the disabled and learning disabled. Many teachers happily accepted that Jewish and Roma children were not children. I can remember very well the treatment my gay friends and I received from medical professionals or at the hands of teachers. Caring did not apply to us. Friendship was not available. At best, we should stick to our own. Perhaps we just needed to be cured.

Being ‘caring’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re immune to deciding some people don’t deserve care - or indeed, quite the opposite. Nazi Germany had the charitable ‘Winterhilfswerk’ where food, clothing and other needs were met by National Socialists (sic) in the winter - and of course, denied to those who were not racially pure.

Meanwhile, controlling and terrorising civil socety - and those who are in a caring role - is a classic authoritarian move, especially where it relates to social hatred and out groups. Not only was there Section 28 targeting teachers and youth workers and health workers, but civil society organisations are always a key target for despots. Trump has done this most recently, but Suella Braverman tried her hand at it in the last Government. Now, in the third sector itself, there are plenty of people, organised groups, who desire the exclusion of trans people from charitable services, but more than that to use them as a beach head and a soft target to change hearts and minds and normalise the cruelty of excluding kids who have it pretty tough in their lives.

This is one reason that without putting a profound and absolute liberatory freedom and unconditional love at the heart of charity, we are doomed to simply be the implementers of whatever current - sometimes horrific - fashion mainstream society chooses.

What I find particularly tragic in all of this is that there are many people pushing this kind of rhetoric who do not see themselves as far-right at all, and indeed, beyond this specific issue, probably are not. And I don’t doubt some truly do feel they are protecting kids - or at least, the ‘good’ ones.

With that said, they are being harnessed to those causes - as I explained in my previous article about Arendt and the Tommy Robinson march, that is increasingly how far-right movements are working across the globe. Indeed, many cis lesbians have been at the heart of the stoking of this hatred (EDIT: alongside a huge number of those who are supportive. My point is that people who have experienced prejudice and cruelty directly should know better.] The problem is, people never see themselves as the bad guy. They always see themselves as the victim, or protecting the ‘vulnerable’.

Share

This constant projection of their own hatred and disgust onto a dangerous other, versus a fragile one of ‘us’ can stop us, and them, seeing the selfishness and sometimes sadism at the heart of the hatred.

And in case anyone wants to object to my, even implicitly, comparing patterns of social hatred to what happened in the Third Reich (where, remember, trans people were imprisoned and then sent to their deaths with homosexuals), let’s be clear. I am not suggesting that this is the plan. This not about hyperbole or equivalence, it is about understanding a trajectory, and a structure of thought, underneath which we find a deep, dehumanising cruelty we are capable of.

I’m reminded of the words of my favourite (gay, Jewish) playwright, Tony Kushner:

“If you have a standard of evil like the Holocaust or the Third Reich and you make the decision that it is absolutely forbidden to compare anything to the standard, then everything else is on another spectrum somehow, and the standard is alone, this peak of isolated awfulness, then you’re essentially turning what should be the standard for political evil into […] reassurance. Nothing looks like that. So it’s not that bad.”8

If we don’t see the continuity between extremes of evil and the stirrings of hate, we have no chance of stopping anything, or indeed, becoming better.

At that point, of course, comes the inevitable Martin Niemöller quote.

We must stand up to these people. They are dangerous.

How to help in the third sector

Kevin Taylor-McKnight has set up a Linkedin group for trans-supportive people in the third sector. Please join it - and be supportive of others who post. My advice: don’t feed the trolls in comments on posts. You won’t change any minds, and the bullies just enjoy it. I literally turn them off for anyone but my connections when it relates to this subject.

Meanwhile, please see these excellent posts by Penny Wilson, Kevin Taylor McKnight, Amsel Page-Von Sprecken, and Ellen Jones.

What if the transphobes come for your charity?

If the transphobes come for your charity - and they might - don’t go down without a fight. Speak to the Good Law project or your local law centre, or your solicitor if you have one, straight away. Don’t accept the immediate advice to just fold to avoid financial risk. Boards are there to manage not just legal and financial risk, but also to steer the mission and ethics of the charity. Changing your charitable objects is an option, although very much the long game…. [Update: the Charity Commission has made it clear that it does not see its role as enforcing or policing how organisations interpret the Equalities Act. Well, tbh that sounds kind of obvious, but given that some have been claiming they have to exclude trans kids because of the Charity Commission, I guess it needed saying. And I imagine Orlando would not have made that clarification….]

Be very careful about these people infiltrating your board - those are, again, the tactics adopted, and advised, by Project 2025 and the US hate groups. This is not a matter of ‘agreeing to differ’ in most cases. We’ve seen what happened to the National Trust and similar organisations before the current ones. They also have a tendency to seek out and punish and threaten individuals with doxxing and threats to careers etc. This is partly behind people’s fear of speaking out.

I did have someone ask me on Linkedin in the comments rather haughtily and disapprovingly ‘if this kind of thing was what I advised my consultancy clients?’ As if I was about to say, ‘Oh no! I am completely unbiased! I never have an opinion because all I care about is money!’ Yes obviously it’s what I advise my clients, if relevant or asked. But it’s not advice is it, it’s a matter of moral and ethical judgement. Do I advise you not to be mean to trans kids? Yes, and, also, weird that you asked.

More generally

Most importantly, give JK Rowling a run for her oodles of money. Support the Good Law project. The law is where these battles are being fought most effectively.

Meanwhile some good news

The New York legislature is considering a bill to legalise the presence of Bodega cats.

And meanwhile this reminds me of when we had two moggies. (A brother and sister with so much drama.)

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help

1. Subscribe!

2. Share!

I’ve taken a three week break. Substack’s algorithm will crucify me. Please share to give me a chance of anyone seeing this.

Share

3. Buy me a beer!

Bugger coffee. In this climate, you need buy me a beer. That way you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. And keep me drunk.

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of Barely Civil Society, a window into the troubled consciousness of an increasingly shrill and disappointed queer libertarian democratic socialist working in perhaps the most conservative industry in the UK. First, the monthly essay, and then some more personal nonsense is at the end.

Please like and share this post on Substack to help me break through the social media embargo that a brief refusal to enslave my content generation to an algorithm may produce.

The Essay: The Crisis of Bureaucracy

Introduction: The unnoticed crisis

If you want to clear a room in philanthropy or charity at the moment, say ‘AI’. As using acronyms go, it’s like saying LGBT on LinkedIn, or DEI at a White House party. But say it I must. Because whatever anyone tells you, it is having very substantial impacts on the nonprofit and philanthropy world, especially as it relates to trusts and foundations. I’m talking here more specifically about ‘LLMs’ – Large Language Models (chatbots) like Chat GPT and Gemini. But broader machine learning and ‘intelligent’ decision-making tools will become more important towards the end of the article.

But I guarantee this is much more relevant and much more interesting than you think. Because this isn’t another panic piece or a sale pitch about some charity database NOW WITH ADDED AI. This is about how it’s creating a crisis in some of the main practices we use to manage our microeconomy, and beyond that, our society. Within our industry, trusts and foundations need to understand this, even if the solutions are not simple.

But as ever, the non-profit shoptalk isn’t of primary interest to me here. (I’ll put some practical stuff on LinkedIn.) it’s about what it tells us about the wider world and what is changing for all of us. And how the culture and practices of the nonprofit world relate to our society, politics and culture.

So, yes, the kicking off point is AI in grant applications, where there has been an unprecedented avalanche of applications which has driven many funders to close their doors, repeatedly.

But the problem in the nonprofit world, just as it has been in governments the world over, is that people have been unwilling to look at the massive disruption and how to get ahead of it, rather than to watch it all slowly collapse with no plans for what comes next.

Application overload goes beyond the non-profit world and shows the coming crisis of bureaucracy itself.

The perfect storm: world context

So AI is pretty much definitely about to crash the world economy - with a ludicrous bubble which has been allowed to develop simply because it benefits the short term finances of so many ultra-rich people. Isn’t it always? Meanwhile, several industries and industrial practices have been significantly disrupted, especially where tasks related to writing and the bureaucratic process of application has taken place.

Anybody who has done any recruitment in the last year knows that the game has radically changed. AI-written applications - bad, meaningless, often heartbreaking in their naivety - have swamped the process and condemned many, especially younger, people to the scrap heap. Others are crowded out by the sheer volume. This has helped those who demand ever more complex recruitment processes where a quick letter or resume is replaced by endless tests and rounds of interviews. In fields like IT, people’s ability to use LLMs to write code, or at least to answer questions convincingly and at speed, has helped lead to live assessment, and it is common to have to endure up to ten interviews, take home tests, pair programming, and examinations.

This sits alongside a broader flooding of markets with skilled people in industries, and professions – in fact, a whole ‘middle’ and professional class of workers and a in an economy hollowing out in the centre. More and more, getting a basic job is going to be like trying to join the civil service in Imperial China.

What we’re witnessing across all these domains is something more fundamental than disruption - it’s the relationships between applicants and institutions that are breaking down. LLMs create a breakdown in trust, but through a kind of tipping over of the power relationship inherent in the systems themselves. That means much bureaucracy can no longer work as it once did, as a mechanical, rigid, system of exchange of letters, statements, evidences, memoranda and tick boxes or mouse clicks to make fundamental decisions about resources, people and power through distinct one way hierarchies. The system of exchange of submissions and decisions, or reading and writing, becomes transformed and radically undermined.

LLMs (what we colloquially call ‘AI’) are becoming the crisis point of bureaucracy itself. They form a breakdown in trust - but do this through a kind of even-ing of the power relationship inherent in the systems –That then means bureaucracy can no longer work as it once did. .

But to understand where this is leading, we need to look at specific cases.

Literary pursuits

Outside of non-profits, specific industries have been damaged by technologies that allow fast access to applications. One area I happen to know is the literary and creative magazine scene in the US. After a platform called ‘Submittable’ set up a way for writers to email hundreds of journals and magazines at once with their work, with barely any real checking, the burden was put onto the magazine. Editors returned to the age-old practice of only publishing people they knew. What was already an inwardly focused club became something more approaching a pyramid scheme. But the technology that allowed subversion of bureaucracy crashed the bureaucracy and forced its replacement with something perhaps not less fair but unfair in a different way. This changed perceptions of fairness and rightness in an industry where application or submission was a critical part. Applications and submissions, after all, are a quintessential, some might say definitive, process of bureaucracy. Submittable has since moved into bulk systems of all types of applications, including grant applications. It now markets itself as ‘Giving and granting software that never makes you compromise.’

Planning and Legal Systems

Another place we have seen this reported recently is in UK urban planning. For some time now, I have been working with people in community law who fight against city planners (those who decide what gets built or not) who quite deliberately obscure planning decisions and consultations with legal information designed to baffle and bamboozle. This benefits those with massive legal teams (such as massive property developers), but disadvantages residents in areas destined to be gentrified and ethnically/socially cleansed.

My own discovery was that, as I undertook a research project on community activism for a law centre, with the help of the UK Law AI bot I was able to understand and translate legal information (confirmed by the legal experts I was working with) in ways I could understand. This could, I have since advised campaigners, help them to at least understand systems designed to exclude them. They could even use it, perhaps to generate letters in the baroque formats required.

