Should Charities be Political?
Why we need to re-join civil society. Plus local authority and charity updates.
A while ago, I paid someone for career advice. Unfortunately it wasn’t great - it was the kind I would have got from a bad Connexions advisor in the 00s. But one thing stuck with me
They rather darkly said, just before I went for an interview (thanks for that), they hoped “my bitterness for the sector would not hold me back.”
In some ways they were right - it could hold me back. But when I discussed this recently with a group of other charity consultants and ex-CEOs, what we all agreed was that actually, our sense of rage about the sector was really something quite different - it was outrage. Outrage is different from just rage, or indeed, bitterness - it’s righteous anger about things that should not happen. And that, after all, is why I was here in the first place. After 25 years of my body and soul and bank account being battered by the politics and economics of the sector, the one thing I have never lost is my ability to feel truly outraged by injustice. Increasingly that has been about the sector itself, as well as all the things we’ve been trying to change according to our causes.
What some of us have learned over the last year or so is to harness that, not push it down; much as I did when I first made the move from (wannabe) activist to charity worker all those years ago. And harnessing that sense of outrage is also partly why I started this blog. Because outrage without expression becomes bitterness. If we were more open about our genuine anger about the problems we see and are trying to solve - as well as the conditions we find ourselves working in - we may feel less demoralised, a bit more active, and less exhausted.
Coming out as socialists
It was also why I decided to ‘come out’ as a socialist on Linkedin and in day to day discussions during the last election. Not that most charity people aren’t socialists of some sort, and probably left-wing party supporters after a fashion. When you meet a charity Tory, it always seems bit like meeting a straight drag queen: a bit weird, but, you know… I guess they are out there. But nonetheless, we are made to feel that we ought to hide our political allegiances, opinions, and principles. For many years we have been told to be cautious about sharing overtly political (I don’t mean just party political) views. They could be bad for our charities, and certainly, our careers. (And may still be.)
Caution is not the same as quietism however.
Now Labour has appeared, I think everyone is feeling a bit braver. The more extremist fringes of the last Government actively despised organised charity because they were so centralising and authoritarian in their power, and ideologically opposed to empathy. The only community involvement they would allow was when a baying mob of the discontented could be rallied to their populist goals. The political ideology - a confection of aritocracy and latterly neoliberal plutocracy - could only permit a ‘philanthropic’ aristocracy giving money to the servile grateful (noblesse oblige). Or a technocratic professional or servant class delivering public services quietly on the cheap (neoliberal capitalism).
But civil society has always been precisely about saying things that power may not want to hear. Standing up for things. And campaigning. The last few Conservative governments tried to actively kill civil society itself, which has been a cornerstone of liberal democracy since its birth. That’s why the Civil Society Covenant is valuable, for now at least (in 4 years I think we’re inevitably going to have another Tory Government, and then we’ll have to rethink). Now, it is, literally, all talk. But talk in itself is valuable - for now, the covenant may actually allow that talk to happen.
Is a charity a tax code?
The need to quiet yourselves in the transition from activists to organisation and nonprofit status is a running theme in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, something of a bible for pissed-off American nonprofit people. What it notes time and again, is that in seeking nonprofit status, no doubt sometimes unknowingly, social change causes start to take the more conservative, cautious, and incremental route, rather than a deeper, more root and branch, fundamental change. In the Amercian context (which I do think is different, where foundations have had a much more overtly political and nefarious background) charitable funding has, since its inception, been partly about quieting and controlling the sayable in the activist and social change sphere.
“How did the 501(c)(3), or non-profit, model develop, and for what reasons? How did this model impact the direction of social justice organizing? How has funding from foundations impacted the course of social justice movements? How does 501(c)(3) status impact the relationship of social justice organizations to the state and give it opportunities to co-opt movements? Are there ways the non-profit model can be used to support more radical visions for social change? What alternatives to 501(c)(3) are there for building viable social justice movements in the US? What models for organizing outside the non-profit/NGO (nongovernmental organization) model exist outside the US that may help us?’”1
Which of course might make you ask: if the price of charitable status is silence on social justice, do you want to be a charity? And is that what we are - here and in the US? A tax code? Has the price of our tax break essentially been our ejection from a broader civil society and social change agenda?
Charity is politics
The thing is, for me, charity work has to be fundamentally, absolutely, political. Because it relates to how we organise our society, how we care for people, how we educate people, how we spend and make our money, what we consider to be ‘helping’ people, and the fundamental distribution of resources. As well as who is ‘deserving’ of help. And who gets rights. And who gets power. Deciding that charities themselves aren’t allowed to speak about this is an interesting one. Because, spoken or not, we act on it all the time.