Recently in the Guardian, a typically Millennial headline claimed that AI systems now offering translation and submission of objections as a service for a fee (as usual, some techbro dickhead comes along and charges you extra money to do what normal LLMS will do out of the box) were simply designed to allow mass ‘NIMBYism.’

Well, not all planning objections are from NIMBYs, Guardian, and you would be the first to complain about many of the shocking environmental and human rights abuses by developers that activists have to contest. But also, this practice offers a kind of even-ing of the odds, a rebalancing of the power, and a sudden ability to circumvent some of the guardrails of the bureaucratic juridicolegal process. That may indeed allow the gumming up of an already creaking system. It evens the odds, and rebalances power, but the point is that a power, and resource imbalance is all that ever held the social practices of bureaucracy together. When power is pushed to crisis, however, it has to make decisions about how it will respond. Because it is powerful, that often goes the wrong way for those who came to challenge it: for example, shutting down or circumventing any remaining avenues for challenge through the system they have lost control of.

The non-profit world

And now this same pattern is hitting the charity sector. The ‘Oh shit’ moment á la Brexit has caught them unawares. The closures of funds due to up to 400% increases in applications are indeed heavily influenced by this.

Let’s be clear, the massive crash, panicked-applications, and tsunami of refused requests is not just a result of AI, any more than the macroeconomic tanking economy and jobs market is. Worldwide economic collapse, underinvestment, and reduced giving, all play their part in the contraction happening at pace in the non-profit world, including Trump’s dismantling of the USAID programme which has affected non-profits globally. But the point I’m trying to make is that the wider and industry-specific economic and cultural conditions have combined with a technological change to create a perfect storm. A few foundations who now who say they are ‘not seeing it’ are, precisely, just not seeing it - that’s not the same as it not being there. And the whole point of LLMs is to be convincing.

What will happen? Hard to say. But I already see some changes which I think have much wider significance for the whole of our culture. One is a potential return to individual relationships, and ‘who you know’. Already I am seeing this in funders; most of the recent successes I am seeing are with organisations winning money from those they already know. In many ways, this is what people have been asking for, for years, when they ask funders to fund longer and larger, and with fewer applications….

It’s a return to patronage. But to understand why such a return would be so significant, we need to understand what bureaucracy was meant to solve in the first place.

What bureaucracy was meant to solve

Modern bureaucracy developed, but especially took off, in the West alongside liberal democracy. The idea was that managerial approaches could allow access to juridicolegal systems that would previously have been available only to those who had personal contacts and connections with kings. By filling in a form, you were able to join a system that, on the surface, made decisions without prejudice. The sheer formality and managerial remove meant that a more equitable system - and one which privileged the literate middle classes - was available to anyone who could write.

Of course, part of that system was always a kind of epistemological coercion that prevented or delayed access to favour, or indeed justice, for those least well-equipped to deal with bureaucratic systems. Those people included the poor with oral cultures, colonised peoples with a different language, working class people without a high level of literacy education. Bureaucracy was both an expansion of access to fair process and an attempt to contain it. Remember that another word for, say, an application is ‘submission’. The word itself betrays its origins in what it is meant to replace, but also to continue by indirect means. (That is, direct supplication to a lord or king.)

Practical implications

So what’s happening in the philanthropy sector’s bureaucracy? In the microcosmic world of the day-to-day charitable philanthrosphere, these changes are afoot.

Funders are starting to see AI-generated bids. Some are poorly written - the absolute guff I’ve seen is similar to what I’ve seen in recruitment. But bad applications existed long before AI. AI can be used to fabricate or exaggerate claims. But people could always do that: it’s the number one risk of fundraising and funding. But there’s a bigger thing at play here, as application systems are being overwhelmed by mass input. And this brings us to the most likely outcome for our whole technological society.

The decentring of the sector means key policies around LLMs will be decided piecemeal. The National Lottery Community Fund is now accepting bids by AI, but not by actual humans – if they are those pesky parasites of the nonprofit world, ‘consultants’ and freelancers, who now make up a massive proportion of the workforce. More broadly, there has been little to no leadership from the big beasts of infrastructure (who are now not so big). People like me and the Institute of Fundraising have tried to get bid-writers to use LLMs ‘responsibly’. For me, using LLMs properly means doing pretty much the same work as I have all along, but more efficiently, and sometimes in a more ‘collaborative’ way with the LLM as an editing partner.

Increasing efficiency in applications is what we have been demanding funders allow us to do for years.

And indeed, funders have been claiming for years that they wanted that too, especially for those without professional bid writing skills. But what replaces the application ‘process’ may be even less fair than knocking on a door and handing in your 20-page letter to Santa with full costings. Be careful what you wish for.

As new systems take hold like two-stage processes, and many funders start to expand resources by taking on additional outsourced bid assessors, there remains a more fundamental problem: that in a system where bureaucracy’s power dynamic is evened out, the systems no longer work. This could lead to collapse – quiet in some cases, or ‘loud’ in others.

Where does this end?

One of the goals of bureaucracy was also to remove the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘emotion’ in decision making. This always has been one of the fundamental dreams of bureaucracy - a bloodless, fully ‘objective’ reason above favour or personal sentiment. Of course this brings significant risk and dangers of its own. That modern bureaucracy developed alongside science, with its focus on rationality and process, is no accident; nor indeed is the later development of ‘management science.’

As we move now to become the ‘Impact Industry’ (the latest term being used to describe people who try to make the world a bit better in an institutional setting), this desire to neutralise decision making will only be stronger. Indeed, ‘social investment’ is bound to increase the sheer quantification and dehumanisation of processes as much as ‘performance’ (how many, and how much?).

The thing is, most human beings don’t like making decisions, because they then have to take responsibility, and, god forbid, be accountable for them. The more we hide the decisions, the more we can set the terms of the system and claim bad decisions are accidents. Or indeed, that they are unpleasant for some, but the ‘right’ ones ‘objectively’ - as decided by an algorithm. The implacable ‘black box’ of bureaucracy – the Kafkaesque citadel of filing cabinets which can only be accessed by a phoneline or a form sent up an airtube – potentially comes of age with AI.

‘Faceless’ bureaucracy is meant to make sure nobody needs to see the applicant cry. A pen stroke, key strike, and an email that means Number Go Up Or Down – this is a profoundly comforting things for humans in power. It’s how people who aren’t complete sociopaths manage to do pretty awful things. And the question of to what extent we want to remove the ‘human’, emotional, or subjective element of decisions that bureaucracy promises, has been something of an ongoing theme for humankind for 200 years or more.

In the grant-writing/ awarding sphere, deciding what to fund is less often, although not never, such a matter of life and death or overt ‘violence’ as, say, the use of bureacrcy in wartime. But it certainly does have very live and real effects on individuals and communities. Where bureaucracy originally seemed to promise fairness by removing subjectivity, we might also ask to what extent, or to what level, the removal of subjectivity – the actual thinking of a human agent - is actually desirable.

Solutions? Or more problems?

In the non-profit foundation world, we’re heading towards a situation where writing bots will meet reading bots. We will start to see AI being used to read and decide on bids as well as write them. I know for a fact that is already happening on an individual basis as people use LLMs to summarise applications they receive. (An irony - long bids are demanded by funders, which are then too long to read....) That process then writes all manner of truncations, themselves with selections made by AI, which will undoubtedly affect the final decisions. But I think it is highly unlikely that is where it will end, and we are facing a situation where at least initial ‘sifts’ are done automatically by AI and machine learning. This has long been the case in recruitment, especially in the US.

Much as we developed systems in marketing to craft SEO junk to be crawled by bots, which no human will ever read, this creates a fundamental question: do we need the process of reading and writing at all in ‘application’? If no human is involved, is application and reception the best method? Does bureaucracy need a human? Do we just let the black box do its thing and achieve the ultimate removal of subjectivity and embracing of an ‘objectivity’ which can in the end only be embodied by a machine? (Leaving aside the very obvious fact that these machines are far from without bias.)

If so, what does that look like? It is likely to be some kind of passive crawling of databases. Some tech people already have this in their sights, including, it would appear, Submittable, as well as at least one UK database tool. Their plan is likely to create a system that becomes the absolute interrelation and interlocutor between funder and fundee, applicant and institution, job-seeker and employer, from invitation to to outcome and beyond. Make no mistake, their goal is to replace all fundraising or recruitment – with themselves taking the money ‘saved’. The fact that these companies sell a perfect system which allows more room for ‘relationships’ sounds great. But exactly how that works is a different matter.

The Crisis of Bureaucracy?

So here we are at the fundamental point: LLMs have created what I call the crisis of bureaucracy: the old administrative systems (forms, long applications, human review) are being overwhelmed because everyone can now generate text, and make ‘submissions’ or ‘applications’ at scale.

And for me, the greatest disruption that LLMs have produced so far is not some kind of major cost saving or transformation of working practices in organisations. (Indeed, research recently showed that there was little saving within organisations – tellingly, because the effort of writing was removed, and transferred to the reader, who had to read absolute bollocks created by an LLM.) It’s in the relationships between ‘applicants’ and ‘institutions.’ The mismatch of resource: a substantial, if painfully slow machinery for reading, set against the effort premium of individual writing, was essential to the power balance that bureaucracy and the power regimes it held up relied on. The gatekeepers have lost their gate. Time to build a new one.

The point is that while we are seeing massive disruptions for funders in the UK (with more to come), the crisis is not just in funding applications. It is in the very idea of ‘applications’ across our society, right at the heart of bureaucracy. Jobs, legal discourse, academic pursuits, banking and investment of course, creative arts, goodness knows what else. What we face is logjam, power upturned, and the high likelihood of the more powerful gatekeepers shifting strategy entirely.

So what is this strategy?

In all of this, I see two possibilities. This may be the final apotheosis of bureaucracy. The bloodless removal of human subjectivity, with everything decided by an algorithm.

Or it could be the last crash and crisis of bureaucracy, where bureaucracy as a system can no longer cope with volume and the even-ing out of systems power between applicant and institution. That leads to a world where bureaucracy evaporates, taking us back to… what?

Well, what it replaced. A system of relationships and patronage. Grace and favour. I don’t think any of us could wish for that the process involved fewer human relationships in most aspects of our work. Indeed, grant-makers and even recruiters talk more and more about the importance of the ‘relational’ approach. But what kind of human relationships will it take us back to? And what power relations will that create?

So patronage, ‘who you know’ and the sheer hustle may become even more vital. And indeed, at the front of the queue will be those who learn this best, or who are put there by power imbalances at the outset. Class, race, gender, sexuality, all of these things will be affected. I don’t suggest that these relationships cannot be managed or that we cannot seek to introduce a certain ethical balance and some level of ‘fairness’ to any return to subjectivity. (And we will no doubt claim this process is ‘objective somehow – it’s one of those words and concepts we can never reach, and yet remain relentlessly focused on attaining.) But it may be that the human relationships it takes us back to are far from what most of us, even those of us who innately distrust bureaucracy, would want.