And for me, it’s like Howard Zinn said: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Now certainly, I am not green enough to think that ‘charity’ - which describes almost as wide a range of things as nonprofit or civil society in itself - is essentially transformative, or certainly, left wing. Iain Duncin’ Donuts’ think tank, Liz Truss’s fave that helped her think-tank the economy. Those political allegiances are obvious to anyone but the Charity Commission.
But what about those charities which seek to simply take income and give it to the deserving poor, likewise. Are they political at all? Well, yes. Because things that claim not to be political do have an ideology - it’s a conservative ideology (small c).
Now of course, the prohibitions on policy and party political pronouncements seem on the surface to prevent very little. We can speak on an issue as long as it’s not party-related. (And you will have seen how cautious I am in my own writing - I would never even suggest partisan thoughts, his forbid.) But the creep of that caution - and the active silencing by threats and bullying, of which no political party has been innocent in the past, may be dangerously effective at silencing those who are less conservative, or less powerful; those who dream of more fundamental change.
When I recently suggested online that it was right that charities should come off Tw*tter, and asked why on earth they hadn’t got off before now, somebody in the comments said ‘Why should they? Charities are here to serve people, not to get involved in silly culture wars.’ (My emphasis)
Well, first of all, I’m not sure the culture wars are silly - although they certainly are regrettable. I mean, Elon Musk has just stolen the democracy of the biggest military power on the planet on behalf of an overtly fascist half-man half-tangerine.2
But anyway, that’s why, more and more, I don’t agree we are just there to ‘serve’. It’s important that we place charities in the pool of ‘civil society’. Civil society was invented (okay, developed) to influence big questions, as part of a fundamental turn in society and culture driven by a move away from autocracy, towards parliamentary decmocracy, and towards public sphere discussions and debate. Not just to pootle around the edges ‘serving’ people. ‘Almsgiving’ is of course a long, long tradition. But its transformation into a part of society that has some kind of say in reform alongside its attempts to alleviate misery, was part of the radical developments in the Victorian philanthropy that we always disdain (it wasn’t all bad…), with the growth of reformers alongside the plain old ‘servants’ of the poor.
And to my mind, a proper civil society - and proper charities - are ignoring their responsibilities and social role if they do not also campaign, at whatever small level. At the very least, that means speaking out on issues that affect the people or society they care about. They have to understand the fundamentally political nature of what they do. Because quietism is also political. (I came originally from AIDS activism, where ‘Silence = Death’ was the phrase du jour.)
Charities have been encouraged to consider the potential risks to their reputation of not campaigning to advance their cause.
Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said in a panel discussion at Bates Wells’ annual charity conference yesterday that there are always risks when charities campaign to achieve change. But charities need to be bold and firm when campaigning, Bennett said, and stick to their fundamental charitable objectives.
“The question I always say is ‘what’s the reputational risk of us not doing something?’” he said. “[The] reputational risk of us not doing something is that we fail to achieve what we set up to achieve.”
Shakespeare’s Globe CEO Stella Kanu, meanwhile, said charities should be less reactive in their campaigning. She said: “We should […] create the right culture and conditions to move from reputational risk and fear factor to risk acceptance.”
Charities urged to consider reputational risks of not campaigning,’ Chongyang Zhang, 20 Nov 2024, Civil Society.3
Ooh, I love it when we talk about risk acceptance. Power to the people! …But they’re absolutely right. (Even if again there is always that very Bayes-y managerialism which our sector leaders tend to cling to above all else.)
The recent Employers’ NI panic - which I do understand financially - made it feel more and more that many charities are just small businesses providing social services on the cheap. They allow public sector providers to take advantage of the tax offered, which charities can then use to underprice contracts. Those are then partly subsidised by philanthropists, many of whom are themselves just looking for tax breaks. It’s pretty baroque as a model when you look at it that way, isn’t it?
And there’s nothing wrong with being a small business - I’m one too. Let’s face it, most small businesses are not for profit - we don’t choose to run a small accountancy practice, a consultancy practice, or a cafe, or a football coaching business or whatever, for ‘profit’ really. We run it to make a living wage. And being a small business is really hard for all of us. But is there a substantial or substantive difference between what a local charity delivering public services does, and what some other small business does?