The fundamental questions at this point: is this the crisis of bureaucracy, or its apotheosis? If no human is involved, is application and reception even a meaningful process? And if not, what replaces it? And does this restore humanity and save effort, or entrench unfairness and exclusion from power?

The (not very) funny personal bit

Last week I chaired a session on radical ideas for trustees at the Festival of Trusteeship, where several people presnted such radical ideas as, you know, maybe trustees doing some training every now and then. You may have read my previous work questioning what role trustees ought to play - and have played, over the least thousand years. I did end by suggesting that perhaps the whole shitshow was too shitty to continue the show, but subtly. You can see it here - some great ideas to be tried while we rearrange the deckchairs, anyway…

Shout out to Hannah Kowzun, who won the vote and tore standard trusteeship a new one. We may have to set up a nursing home for exhausted and angry nonprofit people. Let me know if you can fund it - maybe the Mercers, if you’re reading?

Prir to this, I spent two weeks on holiday. A few days in Kent (a weird graveyard), and then 10 days in London on a staycation. Mostly,I watched horror movies and read Hegel. I also visited several cultural institutions and now have a second mortgage to pay off. The Transport Museum refused to give me a local’s discount, because apparently that is only for people in North London. ‘Oh,’ I said - ‘you mean like the tube?’ They didn’t laugh, and I was in a foul mood, but improved it by glaring at parents who let their children run around and enjoy themselves. How dare they.

Meanwhile in politics, Starmer is in trouble. Sadly, the two potential frontrunners to replace the stiff-with-a-quiff we currently have are even further to the right. Streeting is a neoliberal worse-than Blairite shill, who just enjoys scorched earth politics, and Shabana Mahmood is another entrenched social conservative.

I’m hoping Keir stays until Burnham can get back into parliament. But can you imagine them letting him back?

Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed this about Wes Streeting (see image)? Amusingly, he congratulated Mamdani online and said he felt hopeful to see new voices breaking through against the forces of conservatism. As somebody noted on social media, he seems to have failed to notice that, in this scenario, he is Andrew Cuomo.

And finally - watch to the end….

See you in two or three weeks.

- Alex

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help

1. Subscribe!

Subscribe and share! To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Or share this post.

2. Share!

I’ve taken a four week break. Substack’s algorithm will crucify me. Please share to give me a chance of anyone seeing this.

Share

3. Buy me a beer!

Bugger coffee. In this climate, you need buy me a beer. That way you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. And keep me drunk.

Welcome, all four readers and a dog, to the latest issue of Barely Civil Society. This time, I talk about the rise of charity freelancers in the UK and to what extent this is to be welcomed or otherwise. As ever, I’m looking into the wider historical, political and economic trends that are shaping this, both inside, and beyond, this particular industry.

BTW If you’re looking for the funny personal bit, it’s now at the end.

Work work work

It’s become fairly undeniable that swathes of redundancies have taken place in the UK’s voluntary sector over the last couple of years, particularly in the mid-to-senior management level. This seems to be one of the reasons we’re seeing significant increases in the number of freelancers in the sector. Beyond the specifics of freelancing, which, as I’ve said elsewhere, increases the precarity of skilled and ‘professional’ workers, we’re seeing a hollowing out of management and senior roles as a whole, especially in specific skills.

What we’re watching in the voluntary sector mirrors patterns across the wider economy: the disappearance of mid-level roles, the rise of short-term contracts, and the quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’. As ever, I’m not so interested in the ‘inside baseball’ trade talk. I’m much more interested in how this maps to wider changes in our society, economy, and culture. For some time, there has been a hollowing out of middle incomes in the West - people in clerical, skilled manufacturing jobs. In the VCS this seems to be expanding further up the tree and into senior roles. I think we are canaries in the mineshaft of the next recession (or even crash) likely to engulf the wider economy before long.

What’s happening in the VCS?

In the Third Sector podcast, we were looking at a survey by freelancer network, Blume undertaken by Jenny Raschbauer. The top line figures showed that very few freelancers would want to return to F/T permanent employment (7%). But also that many had not really chosen their current situation. There’s also a certain amount of survivor bias in that survey, I suppose. You’re much less likely to complete it if freelancing didn’t work out for you. Either you’re not doing it any more, or the last thing you want is to tell anyone about it. (Of course, some will choose to do so because of the strength of negative feeling too - and there was some of that in the raw data…)

The survey data gives a snapshot of this tension between choice and necessity: and shows that an apparent boom in autonomy can disguise a collapse in security. So, while some are starting out on ‘an exciting and enterprising new chapter’ (as the Linkedin posts always say...), at least 20% of them are coming from redundancy, the survey shows. Or horribly toxic workplaces. And there’s always a danger that we welcome a new flexibility without noticing that much of this is a result of massive sector contraction. Some people are finding that there is no longer an alternative, as restricted funding, refusal to pay for management costs, and wider cuts risk creating a new precariat where managers/ specialists used to have job security. Others - especially fundraisers & CEOs - are fleeing toxic burnout cultures.

Add to this that many others find they have to freelance because of childcare, health needs, and so on. The constant refrain was of women especially having to do freelance work in order to given them time and flexibility for childcare. This is obviously part of the pregnancy pay gap. But alongside that, there is the fact that those who are able to freelance - who have this as a choice - are more likely to have things like a stable second income from a partner, or a financial cushion.1 (I’m not talking about the fabulously wealthy here - remember that many people have no more than even a single month of income in savings and live paycheque to paycheque. Often we don’t realise just how bad things can be, and how often they are.) So class plays into this heavily too - also, of course, in the skills we are able to accrue, the networks we have (this, I think, is perhaps the biggest driver, and so dependent on professional class-based skills and culture).

So, while some, (like me, this week, mostly) enjoy this work, others would find anything but permanent stable employment not only anxious, but dangerous. Let’s be clear: the fear never goes away. Uncertainty and fear was a universal negative in the Blume survey.

To understand what’s happening, it helps to zoom out: the new freelance precariat in the charity sector isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It seems to me to sit within a much broader story about the decline of the post-war middle class.

The hollowing out of the middle classes

The US consultancy firm, McKinsey, categorises ‘independent’ workers into four types: Free Agents, Casual Earners, Reluctants, and the Financially Strapped. Our sector has all four. The first two are to be welcomed: ‘enterprising’ folks who’ve found the thing that works for them partly through skill, and partly luck.

“While demographically diverse, independent workers largely fit into four segments (exhibit): free agents, who actively choose independent work and derive their primary income from it; casual earners, who use independent work for supplemental income and do so by choice; reluctants, who make their primary living from independent work but would prefer traditional jobs; and the financially strapped, who do supplemental independent work out of necessity.”

McKinsey on Independents and the gig economy

The last two that should concern us. Across the world, the growth of the Deliveroo/ Uberised model of the gig economy is sometimes dressed up as lifestyle choice. But we know that isn’t always what’s happening. Yes, many benefit from the flexibility of self-employment. The people who don’t - but still have to do it - are the problem.

The new precarious middle classes have been the subject of concern for commentators and economists for some time. And it is likely that this sense of increased anxiety and middle class precarity adds to the rise of voting for right wing parties in groups who might normally find them rather too déclassé. When you lose a property owning middle class, more and more of that wealth is sucked up to the super-wealthy. Economists and popular economic commentators like Gary Stevenson have warned about the hollowing out of the middle classes, as resources get siphoned out of the working and middle classes and into an ever-increasing share of wealth for the super-wealthy, whether corporate or individual.

Elsewhere the brilliant Barbara Ehrenreich has written about ‘Fear of Falling’ and sees that fear of losing hard-won and fleeting privileges as part of the essential experience of the modern middle classes (compare this with, for example, the past supposed solidity and unchallengability of hereditary wealth). What we’re seeing now is not the end of that class, but its transformation into something even more anxious and less secure; that is, a middle class without any of the small guarantees that started to develop for it after the Second World War.

This comes after the post-war creation of a property-owning middle class, which is one of the reasons we ended up with comparative stability and prosperity for some time. In other places, for example some parts of Europe, better controls on housing profits/ public ownership and more redistributive economics have done a better job at reducing absolute poverty as well as relative - but in the anglosphere and many other market capitalist economies, this property-owning middle class has been vital.

A recent study by the OECD shows that the middle classes, faced with stagnant incomes and rising costs, are becoming less able to save and falling into debt. We also know that home ownership is becoming less and less likely for even middle class households. Of course the ‘middle class’ is constantly shifting, and has many nooks and crannies, and levels of wealth, autonomy, power and privilege. Where it begins and ends is a constant source of debate and discussion. And many would point out that most of the people who we describe as ‘middle class’ in the UK are in actual fact, much like in the US, really ‘working class’. They may have the trappings of respectability, perhaps some savings, may (decreasingly) own their own home, or may have been to university, but as the OECD points out, all of those things are being erased. We’re seeing downward social mobility over the generations (I’ve seen this in my own family). And the fundamental of having to sell labour to those who extract profit is an economic characteristic of most ‘middle class’ experiences, until we reach the upper limits where we may find those who have invested in property, or enjoy some level of hereditary wealth.

But the point is, the middle classes have always in some ways been defined by their precarity, because that is what sets them apart from the hereditary wealth of the aristocracy who preceded them. As the bourgeoisie’s ‘new money’ solidified, many became wealthy across generations. But most, in the shape our economies and societies now, are much more precarious than our ideas tend to suggest.

Those who set up businesses and extract profit from the labour of others often tend to see themselves as somehow more independent, or as members of a different class than the ‘working class’: you make money from other people’s work, not your own’ as the saying goes. But remember that the majority of people who own small businesses are not making a ‘profit’ - they are making a living. The dream of becoming some business magnate who extracts profit from the labour of many others and reinvests this into more profit-making is not universally held, and certainly, not universally real.

Even more so for the self-employed. While we appear to have a high level of independence, our need to continue to sell our labour even with control over whether we supply or withdraw it, means we are highly and directly reliant on markets and purchasers. The idea that we are employed by ‘ourselves’ is often not really the case. We still sell our labour for the profit of others. We just choose who we sell it to, and can up sticks when we want to. Are we working class or middle class, petit-bourgeois, or bourgeois? It all depends on where you draw lines - and of course, the lines are not really lines so much as axes, or forces. Our power changes over history.

Freelancers and the Black Death: an aside

This tension between worker dependence and autonomy runs pretty deep, and I think that’s why talk about freelancers often turns into ad hominem critiques about their supposed greed or lack of scruple. Some in the Blume survey noticed what I did, that there is an assumption that freelancers are trying to inflate their work, or their price, or get away with something, or don’t feel a sense of allegiance to their cause. In the podcast I talk about people’s ludicrous objections to day rates - usually because they don’t know the first thing about any kind of business.

So why do people treat freelancers with a deep level of distrust? Well, first of all because they often can. As I said in the podcast, I see a lot of projection of anxieties about paying people fairly for their work in the non-profit sector onto those who have to ask (invoice) for money regularly, rather than just having to await a monthly bank transfer. But there is often something beyond that: a level of disdain.

The thing is, freelancing and self-employment has always unsettled long-standing expectations about loyalty, hierarchy, and control for employers. We seem like dangerous, anti-social lone wolves. We might be hard to control. Nobody ‘owns’ us.

Some of this is no doubt simply because of the dynamic itself: you’re an outsider and easy to exploit, or, in some situations, expected to exploit. (I have often said that the difference between a freelancer and a consultants is: a freelancer is someone you think you can exploit; a consultant is someone you think is going to exploit you…)

But I sometimes wonder if this is woven into our culture more deeply. After the Black Death, with at least a third of Europe’s population dead, the feudal system was in disarray. Serfs were given leave to remain on the land of feudal lords (erm, hence landlords), to till the soil, and give up the larger portion of what they grew as payment, in return for protection (when it suited….). Suddenly, with a massively reduced workforce, peasant workers found that they were in high demand. Whereas in the past they would remain where they were and ‘pledge fielty’ to the lord and the land, some realised they could demand better deals in other places by moving around. All the bargaining power made them unpopular.

This struck landlords as a bloody cheek because they had been generously terrorising and exploiting these serfs for a centuries, and now these scrubbers thought they could just go off and sell their labour to anybody they fancied. Somthing had to be done.

Soon, any slutty roaming peasants hoeing around with anybody who paid them were controlled by the Statute of Labourers (1351). This introduced wage controls, restrictions on movement, compulsory work, and price controls on food and goods. Labourers still moved around, and employers broke the rules when it suited them, but it marked an important moment in the history of capitalism: it was one of the first legal attempts to regulate the labour market, to turn ‘free’ peasants into an immobile workforce because suddenly there was an element of choice. The goal was to manage and win class conflict, between the labourers, and those who controlled and exploited their labour.

Deep down, ‘employers’ have many elements remaining of the feudal landlords. They expect a great deal of loyalty, and often express a desire to control all aspects of what we can say, do, and think. (They can tell you when you can go to the toilet, or fire you for speaking ill of your ‘lord’.) What changes over time is the extent to which lords feel like they have reciprocal responsibility to their labourers - and what the role of central government (and welfare/ charity) is in those relationships.

As we have developed our economy and society over time, we have constantly batted it back and forth. There’s the desire for a self-reliant labouring class to whom lords have no responsibility beyond the immediate provision of labour - and who therefore retain a level of self-determination and independence. And then there is the demand for a workforce who are reliant on those lords, and indeed, might show deference to them. Of course, the main goal of neoliberal capitalist wage and labour relations post Thatcher has been to create a relationship of total reliance by workers on the employer and zero responsibility from the employer to the worker. The battle continues.

Anyway, it’s worth bearing in mind that when a potential buyer talks about freelancers or consultants as greedy, thieving, disloyal parasites, they are just parroting the same ideas feudal landlords had in the 14th century. And indeed, there is likely to be some deep-down cultural continuity in those ideas, even in a sector that likes to think of itself as above the moral fray of economic extraction. (As if! Much more to say here….)

Back to charities

Now you might say: charities don’t make a profit, so this isn’t relevant. Well, yes and no. Charity culture is not immune from wider economic ideology. We see all of the charitable funders who flatly refuse to pay for management costs. Fund your CEO? Ha! Pay for a senior manager? Double ha!

This hostility to paying for ‘management’ isn’t just about efficient budgeting. It’s an ideological stance that sees professional labour as wasteful or self-serving, while idealising low-paid or unpaid labour as virtuous. You can see funders’ determination that management posts will not be funded as an expression of wealth privilege and its ideology: that the middle classes and professionals are not to be valued. And indeed, historically, the middle classes have been seen as a threat to class systems and to the privilege of the wealthiest. They tend to vote, for example. And, indeed, given that the middle class has long been the greatest competitor for wealth and resources, and there has long been a battle within the charity sector over which elite is in charge (the priests, the aristocracy, the merchants, the bourgeoisie or the political elite), you are likely to find these ideas and practices leaking over into our perceptions and practices.

That may hang heavy over the ideas of a sector driven by a battle between the managerial classes and the ultra rich who drive and guide giving (whether directly through their giving, or through the ideology that the bourgeois elites who often steer trustee boards mimic). Once you see it this way, the sector’s funding patterns and refusal to fund managers look less like neutral financial decisions and more like a reproduction of class hierarchy and ideology.

So, if the origin is cultural and ideological, the end point is economic. Again, it serves to hollow out professional labour, and drive wages to the bottom. It also leaves us without people with the skills to challenge those ideologies and the power of the funders who hold the power over charitable delivery, and industrial conditions, through their wealth: in many cases, directly representing massive capital of either private or corporate/ shareholder origin (at differing levels of remove and control).

This goes far beyond the idea of casualisation and freelancers, but now if you take it to the stage where there is no funding for permanent or lasting employees in senior roles, the only way for charities to get people into those roles is by outsourcing the task to others and through casualisation. This also ‘hides’ the work to an extent. But it transfers precarity to some who would previously have had stability and employment rights, as well as the responsibility for cost cutting, and managing impossible systems set up by funders, to charities.

We’re seeing the precarity long expected of workers at the bottom of the pile being expanded and extended further and further up the tree in terms of employment and earning. Youth workers and care workers on sessional rates? Not a problem! They love it. It’s better than Tesco, what are they complaining about? Don’t they care about the people we work with? Managers? Hold on a minute…

Overall, within the charity sector and without, the balance is complex, and a matter of ongoing conflict and change. It is in many ways this is the sharp end of class conflict. And the gender and class lines in the charity world are deeply knitted into this changing picture of how we do, and pay, work in the deeply class-riddled world of the charity sector. (A sector where a deeply enculturated class system sometimes shows itself more overtly than in sectors more directly opened to the ravages of neoliberal profit incentives.)

So we end up with a sector where the work once done by stable employees is dispersed across freelancers and temporary contracts (I didn’t have a permanent contract once until I first became a CEO), without anyone addressing the structural problem beneath it: the collapse of financial security itself for all but those with wealth. Yes, in the charity industry, but far beyond that, to our whole changing economy.

Subscribe now

Enterprise and UBI

Now, none of this is just to sing the praises of employment. Much as there are moments I want to drop the consultancy game (when there’s no work, duh…), there are many things to be said for individual or even small enterprise. And not just for our personal experience/ lifestyle, but for society: enterprise and small businesses are pretty fantastic drivers of innovation and creativity. Alongside a tendency to unseat our human relationships and concentrate profits at the top, market capitalism tends to kill small business and enterprise. That’s bad for everyone. 

And weirdly, I have always admired the Enterprise Allowance scheme run by Thatcher’s Government, which was strikingly effective in some ways (probably not those that Thatcher intended). Not only were there many new artists, creatives, and all sorts of interesting self employed people and business created. It also gave people who otherwise would never have the access to start up capital a chance to make a business happen. Let’s think about this: that lack of a cushion and any chance to invest is indeed the kind of thing that perpetuates the class system.

Complaints (as you often see about EA programme) that up to one in six businesses failed in the first year seem bonkers. Surely at least one in six businesses fail in the first year anyway? And what does ‘fail’ mean? And I thought a survival of the fittest economy was what we are all about? Isn’t this the glorious logic of the market?

So I was very interested to discover the Irish Government is introducing a scheme providing £325 week as a basic income for artists. Let’s face it, with the rise of AI and so on they are in even greater trouble than they have been for some time in an economy that values bulk and ‘content’ over art or craft. Providing this opportunity has a chance to open up the possibility of self-employment and enterprise in creative industries in ways that would otherwise be off the scale unachievable for anyone without rich parents. (We all know about this trap.)

The appeal of enterprise lies in its promise of autonomy, but it risks recreating the same inequalities unless there’s some shared foundation of security beneath it. And what this brings us to is the idea of universal basic income.2

UBI is perhaps one of the most potentially powerful ideas for the ‘charity’ or nonprofit sector that exists on the left today.3 That’s partly because it may improve the lot of the people we work with. It’s also of massive significance to volunteering - it would open up the potential for all to become an active part of a caring society. They might even have the time to care for their own families and friends!

And the overlap with volunteering and what we call ‘freelance’ and consultants in the sector is signficant. Not least, many of us will have seen wealthy professionals from other sectors volunteering to do the work we might be paid for, for free. (They do it badly, it’s not worth worrying about.)

But the point overall is that if we looked more to models like UBI, the ability for people to balance childcare/ health, lifestyle, earning, and contributing to a cause or something they care about would potentially be greatly increased. Match this with the potential for seeking investment for business ideas, and there is significant potential for the development of an enterprise culture not based on financial profit, but on social profit.

If this seems a sidestep, well, yes, it is. But my point is that with many of us choosing to do this work in a way that allows us to exercise creativity, freedom, and contribution to cause, retaining independence and driving enterprise, while at the same time making this more equitable and accessible, could be a massive benefit to the civil society we work in. In a way, this brings the argument full circle. The pressures driving freelancing and precarity are the same ones that make ideas like UBI so compelling: a search for ways to reclaim agency, stability, and meaning in work without returning to old hierarchies - especially as AI and technological developments threaten many of the entry level professional jobs which have developed since the rise of bureaucracy.

In the meantime, balancing complex conflicts in a labour market rapidly contracting in the centre, and having to do ‘more with less,’ will remain a very tricky way to work in the charity sector, and indeed, the wider world of labour.

What are our values?

What’s at stake here isn’t just how we work, but what kind of (civil) society we’re building. Hannah Kowzun, for example, has been looking recently at how charity sector values seem not to follow through into their relationships with employees. What always worries me is that where capitalist enterprises extract profit from labour and put it into shareholder value, we extract that same profit and put it into ‘noble causes’. Exploiting employees for a good cause is not much better than doing so for your shareholders. Perhaps even less so when we are very often replacing public welfare systems that were killed to allow greater profits for private shareholders.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all freelancing is extractive or exploiting - but the message starting to be pedalled is that greater ‘flexibility’ (precarity) is better for ‘charities’. To my mind, that’s a narrow view that fails to see how quickly we can prop up the social ills we fight against, with our very own practices.

If care, community, and social change work are only possible through financial precarity, and then only available to those best placed to weather that uncertainty, there’s a risk we’re just further institutionalising exploitation in the name of diverse ‘causes’. As well as making participation in civil society itself - a fundamental of democracy - more than ever a privilege of the better off.

What can we do?

So what can charities do? Some people don’t like it when I don’t provide ‘3 weird tricks that doctors hate’, to fix complex social and economic problems in civil society. And yet the answers are usually obvious and well-trodden.

First, funders need to give truly unrestricted funding. That way we can make it possible to hire proper staff to do the things we need, at whatever level, and whatever level of specialism, at least when there is enough money. Underinvestment is one problem; simply refusing to let people spend money in the way they need to is another. That way, if you can afford a proper senior post, you can have one.

Second, people with caring responsibilities, health issues, and so on, need flexible working. We need to continue to make this more possible. (Maybe I could have stayed in my last permanent job if they had allowed me to do more home working while I was ill.) And while this is a problem across our whole economy and society, we need to recognise we’re not immune to it in the VCS.

Thirdly, a lot of people are leaving senior jobs to be freelance because of a toxic culture of more-with-less and excessive and unreasonable demands, especially of fundraisers. That only stops with culture change, especially among leaders and trustees. Demanding fundraisers raise more as people give less is magical thinking. They are not machines or a dirty secret - they are vital partners who care about whatever cause you adopt just as much as delivery staff, if not sometimes more.