Yes, in governance. And hopefully, you will tend to find differences in culture (although not in some). But the finances aren’t much different, apart from a tax break and the misery of restricted funding. If charities are unable to fight, to fundamentally change the conditions they inhabit, and under which their beneficiaries suffer, just how great is the real difference? Indeed, the weirdest thing of all is that a standard business, small or otherwise, could do as much political campaigning as it fancied. Like Farage’ Reform for example. Or Musk’s Tw*tter. How valuable is that tax break if you really want to change the world?
Burnout and moral injury
And finally, it seems to me there is another risk.
We are all tired and burned out. I think that is partly after a good 15 years of relentless bad news, economic catastrophe, and increasingly, persecution by our previous Government. But burnout has another driver. It’s the concept of ‘moral injury’ or ‘moral distress’:
"Moral injury is understood to be the strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person's moral or ethical code... Can cause profound feelings of shame and guilt, and alterations in cognitions and beliefs (eg, 'I am a failure', 'colleagues don't care about me'), as well as maladaptive coping responses."4
Moral injury has been strongly linked with burnout, and serious mental health issues, especially among the military and health workers. As the BMA makes clear:
“Moral injury has been linked to compassion fatigue, burnout, [and] depression. […] The causes of moral distress in medical staff are varied but they are often consistent across countries. Doctors can experience moral distress due to:
Lack of agency to make the best decisions for patients
Insufficient resources or non-existent resources to provide care to suitable professional standards
Witnessing poor standards of care
Practical experience of medical care clashing with ethical standards taught at medical school and doctors’ own personal ethical standards
Complicity in wrongdoing”.5
Most of the things described above could describe the things we experience in care roles in the VCS. Indeed, this takes me most of all to the research on the mental distress of charity CEOs most of all - I know that feeling a sense of ‘complicity in wrongdoing’, whether deserved or not, was something I often felt.
But the reality is that if your values don’t align with their work, it rots your guts. It’s a heavy burden. This continuous compromise on values leads to emotional exhaustion and a gradual erosion of motivation. And you will end up very very bitter - that outrage turns to something much less helpful and motivating. That, I think, is partly why so many of us are burning out.
It seems to me that, even for our own self-preservation, we need to speak out, we need to be openly politically engaged. Without that, our quietism will not only stop us achieving the social change that many of us desire; but also, make us burned out, unwell, and just… bitter.
If it helps, let me tell you: I’ve never felt more passionate about my work and what we all do in civil society than I have since I started being more honest.
Local Authorities, Oh My God What Now
We talked last week about the fun fun fun of Local Authorities using their local VCS as a cheap labour source to deal with their own financial difficulties. Just Say No was my take. As much as that is possible. There’s been some good news - again, the right noises, although how much practically can change, we shall see. Labour has said they will move money from the richest to the poorest local authorities, reversing the trend of the last few years under the kleptocracy.
Council funding to be redirected from England’s richest areas to most deprived Patrick Butler and Kieran Stacey, the Guardian. 28th Novermber 2024
Ministers will also consider local authority requests to raise council tax above threshold on case by case basis.
And yet the sheer depth of the local authority shitshow is even worse than imagined.
Not only are Local Authority finances bare, they are completely unknown. 90% of local authorities don’t even have accounts. This has been kept relatively quiet by the press, and I suspect Labour didn’t much want to discuss it either - even if it’s as clear as possible that the problem comes from the previous Governments.The sheer level of banana-republic level financial incompetence shown by the last government should continue to amaze anyone who wasn’t paying attention. This issue was another gift from the Conservative governments, and particularly Eric Pickles, who decided in 2015 that it would save bank if they gave council auditing to the private sector. But there weren’t enough qualified accountants, becaude local authoritiy work doesn’t make enough profit, so the private sector couldn’t be arsed, and it didn’t get done.
And now nobody even knows how much they’ve spent.
My suspicion is that they probably don’t want to know. I suspect we would find that a much larger percentage (maybe 90%, coincidentally) are actually insolvent and avoiding this declaration. I can understand the Government wanting to avoid this too - imagine having to take tens, perhaps hundreds of local authorities under central control all at once, and bail them out to the tune of probably billions. But if they don’t at least publicly recognise it and apportion blame correctly now, bad things will happen later in their term. Finding out the sheer depths of this issue could cause a massive financial crisis that will go far beyond local government itself. The sheer scale of that and its effect in the macroeconomy as well as the Government can’t be underestimated.