And finally, treat people who freelance with respect, dignity, and fairness. Either they’re enterprising souls who have chosen to do something risky to share their skills and balance their work. Or they may be people who have been cast aside from a labour market in free fall due to neoliberal economic policies of the last 15 years.

Most of all, do not use their precarity to exploit them. Pay reasonable, serious rates that recognise their skill, value, and their need to pay for the time they will be without work. That is how people make a living. 4Overall, you may not be able to get as good a ‘deal’ for your charity that way. But do we want to (non)profit at the expense of others?

The funny personal bit

The last couple of weeks have been especially stressful since my toilet broke. You’ve heard me say that I want to ‘smash the system’? Well, somebody misheard and instead, I just cracked the cistern.

After many attempts, I managed to get it replaced yesterday by my usual plumber. I felt weirdly guilty about how unpleasant a job it clearly was, and I felt he was judging me for having done appalling things through what is, after all, a hole in the bathroom floor for the last ten years. I’‘m sure he glared at me accusingly at one point. Anyway, the new convenience has a truly terrifying flush that booms like a crack of thunder - as if Thor himself had recently dropped a hammer. Try that at 3am.

Meanwhile, the diet continues, and it’s hard to keep food interesting when you can’t eat most of it. Yesterday, my special indulgence was buying the most beautiful pomegranate: a crimson and magenta mottled orb the size of a bowling ball, with a perfectly pursed top like a signet ring. Very beautiful, almost regal. My bag was full, so I carried it home proudly in the palm of my hand. As the bus went past, in the reflection in the window, I realised I looked like a symbol for something. ‘You looked like a Tarot card,’ said my partner.

On Saturday, for my sins, I saw the new ‘Tron: Ares’ movie. Every time I see the poster I’m convinced it’s called Tron: Arse. Turns out that would be more apposite. What a yawn. But at the other end of the culture scale, I’ve been reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. His personal experiences of class are complex, and he is full of the same neuroses he criticises in others, much as he is perhaps more aware of (some) of them.

But even more interesting was noticing how much time he spends frothing about working class men’s bodies. Seriously, it’s like a gay pulp novel from the 1950s; all ‘magnificent buttocks’ and proud broad shoulders glietening with sweat. I then discovered he was appallingly homophobic. Oh, George, you complete cliché.

Beyond that, what really comes across is that pretty much everybody is apparently awful except… well, George Orwell…

I fear I am reaching podcast over-exposure at this stage, as well as over-exhaustion, but have no other current celebrity appearances planned. Except, that is, for opening a branch of Poundland in Wigan, followed by a nightclub PA appearance at JAZZY NITES Danceteria. I’ll be sharing the charity DJ booth with Pudsey Bear and Katie Price.

On that note, I am considering reducing output. I’ll see you in three or four weeks, after a holiday break. I’ve written around 120,000 words in this blog in the last year. So it might be time for a slight slowing of production….

Weekly internet nonsense

The above is very interesting - a documentary explaining how despotism happens, to Americans in the 1950s. Pretty spooky stuff.

I always hate these kind of posts (above) on LinkedIn, so this is a hoot.

And finally: this one’s for Emma and Lauren.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe!

Share!

Support!

Buy me a coffee and keep me anxious and crabby. Or help me fix my toilet, which costs more than you would think.

Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

Work with me!

Yes, I’m a freelancer/ ‘consultant’. It’s terrifying. I do

• strategy & change

• learning, research & evaluation

• leadership training & development

I’m reasonably priced, easy to work with and have worked with organisations from £100k to £80m turnovers, including delivery charities, grantmakers and the public sector. Check out my day job webpage.

Oh and - no politics unless invited.

The brief introduction

Welcome to another week of Barely Civil Society. No big essay this week, just a newsy roundup.

I’ve had to take a break from fascism for the last couple of weeks. No, not because, as my partner suggested, ‘My arm was getting tired’.

Because it’s all too depressing and I needed a week or so news-lite, if not entirely free. Still squeaking in, there has been some stuff from the Labour party conference, which seems to have made everything a thousand times worse, so, nice one Keir. I did rather like the Guardian’s description of him having the ‘reverse Midas-touch’.

I guess we’ll see if we get Andy Burnham, and then at least someone easier on the eye can ferk it all up.

Onto the news…

Most corporates officially do not give a fahrk

The latest report from the Charities Aid Foundation on corporate giving shows that only 25% of British businesses support charities with cash, time or goods. You will be aware of my rather dim view on the role of corporate giving - and indeed, that it is one of my hard(ish) red lines in terms of things I won’t get involved in, not least because of the high risk of appalling toxic behaviour being unleashed upon charity staff.

But I suppose my concerns are a bit like the old Jackie Mason (I think…) joke:

When corporates do give, it is mostly about them, and them alone - and you need to always be aware that they must be somehow profiting from, extracting from, the charity through what they ‘give’. (Obviously, say, an owner run business could be different - that’s actually different than ‘corporate’ after all.) Perhaps in a few cases, this works both ways and you get different things you need - you launder my reputation, I pay for your soap powder. But very often, the sheer effrontery of it is mind-blowing.

For example, this little doozy - a corporate ‘award’ - always the very shittiest of all deals for charities - run by a major insurance corporation.

First of all, quite why the corporation thinks they are best placed to ‘award’ a grassroots charity for its contributions to diversity and inclusion is pretty mind-boggling. Talk about hubris.

But then look at the ‘prize’. £10k first prize. Second £5k. Third £3k. Hmm, couldn’t spring for a fourth? No wait - that’s admin costs!

It’s like: ‘Tell me you had £20k for CSR in your marketing budget, without telling me you had £20k for CSR in your marketing budget….’

Meanwhile, not to belabour the point, I’ll just leave this here:

As for CAF recommending everyone donate 1% of their profits. I’ve got another idea, and it rhymes with ‘make them pay more tax’. Sorry, wait, it is ‘make them pay more tax’.

More on class: I appear on a podcast and everybody runs away screaming

CLASS. Yes, it’s a thing. You may have heard me mention this once or twice.

I’m on this this month’s Benefact Group podcast talking to Felicia Willow along with, Dorothea Jones FRSA FIEDP and Duncan Exley, about the ongoing problems with class in the voluntary sector.

As you may know, my focus is historical, and about economic/ material factors that have shaped the sector over at least a millennium: changing ruling class structures that hoard power and tell us who is worthy of ‘charity’ in our society. We started with a church control by priests, moved on to royal control, then to the mercantile classes, then to the bourgeoisie. In every stage of our society, the most powerful/ ruling class has been in charge of charity; either through the purse strings, or through regulatory and administrative regimes.

I care about individuals and their experience of class, but I’m most concerned about how structures and regulations in our sector prevent real and lasting socio-economic change. So yes, underneath it all, I’m, whisper it, a Marxian.1 (Turns out Dorothea is too - respect to you Dorothea!!!) What I’m noticing more and more is that people are treating ‘class’ like a tick box on a DEI sheet - but what they are really describing is something more like ‘the poor’. Class is far more complex than that, because it’s about ruling ideas and relationships to power - and economic/ material means of production. I’m talking about economic class rather than what people sometimes call ‘social class’.

So what are the means of production? Well, think about it like this. If you own a building, machinery, some start up cash, some labour, some land for agriculture, anything like this, you own ‘productive forces’. Having this stuff allows you to ‘produce’ more money and then buy more resources. Then you can generate more profit and buy more resources. And so on. Of course, you do this by getting more money in than you spent out. That’s what profit is, and most of it comes from employing wage labour. So when we look at that, we ask, are you part of the owning class, or part of the working/ earning class? That makes a big difference, right?

Excluding the voices of people from ‘working class backgrounds’ (which I think often is really just a rephrasing of ‘from socioeconomically deprived backgrounds’ as we would once have said) from work or leadership is a massive problem. But there are much bigger, more systemic factors. Class is not a DEI characteristic alone. You see, poverty is a result of class, not class itself. That’s why you can’t usually just work yourself out of poverty if you start from nothing, whatever Centre for Rehabilitating Iain Duncan Smith’s Legacy thinks.

Classes are not just our lifestyles or where we went to school, or how much cash we have. They’re about our economic relationships to material and economic power, again, to productive forces or the means of production. Do you make your money from wealth or work? Do you own your labour or sell it? Do you extract profit from the labour of others? Do you have ‘capital’ - that is money, land, resources - that will make you more money?

The ‘lifestyling’ of class isn’t necessarily helpful. For example, people from poorer backgrounds, very understandably, will object to ‘middle class people’ trying to ‘pretend’ they are working class - like me, some might say. (Lattes are too déclassé for me - mine’s an oat milk cortado.) They’re right that your class expresses itself through lifestyle, and that lifestyle can go on to affect your class (and your children’s). That’s what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’. But we ignore the material forces that shape that at our peril.

So, much as I recognise these other things as vitally important, I think it’s most important of all to remember that ‘classes’ in Marxian and anticapitalist critique are really talking about people in our society who share particular relationships to material and economic forces. Because what happens then is that those ‘classes’ of people in society battle it out to decide who is in charge, and who gets to exploit whom.

For example: what do we tax more? Wealth, or work? Businesses or employees? Different ‘classes’ in our society will have very different ideas about that, because people who have a lot of wealth want us to tax work. People who do a lot of work will want to tax wealth - unless they read the tabloid press in which case they will be begging to have their homes repossessed by the Duke of Westminster because Rupert Murdoch told them to.

Those ‘classes’ will come with all sorts of reasons why they are the ones who should be top dog. We call these kind of ideas and ‘reasons’ ideology. They’re justifications of the way things are, or should be (and we all have them…. You’re listening to mine now).

So you can see there are big structural questions being decided and fought out by ‘classes’ which are much more than just who gets a job interview because of their accent. The point is that when we treat this like an HR problem, or a ‘community consultation’ issue, or even a matter of ‘social mobility’ (helping poor people work harder to be less poor), we miss the need for massive systemic changes to how we organise our society and our economy, and who owns and benefits from our collective assets. Changing education systems, redistributive tax policies, and an intersectional (in its positive sense) approach to social change are vitally important. But even beyond economic redistribution and the engineering of more equitable opportunities for mobility, there is also a question of how much we are letting capitalism, and its extraction of profit, and its theft of resources by the few from the many, shape our society. Ownership is just as vital as redistribution and social inclusion.

Back to charities, who have so often been given the role historically of preserving class relations: we are the apolitical safety valve for the poor masses to avoid deeper change. That’s why whichever class is in charge at any point has ended up being in charge of charities. But I think that can change. It starts with us making more noise. It starts by us being willing to challenge the dominant narratives. And by refusing to simply act as the window dressing on capitalist profit extraction when we know better than anyone how unsatisfactory our work is for economic change.

One of the bits I recorded that didn’t quite make the cut was that there are a lot of different things that charities can do to make themselves a pain in the arse for capitalism. For example, the law centres I’ve worked with who are holding property developers to account for their attempts to ride roughshod over social housing regulations, or to displace unprofitable tenants from city centres. There is much more capacity for disruption than we imagine, if we are brave, creative and strategic.

As for our industry itself - central to change is interrogating and starting to shift the trustee machine, and challenging the regulatory, depoliticising role of the Charity Commission. Meanwhile, while rejecting our role as piecemeal redistributors, we can wholeheartedly campaign for deeper change.

Check out the podcast anyway, and try not to notice that my voice sounds like it’s coming through a cardboard tube, not for technical reasons, but because I had flu.

Thanks again to Felicia for having me on - she’s such a ray of sunshine.

The above dude is so right, and both his intelligence, and his pecs, are intimidating.

Meanwhile, you can find more discussions on class and the charity sector in BCS here:

Class in the charity sector

What do I mean by class, and why does it matter?

The Charity Sector’s Class Ceiling: Central, but unspeakable, class is the elephant in the charity sector’s room

It’s not just about ‘DEI’: Resisting the far-right means asking questions about class and wealth inequality

Beyond charity: A glimpse of a socialist future

Beyond charity part two: Beyond socialism?

Beware the Centre for Social (Victorian) Justice

Disappointing meanwhile to see the Charities Aid Foundation sharing the podium with the right-wing neo-liberal Victorian-styled philanthropy organisation set up by Iain Duncan Smith to justify austerity and welfare cuts.

Apparently, the relationship between charities and Government is often poor. Well, tell us something we don’t know. But hey, I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in who is behind this organisation, start here.

Here come the data pixies….

More data. More impact. More pixie dust. I honestly felt depressed when I saw the announcement about the latest DCMS magical data pixie proposals. No shade on PBE, although I do feel they could prioritise different approaches.

But my point is that we keep returning to data as a panacea - or a sprinkling of magical pixie dust - as if ‘knowledge’ or ‘evidence’ or ‘understanding’ is what our problems in the third sector, or even more broadly in social care, are really about.

What bothers me is the swell of starry eyed tech bro data-hyping, and the third sector people who hang on their every word, after this and every other announcement about ‘data’ ‘sharing’. (This is a part of a wider societal obsession I’ll discuss in a future essay - but suffice to say, it’s not just AI that is a bubble. It’s data hoarding itself.)

On this particular development, I have so many questions.

1. Why did we close the What Works centres if this is what was needed? (It wasn’t, and it isn’t.) What happened to the data and evidence that learned ‘what worked’? Did it ‘work’?

2. What or who is this intended to influence? The State to provide more money to commission the voluntary sector? Really? We already know things are effective, there are endless stacks of ‘evidence’ and ‘data’ and the VCS is already provides vast amounts of public services at low cost. What has happened to all the other ‘evidence’ and ‘data’ we have been hoarding for years? What new information do we want to know? What do we not believe there is ‘evidence’ for already? Being nice to people is better for society? Surely not.

3. I find it disappointing that we are still putting our efforts into ‘proving’ the value of the VCS when we could be challenging the threadbare, evidence-free economics of the latest neoliberal Government and the terrible decisions, against the advice of even the IMF, that affect the people charities work with, and indeed our whole society. Too few think tanks and economists are doing this. PBE are wasting thier considerable expertise and platform.

4. If we really believe that arguments on the basis of cost and ‘value’ rather than ‘values’ will tell us the best use of resources, can someone tell me the financial value and return of this exercise?

5. People who believe the VCS still has to ‘prove’ its value by a financial metric, or by other forms of the holy grail/ fairy dust of data (BEHOLD! ABSOLUTE REALITY!) are not people who want to support it. Seriously, Just say ‘no’.

6. You can collect all the data in the world into ‘one big database’ as some dude fantasised on LinkedIn, and then what? Crappy junk data that nobody agrees on, comparing apples with anacondas, and with more null values than the list of IQs at a Reform party conference.

7. What would this magical, passively collected, data allow anyone to do? What structure would we agree on to ensure it has even the very smallest chance of being more useful when centralised than it is when spread across a thousand different sources?

8. What data, and to whose purposes is this to be applied?

But I think it is all starting to drive me to an overall question that came to me this week:

Has anyone noticed charitable delivery getting better since we started obsessing about ‘impact’ and data all the time about 20 years ago? If it did, would we know? And if it hasn’t, what makes us think it will if we just keep collecting and sharing more of it?

Anyway, £2.5m, and £600k per annum isn’t much in the scheme of things. The annual cost is about half a local CVS - so why not?

But I do worry about any time anyone pretends that ‘data’ is what is needed to demonstrate ‘value’ and ‘unlock’ public, or indeed, private funding. Once more for those at the back: the paymasters don’t need data. They. Just. Don’t. Want. To. Pay. Demands for data are very often simply another way of saying ‘go away’. It’s the equivalent of miming throwing the ball for a not very smart dog but keeping it in your hand. It keeps the dog occupied while you eat your ice cream.

Meanwhile, a few books about the critique of what is called ‘data’ (usually just meaning the metrics of neoliberal statecraft) for those who think this is the critique of one crazy person in the voluntary sector.

The Cult of Efficiency - Janice Gross Stein

The Metric Society - On the Quantification of the Social - Steffen Mau

Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? - Mark Fisher

The Tyranny of Metrics - Jerry Z. Mueller

Some Social Implications of Modern Technology - Herbert Marcuse

Charity closures hit the press

It’s encouraging - in a way - to see the national press in England and Scotland covering closures and contractions of charities. With that said, I’m sure the numbers quoted are the tip of the iceberg. The level of redundancies seems to me to be even more striking. It also fails to look at who and what is closing. Jo Jeffery has a briefing note on this coming out soon.

The List goes Live

Meanwhile, Jo’s Magnum Opus, ‘The List’, of ongoing UK charity funder changes and now has its own live website, and it looks beautiful.

That’s it for this week. See you again in a couple of weeks or so for - if there is time - a another essay.

Have a good first half of October.

Alex

Weekly internet nonsense

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help.

Subscribe!

Barely Civil Society is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Share!

Support!

Buy me a coffee and keep me anxious and crabby. Or help me fix my toilet, which I am having to get replaced next week.

Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

Work with me!

Check out my day job webpage.

Or don’t. See if I care.

This week, we’ve all talked - and panicked - a lot about the far-right rally in London at the weekend. I work near Millwall football club, famous for its history of violence and racism, a reputation that in many ways it still deserves.

When my colleague went back to work on Monday, he asked how business had been at the market on Saturday. ‘Terrible,’ a stallholder said. ‘Absolutely dead.’ We didn’t need to ask why, or where everyone was.

Now, a local charity organisation who were going to do outreach work in the area have pulled out because they are too scared of far-right activity. People are being frightened into submission. The ripples are being felt. As a charity in the thick of things, we’re moving to a new footing where we move from community cohesion work to having an anti-racism strategy. We are looking at frameworks and ways to keep people safe. But really, we knew this was coming. We will continue that community cohesion work, and yet, at the same time, recognise that the threats now go beyond divisions and distrust, and to something more immediate and dangerous.

Meanwhile, at the centre of that march on Saturday was a mob of angry and violent men. There has been a great deal of frightening news coverage about that, and a huge amount of rightful outrage and horror in response from the progressive mediasphere. But I want to suggest that, if we focus on that, we’re missing something of massive importance.

Outside the bull ring - full of the kind of men who would have been on National Front marches when I was a kid - were families of multiple generations including kids. And thousands of women. I saw them all arriving together on the trains at Waterloo.

Several posters were right on Linkedin to talk about the very visible problem of white (straight) male violence in the UK.1 (Just the UK?) But to me, focusing too much on the mob of men is ignoring the huge and wider danger that rally showed us. If we think this is just a minority problem of male underclass animus, there is a surprise coming at the ballot box - just as there was in the US. Twice. What is happening is much wider and cuts across gender and class more than many progressives are willing to admit.

Let’s be clear up front: this is not an essay complaining that ‘women/ the middle class are just as bad’. (I am sure that some will skim or see the headline and presume that….) But no: that is pretty pointless stuff and helps nobody. It’s about trying to understand more about how that violent mob relates to a much wider movement. And how that wider movement works to bring in a far wider range of people across class, gender and even race and sexuality.

Subscribe now

The mob, the masses, and the people

Philosopher of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, talked about ‘the mob’, ‘the masses’, and ‘the people’.

‘The mob’ is what you saw in the middle there: angry, violent people who are the déclassé of all classes, many of them criminal. These are the people who help fascism2 scare people into silence. They are a terrorising spectacle. They do often come to take on a leadership role - already you see people of this type taking on key roles in Reform. Hitler was from the rabble.

‘The people’, for Arendt, are the whole representative body of the populace. She notes that, because there is often a wide range of participants in these movements, it can appear to be somehow representative of ‘the people’ as a whole. She cautions that this is not the case, and that making that mistake is dangerous. In this case, despite the wide range of people across the march, there were clearly many groups of people missing. This is an assemblage of sorts, but not a representative ‘people’ in any real sense - despite what they may tell you.

They’re what Arendt called ‘the masses’: the people who feel disenfranchised, unrepresented by parliament, unheard and angry about something inchoate they have lost. If it’s hard to say what, they will find a close source to blame. Usually a type of person. She’s clear that they have not been ‘incorporated’ - and cannot be - into the whole ‘people’ and polis because they have been rendered outsiders. That doesn’t mean they are outlaws - many of them, then as now, are petit-bourgeois and day to day ‘respectable’ people, who simply come to believe that the ‘polis’ no longer speaks for them. These groups of the unheard and unengaged start to cohere. And they start to find each other once leaders and ideologies with easy answers appear.

What happens is that the sense of anger starts to connect all sorts of people who previously weren’t political, indeed, felt excluded by politics. They come from a range of backgrounds, often previously little connected. Those are the people who will support - and eventually vote for - far right parties.3o

Returning to the mob, however. We have a tendency to focus on the mob - violent, frightening, mostly male - because it is spectacular, frightening, somehow exciting, and also, especially for those of us who feel in any way connected to the ‘polis’, seems profoundly, perhaps reassuringly ‘other’. It allows us to believe that the people calling for things that shock us are just a few truly awful dangerous criminals scrapping in public or smashing windows. But when we do, we are ignoring the people who will give us a far right government. Focusing our fears solely on violent white working class male mob allows us to displace our fears onto one group - and not recognise a mass movement.

Often, we have created a sort of simplistic homonculus of right wing voters and activists which is a gross oversimplification. I want to challenge this in terms of gender and class here.

Fascists are women too

There, I’ve said it. As I mentioned, there were thousands of women, of multiple generations, and of some socio-economic class variety, taking part in that march. Interviewed on TV, they spouted the same hate as the men, the same ideas. They were just as likely to be openly racist, anti-migrant, xenophobic, and transphobic.

And yet, across social media (most of all on Linkedin where I am in with a very middle class female professional crowd because, hello, charity sector) there were, as I mentioned, many posts about how this all boiled down to a serious problem with ‘male violence’ in the UK. Well, no disagreement on that in itself - but there is an almost wilful blindness there which pushes the (far-)right-wing behaviour away as something that ‘female’ subjects could not countenance. I’m afraid neither the reality of the march, nor the history of these movements bear this out.