Watchdog refuses to sign off UK public sector accounts over unreliable data
National Audit Office ‘disclaims’ accounts because of shortcomings in auditing of English local authorities
“The roots of the audit crisis – described by one expert as a “public administration disaster” – date back to the former local government secretary Eric Pickles’s 2015 abolition of the Audit Commission, which provided oversight of council finances and audit, and create a private market in auditing local authority accounts.
Pickles’ decision – driven by a desire to cut red tape and save money – is now widely seen as a failure. Big accountancy firms see audit work as unprofitable and there are chronic staff shortages. There are just 106 people in England qualified to work in a market that requires annual audits of hundreds of public bodies.”6
Just as in the 70s with the Callaghan government, the Tory mistakes will be passed off by the Murdoch and Rothermere fascist rags as Labour’s economic mismanagement. By that stage, the more they resist, the more they will look guilty.
Anyway, small consolations: my sense is that charities can take some comfort in the fact that Local Authority finances are even more buggered than yours. So, next time the Local Authority or any public sector body tells charities that they need to manage their finances better, feel free to laugh before you show them your, you know, solid and fully audited accounts.
And finally…
LinkedIn has gone even WEIRDER
God, LinkedIn is getting even weirder. The posting of narcissistic work drivel is turning into people trying to out-overshare each other and see who can have the most offensive/ provocative post heading. People posting baby scans (about which someone said, “Um, excuse me, this is not Facebook and I’m not your mum….” Never mind the triggers that may have.) I mean I’ve changed what I put on there in the last year or so, but…. It’s still about work. There’s being authentic and willing to say a few more things which are real about your industry - but then there’s just not understanding boundaries.
I’m not going to start posting pics of my nasal biopsy or stories about my evil ex on Microsoft’s LinkedIn. That’s what Facebook is for. But of course, it’s happening because the other social media are dead dead dead. The thing is, The Book of Face only has the elderly boomers left. Millennials are on Instant-Gramme doing their makeup and skits about having sore knees (the first generation ever to get old). And Gen Z are on The Ticks and Tocks doing whatever they do. Meanwhile, Gen Alpha are, hopefully, on YouTube learning about how to build a makeshift boat in preparation for a post-Trump climate.
Meanwhile, there’s another thing on LinkedIn. Not just oversharing but ‘overswearing’. I mean look, the odd one here and there can stand out. British people swear better than anyone else in the world. But rapidly it’s becoming a really tired marketing cliche, especially if it’s literally leading your brand. If the only thing you have to differentiate you is a swear word, it’s not good. So here is a promise: I’ve decided not to swear any more because it’s been overdone.
Some corporate guy in a suit did a LinkedIn post the other day which had the heading “I don’t p*ss about.” Nothing else. Um, okay, killer. You do you. But at least have the guts to actually spell out one of the least offensive swear words. F*ckwit.🙄
Until next time….
I hate Christmas but even I am gagging for Christmas break - it’s been brutal. Then in January, I still have a slot or two available for anyone looking for:
Transforming operations for deliery charities and grantmakers alike
Developing strategies that actually work - not just on a piece of paper….
Reviewing and enhancing grantmaking approaches
Developing financial sustainability plans
Creating realistic income generation plans
Conducting meaningful evaluations and research
Facilitating the conversations that matter
Helping organisations tell their story better
Drop me a line if I can help.
Introduction, The Revolution Will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed. 2017. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-will-not-be-funded.
Silly culture wars like… queer and trans rights, or rights for people with AIDS? Women’s rights? Racial equity? Redistributive economics? Those kind of culture wars? All of those things that Twitter is literally trying to destroy as the ‘woke mind virus’? It must be nice to be able to think these things are silly. I wonder if they’re one of those straight drag queens, I mean charity Tories?
‘Charities urged to consider reputational risks of not campaigning,’ Chongyang Zhang, 20 Nov 2024, Civil Society. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/charities-urged-to-consider-reputational-risks-of-not-campaigning.html
The Lancet - Moral injury: the effect on mental health and implications for treatment
Victoria Williamsona,b victoria.williamson@kcl.ac.uk ∙ Dominic Murphya,c ∙ Andrea Phelpsd ∙ David Forbesd ∙ Neil Greenberga
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00113-9/fulltext
BMA: Moral distress and moral injury: Recognising and tackling it for UK doctors. See: https://www.bma.org.uk/media/4209/bma-moral-distress-injury-survey-report-june-2021.pdf
Patrick Butler and Michael Goodier, Guardian, 26th November 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/26/watchdog-refuses-to-sign-off-uk-public-sector-accounts-over-unreliable-data