How we can still suggest this in the face of Trumpism, I don’t know. Women turned up at the Capitol riot, not just as followers but as organisers and recruiters. Groups like Women for America First helped stage “Stop the Steal” rallies. Others spread conspiracy theories online, raised money, and mobilised networks. They may not always be in the frontline violence, but they are deeply involved in sustaining and spreading the movement.

White women have always been part of white supremacy. They were active slave-owners in the American South, often exercising brutality in their own right. They opposed school integration in the mid-20th century, leading parent groups and protests. Many joined the Ku Klux Klan or its auxiliaries. Again and again, women have taken up roles as organisers, moral guardians, and enforcers — helping to preserve racial hierarchies under the banner of protecting family, children, or community.4 The fact that women did not fight on battlefields does not mean they have not been complicit, and often had significant agency, in violence of physical, bureaucratic, and cultural forms throughout history.

As Sara Salem points out, when women do things like voting for Trump (or Thatcher) even if people do pay attention and do not simply write the whole phenomenon off as rampaging men, despite evidence to the contrary, there is a sort of performance of shock that women could do this. We’re not noticing that this is a continuation, not an exception. There is quite a memory hole here.

The problem is that we have got so used to aligning patriarchy alone with racism, that we ignore the realities of history.

“Like Salem, as a non-American (albeit one with permanent U.S. residency), I am keen to place U.S. politics in global context. The truth is, as I explain in my book White Tears/Brown Scars, white American women along with their counterparts across the former British Empire have always been heavily invested in maintaining white power structures, even if seemingly to their own detriment. What’s more, they often did this by not merely neglecting, but actively throwing other women under the proverbial bus.

Patriarchy discourse is obstructing our understanding of how power operates in the West.”

Ruby Hamad, We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s Complicity, 2020.

Patriarchy alone cannot explain racism - although they overlap/ ‘intersect’ considerably. But pushing all right-wing activism and violence onto pathological men is just a way of abrogating shared responsibility for white middle class feminists. So it’s absolutely right to critique patriarchy, and indeed, the actions of ‘men’ (straight, white mostly). And there is no doubt that there is a serious problem with white working class male animus, born of a sense of injustice at post-industrialisation, and the perceived connections with the rise of identity politics. But there is also a self-serving blindness to some progressive straight white women’s refusal to acknowledge the complicity of their sisters in racism, homophobia and indeed, misogyny in the way that, say, I have to when considering my role as a problematic ‘man’.5

Is it just working class people?

Gender isn’t the only place where denial creeps in. Class is the other big comfort blanket – blaming it all on the white ‘working class’ - especially when the behaviour seems vulgar, irrational or violent. But these are not uniform class movements at all, much as class and material/ economic factors are huge determinants and drivers in different sections.

Arendt is clear that the ‘working class’ can’t explain ‘the masses’ in fascist movements - they are born of much wider groupings, usually more economically diverse than you might expect, and originally apolitical (indeed, their concerns are still apolitical in any real sense - they just know they feel angry). They have no specific class consciousness. Indeed, some Marxists would say that is where the problem lies.

While Farage is reaching out to industrial towns and the poor huddled dispossessed, he is also making great, ahem, strides with the petit-bourgeois middle classes who dream of ‘common sense’ and see social erosion and a perceived lack of decency and safety (as well as just plain of dislike of difference) as the reason for the sense of grief and loss they feel. Particularly as the cost of a latte continues to increase. (Hey, we all feel it….)

Again, even in the central ‘mob’, you will see people with expensive watches and designer clothes as well as those who are clearly poor and deprived. That has also always been the case when you look at football hooligan gangs.

Likewise, with Trump, while we see massive support from the Hillbilly Elegy types, we also see large numbers of fairly affluent, solidly middle and upper middle class Christian and socially conservative people in all corners of the country rallying to the MAGA flag. And indeed, some extremely wealthy people drawn to the tax policy, and indeed by their own personal pathologies and interests.

What you see in the US, and sadly now in the UK, is a mass movement which is being comprised and drawn together from multiple groups, from multiple classes and backgrounds (even Black and Latino people in Trump’s case), of different ages and agendas, who feel somehow despairing or disenfranchised for reasons real or imagined. They are all looking to a leader and a simple idea of a few enemies to unite them.

And this is how far-right movements are born. Right wing extremists are amazing at ‘intersectional’ collaborations in a way that progressives always struggle - indeed, they have taken on the moves of the Marxist activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci, who advocates exactly that sort of action to build mass movements for the left. We were too busy arguing with each other to notice that Project 2025 was two volumes ahead of us in The Prison Notebooks - and actually doing it.

We ought to note just how amazingly good right wingers tend to be at building community, and a thriving civil society. However uncivil.

A mass in formation: anti-trans uneasy alliances

And the way these coalitions form today is clearest in the culture wars: for example, all around trans rights. Meanwhile, the focuses of social conservatives - anti trans, homophobia, sex fear - unite multiple backgrounds and strands too. Note in the UK the desire to protect young women and girls from asylum seekers and trans people among the flag-shaggers, which quickly overlaps with anti-trans gender-critical feminists, who in turn are finding common cause with Christian Nationalist tradwives - and bloody JK Rowling, previously a die-hard supporter of the UK Labour Party.

If the US has its tradwives and Christian Nationalists, in the UK there is a deep undercurrent of petit-bourgeois anti-trans nastiness I call ‘Mumsnet fascism’ driven by obsessive protection (it is said) of home, family and child.6 Gender critical feminism has a very strong lesbian strand. Some gay and bisexual men have distanced themselves from trans people they see as less ‘normal’ than them.

And then, of course, there comes a ready made seam for the millions of racist, homophobic, misogynistic and transphobic men we tend to foreground in our progressive rhetoric come in. Find a connection, any connection, particularly one that is simple and based on simple single solution like closing asylum hotels or banning trans women from the bogs, and you are starting to form the kind of alliances the left can only dream of. These groups do not agree on many things - but their overlap on elements is what produces the sheer numbers an electoral shift requires.

These alliances are bound to end badly, but, whatever the faultlines, a movement and a yoking together of disparate grievances is again being formed. Not based on class, or gender, but on specific enemies, grievances, lurid fantasies and inchoate angers barely able to be rationalised, and with zero evidence in reality.

‘They’ are everywhere

So, I can’t be clear enough that I am far from claiming that violent men are not a serious problem. That patriarchy shapes and in many ways drives far-right (and especially Christian Nationalist) movements. And that class is a huge driver of the anger and resentment that has led to the increase in far-right sentiment (which many of us on the left have been screaming would happen for twenty years and more). But I do want to warn off those who would simplify what is happening into an ‘othered’ gang of poor angry men (the ‘mob’ spectacle who frighten us all, and indeed, are intended to).

Charity worker Rebecca White, Kevin Taylor-McKnight and I have all experienced a particular troll on Linkedin who pushes anti-trans, anti-migrant sentiment, all the while insulting us. She doesn’t use her full name, or an image, but she does show her employer - a large arts and culture charity working to ‘bring people together’ in Glasgow.

‘Other’ these people all you like - they are right there next to you. Even worse, they probably believe in some things you do. I think we should close asylum hotels and that they are a waste of money too - because we should have built a housing supply that could house our own population, as well as additional capacity for specific issues. I think asylum-seekers should be allowed to work so that they are not reliant on what others call ‘handouts’ (and I call vital assistance) where we set them up to fail and beg in the worst of all possible worlds, and have the chance to live a life and have some autonomy in a bad situation. Indeed, they might even then be able to pay rent and find their own their own space - who knows, even have friends round, somewhere for their kids to sleep, or a kitchen to cook in. You know: living.

I want to protect women and girls from violence too - but I know their uncles and husbands, or indeed, Andrew Tate and r*pe culture, are a far greater risk than a person who has changed their gender. The simple solutions are offered, in soundbites and little sadistic chunks of rage and cruelty and fantasy, and they work so much better than evidence, especially when it mobilises a wider sense of anger.

Meanwhile I do also agree that working class white people - yes, even men - have been left behind in a post-industrial age. Their mental health is abysmal (hence the violence and aggression). Their pain and sadness and grief and lack of agency in many cases are minimised or indeed mocked. (See Owen Jones’ ‘Chavs’.) Their prospects and health are poor. But this does not make Black or other minority groups either less important, or the cause of their pain. And that pain, as my white working class dad and my friends would have said, is ‘no excuse to be a c*nt’. As you can see, he was far from ‘woke’, but he knew when he was being manipulated by people like Nigel Farage - and that they offered zero solution to any of the problems that others around him raged against. (He was an anarchist btw, not a socialist. He took a very dim view of humanity, which I inherited.)

As Amhara Spence notes, nobody else is organising poor white people who are of special interest to both Labour and Reform: we all know that much of the reason people feel ‘left behind’ is the massive and increasing wealth inequality in the UK and US. The progressive left has spectacularly failed to address those people. Others have noted that political organising on the left has totally abandoned these groups - and the right have been incredibly adept at getting people actively involved. Not just donating or turning up to vote. This is partly because it fails to see them as anything other than a problem. And it has to be said calling them racists and fascists probably isn’t helping, even if, in many cases, it is true. I hold my hand up here - but it is important if it means the rest of us start to take this seriously.

Again, the collapse of local civil society and community has been one of the greatest enablers of the far right And they have swooped in and recreated what mainstream society and neoliberal economy has taken away, in their own nasty image.

Amahra Spence

Who Is Organising Poor White Folks Towards Liberation?

Now, I want to be really choiceful in my language and intention here. This is not a pity party. Nor is this easy to write, as someone who dedicates her life, practice, study and politics to the liberation and emancipation of African-descendent people. I’m digging deep. But my political commitments have always been wide enough to acknowledge that such li…

Read more

a year ago · 92 likes · 9 comments · Amahra Spence

The point of all this is not just to say ‘women are bad too’, or ‘not all men’. Or to somehow argue that white poor nationalists should be pitied for their rage and cruelty. The point is to notice that, however easy and in some ways comforting it is to think of a this as a problem for badly behaved men, we are ignoring the whole process of creation of a mass movement for extreme right nationalism which goes far beyond that. The contours reach into all sorts of places where women, and even, god forbid, respectable middle class people, might be. That is the skill, and the power, of successful fascist movements. We ignore that at our peril.

What will happen?

A Reform victory may be just a nightmarish phantasm - I hope so. It has been warned about many times before (a social media commenter the same age as me reminds me that people have been predicting a win for the Front Nationale in France at every election for 30 years - she’s right. Likewise we’ve had panics about UKIP, Reform, the BNP here fairly regularly). But then again, perhaps it has only been prevented as a result of us finally screaming and panicking when we see the real potential: and the face of the mob fighting in the streets. Perhaps we will have that to thank Tommy Robinson for, at least. Furthermore, that was a march of only 130,000 people. That is big, but there have been considerably bigger.

Nonetheless, I will point out again that James Callaghan’s Labour Government returned from the electoral wilderness in the mid seventies. Then, beset by strikes and disputes, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and a national and world economic crisis, they handed over power to the most right-wing Government the UK had ever seen in 1979. And note: the majority of union members - largely voted for Thatcher (talk about self-mutilation), and by 1983, the skilled working class were voting evenly for Thatcher and Labour. A small majority of women voted for her in 1979, rising to a huge majority (up to 47%) in following years.

Meanwhile, we have to tell our leaders: those are not ‘the people’. No small force, sure, but they’re a ragged coalition of people who have been told their lives are worse because of a common enemy. When the real common enemy is somewhere else entirely. Stopping the Overton window of mainstream politics shifting further to the extreme right is one of the things we must do most urgently.7 Keir Starmer is not listening.

And finally, a note again: the level of community organising and mobilisation of civil society we are seeing here on the right is impressive. If we learn anything, it’s that our own methods work - and those of us on the left need to redouble them, or be left behind.

Other interesting stuff

Some good linkedin posts from Kevin TM and Rachel Reese.

Couldn;t agree more with this post from Charlotte Ashlock:

Weekly internet nonsense

This has been very stressful, and you have been very good. So here is a lynx in a cardboard box.

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help

1. Subscribe!

Subscribe and share! To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Or share this post.

2. Share!

2. Support!

If you buy me a coffee, you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. As I mentioned, the price of a latte (oat milk cortado actually) is still going up, and I may need to turn to blaming migrants and trans people if that continues. See: there’s something practical you can to do stop fascism.

The black shirt is just a coincidence.

3. Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)

The Philanthropy Bros

Linkedin posts like these are why I have a very serious problem with the notion of philanthropy. Truly emetic. Have a read:

It gets better:

“Your donors aren't the problem. Your team's attitude toward donors is the problem.
[..]
Either hire fundraisers who genuinely appreciate successful people, or help your current team work through their wealth-related biases.
[..]
”Stop expecting people who are uncomfortable with wealth to be successful at wealth-based fundraising.

Because in fundraising, your team's attitude toward donors determines your donors' attitude toward you.”

- American bloke, Linkedin post 3rd September

What I increasingly find is that fundraisers are indeed uncomfortable with wealth. (And they write to me all the time to tell me this.) As I’ve noted elsewhere, the sense of discomfort in the pit of the stomach for many fundraisers who sit between the greedy and the needy is leading to burnout from the sheer toxicity of working constantly against their core beliefs. We’re all well aware of “donors’ attitude towards us.”

All the professionals the poster lists as the ‘problem’ in nonprofits are precisely the people who should be in charge. Because, yes, strangely, people who see the sharp end of inequality don't believe the wealthy are magical humans. They know these are most often the greedy lucky children of the wealthy. (“Not all of them!” Well, perhaps. But the ‘working class made good’ are often the worst of the worst.)

As I said to a Linkedin commenter who added the obligatory ‘not all philanthropists’ volley, we need to change this narrative. Even if some individuals are decent, the system should be doing more to make less money available for philanthropy, frankly. If the wealthy truly believe they’re doing the lord’s work, as someone who hoards wealth then throws some crumbs (or even a handful) to the poor, there are a few key checks: would you be just as happy to pay that money in taxation? Would you be happy for the money to be given with absolutely no evidence to the outside world of your giving? Would you be willing to give it to fund toilet paper and printing? And would you be happy for the use of that money to be decided democratically? If not, you can jog on.1

I’ve written extensively elsewhere about the Tech Bros (as an example) who detoxify themselves with the most self-interested forms of philanthropy in the tradition of the Gilded Age billionaires. But within the philanthropy industry itself, there are very identifable Philanthropy Bros. (To be fair, they aren’t all of the male variety.) You can guarantee the word ‘portfolio’ will appear rapidly, not to mention a hell of a lot of macho impact. They like to swagger around and pretend that they are ‘comfortable with wealth’ and ‘genuinely appreciative of successful people.’ But to me, I’m always put in mind of the tiny fish that hang around the mouths of sharks, whose teeth they clean. They might well imagine they are best buds with the sharks - but the sharks just find them useful. And not even worth eating.

In the comments, alongside significant concerns from decent people, more wealth-cult bullshit nuggets bobbed around like it was a Kentish beach. Honestly, I was expecting some of them to start quoting the Kardashians, The Secret or indeed, Donald Trump. Maybe we should all just manifest.

As I’ve been arguing for the last year, I think we all need to get much less comfortable with wealth and the wealthy. We need to stop asking, and start taking, through taxation and legislation. We need to recognise that most wealth in philanthropy is twice stolen - once through profit exploitation, and once through tax avoidance. And there is much more to be done in actively shaming the extremely wealthy - not flattering.

As charities and nonprofits start to recognise and embrace their own values, rather than those imposed by ‘philanthropy’, and fight to end this inequality rather than simply mop up after it, we won't need hot takes like this polluting our work. And we won't need to keep courting the kind of philanthropists who require them. ‘Your donors aren’t the problem’ is so wrong. They are EXACTLY the problem.2

[As an aside: I couldn’t help seeing something of an on-ramp here, through expectations of ‘genuine appreciation of successful people’, with the culture that has led to notorious sexual abuse scandals in the philanthropy sector. Some of my fellow Substackers will well recognise this….]

Go deeper: and criticise the right things

That post did put a lot of people’s backs up: some excellent take downs followed and the Good Eggs were close to cracking on our LinkedIn chat. But as ever, elsewhere many went to a place of individualised diversity rage as opposed to challenging the more fundamental injustice. “What about working class people!?” they cried. “You’re excluding them from these jobs.”

Okay, so, let me get this straight: our critique is “But that means that people from poor backgrounds can’t beg rich people for money - to fix the society those same people broke.” Are we saying “everybody should be equally allowed to beg rich people for money”?

Excuse me for a moment.

It is not enough to say ‘we need to help a wider range of people be exploited by capitalism.’ These are the kinds of arguments I’m so tired of seeing in the DEI industry.

My suggestion: working class people should avoid these jobs like the plague, and redouble campaigning and activism to make this unecessary. This may be through the formal nonprofit sector, or it might be using skills they have built there - for example, as fundraisers - to take action which will be far more valuable in the long term than just begging for scraps for a soup kitchen.

We need much bigger ambitions than voluntary capitalist giving, run by Philanthropy Bros who get excited at the thought of a rich Zaddy giving them a ride in their Tesla.

And if you must have the ride (it’s okay if you enjoy it, I won’t tell anyone), at least go back later and steal the hubcaps.3

I’m a realist. We need these people’s money. Day by day, do your best to smile and show your appreciation of their success. But please don’t forget what this is really about. The end goal of our work should be that Philanthropy is unnecessary, beyond the odd wing of a gallery or opera house.

Quick bits

Black Rock and Lloyds are stealing your homes

There are some very concerning things happening in the rush to build in housing markets that we aren’t talking about enough. These are global changes and dangers.

Black Rock, the asset management company who won’t get out of my LinkedIn feed, are buying up thousands of homes across the world because they recognise this is an asset that will provide ongoing income ad eternam - and remove all possibility of control over their own living situation from the hands of mortals.

Meanwhile in the UK, Lloyds PLC plans to own 30,000 homes by 2030 for rent. Again, some of this will add to the stock (others will just be taken into private ownership - some by repossession on mortgage defaults when the crunch happens) - but what it will also do is put more and more capital and wealth into the hands of the 1%.

None of this is to be welcomed. It is not the solution to the problem: it is more of the same problem.

Oh, great. Rachel Reeves is reshuffling the Treasury. 🙄

Rachel Reeves reshuffling her team goes way beyond rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is more like letting the iceberg decide the seating plan.

Letting Torsten Bell come and work directly on the budget is wise, and politically savvy, I think, given that at some point the unthinkable may need to happen and Reeves will shuffle off. Obviously, Bell has the most actual economic expertise in the Government.

Amusingly, Gary Stevenson recently called him ‘the poshest man I have ever met’ when he was on Campbell and Stewart’s The Rest is Politics. I don’t think that interview was Stevenson’s finest moment, but it was certainly amusing to hear, and to see Alastair Campbell almost shoot his drink out of his nose.

Meanwhile, Owen Jones doesn’t think much of Bell, and I must say Bell’s performances in the hot seat on political interviews are pretty amateurish. He does come across as incredibly arrogant and snooty. I’m hopeful it’s because he is being wheeled out to defend the indefensible rather than a sheer lack of ability or understanding.

Bell’s economics are focused on growth through investment and reducing inequality. Or at least, they were when he wrote his book and before he became a junior minister. What his input can be at this stage, when Labour have still decided to live with their pre-election acts of policy self-mutilation, remains to be seen. More and more in Government, Bell has seemed to be an arch Blairite. But even a Blairite would be an improvement to the Cameron 2.0 government we are currently experiencing.

Impact, Impact, Impact and Delivery, Delivery, Delivery

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the obsessive focus on instrumental terms to describe our work in the voluntary sector: impact, change, tranformation, rather than meaningful words like love, hope, care, community. And now Keir Starmer is pushing ‘delivery’. It’s another of those words that betrays no values, no morals, no end goal. And that, perhaps is because he has none of those, beyond the ‘business as usual’ of neoliberal economics.

This was always the danger: that we elected (with little choice) a Government who quite clearly had zero idea of what a good society looked like, except that its economy should grow.

Starmer’s belief that ‘delivery’ of whatever is delivered will be seen as meaningful in itself ignores the very clear signals around us all: that we desperately need a bolster against very different values spreading like herpes across the country and world.

And this refusal of progressives to fight on values - and especially on economic injustice - is why this is happening. Starmer is deliberately avoiding the difficulties of overt ideology, of values, or big words, sticking with the covert kind of ‘common sense’ values and ideology (neoliberal business as usual), and focused on technocratic ‘stuff’.

Long forgotten now is the incompetence of the Tories - and indeed, nobody cares. As demonstrated by Reform’s ongoing success despite their local Council disasters, and with the incompetent administration in the US, people could not care less about competence. In fact, its effects may even be sadisitically valuable to people. The damage of state incompetence feeds into the ‘burn it all down’ demands which go hand in hand with right wing hatred.

Starmer, and the rest of us, need to understand: the fight is over values. Without that, left wing parties are doomed to irrelevance, electoral defeat, and indeed, to complicity in the rise of the Right. As Howard Zinn put it, ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train.’ You’re on it, or you’re off it.

Weekly internet nonsense

Finally some good news! I absolutely love this. So many empty Debenhams branches have left a real scar in town centres. (And my mum is bereft…) I can ride a skateboard you know. I mean, a few metres. I wasn’t an athletic child.

It’s a cheap gag and I’m totally here for it. Have to confess I got caught up in the excitement over the weekend…. (Wink wink.)

This guy is my spirit animal.

This series of AI videos gets better and better.

And finally:

Barely Civil Society is about making the nonprofit world braver.

Here are three ways to help

1. Subscribe and share!

Subscribe and share! To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Or share this post.

Subscribe now

Share

2. Support!

If you donate to my work, you can help me spend more time researching and writing - including some bigger projects I’m working towards. Could you buy me a coffee?

3. Send me a message

The messages people send me every couple of weeks are my favourite thing. Drop me a line and say hi! What made sense to you? And what didn’t? (Be nice.)