Allen Lane Foundation
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Dissent, independence and risk — the challenge for independent grant making trusts' Julia Unwin Introduction I am honoured to be invited here today to give this prestigious lecture which has such an important place in the calendar of the charitable sector. I am of course horribly conscious of the sea of experience in the room and acknowledge that I would be infinitely more relaxed addressing the Albert Hall full of people who know nothing about my subject, than this smaller, more select and infinitely better informed audience. What I want to do today is to explore the role of the voluntary sector as a source of challenge, a legitimate channel for dissent - an independent platform for influence – and to argue that the way in which we fund the UK voluntary sector has a fundamental influence on the sectors ability to express dissent.
Twin roles of the voluntary sector There has been a great deal of attention in the last few years on what is often called the twin role of the not for profit sector, broader civil society or - as I shall unfashionably term it - the voluntary sector. The twin roles of both running services and building social glue. We have endlessly and in detail discussed the historic role of the voluntary sector in providing vital services. And all of us in this room have bridled at the way in which ministers, on an apparently annual basis, ‘discover’ the voluntary sector and the way in which it can provide help and support for people in need. Whether we are talking about the services that have historically been run in the voluntary sector, the complementary ones, the ones that didn’t fit neatly into the states formulation, or the services that have been at least since 1945, run primarily by the state - the schools the hospitals, the housing, the job centres and the rest. And the ministers, as we could have told them, have in different ways concluded that there are some particularly good things about the voluntary sector running services.
We can all debate for as long as we want to whether it is the added social capital, or perhaps simply the different management and governance structure, that makes all this possible, but by and large we have accepted that voluntary organisations run services, and that sometimes, but not always, they run those services in ways that are better, more appropriate and more responsive than either their local authority or private sector competitors. And at the same time as this debate has taken place, we have discussed at length the role of the voluntary sector in building a strong, vibrant civil society. It is not just nostalgia to recognise that the glue that binds us has been powerfully diluted as the institutions of civil society – the churches, the political parties and the trades unions - have come under increasing fire, (that is if the contempt and dismissal of the last fifty years can be described as anything like fire.) But if chess clubs and amateur dramatics clubs, mens’ choirs and allotment societies are to be replaced it is through the activity of the voluntary sector, working locally to build the social glue that holds society together. That is how we will manage the civil renewal that we so desperately need.
The vibrancy and dynamism of this part of the voluntary sector holds much of the promise for the future. But today I want to risk taking this debate one stage further. I want to build on the idea that the voluntary sector is of course provider of services and creator of social capital, and what I want to explore is the role of the voluntary sector in articulating dissent, in challenging the status quo, in shouting enough, we want something to change. And in so doing I will look at the role of the grant making trusts – in making that dissent possible, in providing a platform for real challenge, for real dissent and I want to look at the risks that this approach heralds. The sector’s role in providing services, and the sector role in developing social glue – both involve it in the expression of dissent and the formation of challenge. This is not – in my view- an added extra. It is the core business of organisations that really seek to stand alongside the dispossessed. Organisations that fail to do this – for whatever reason – are walking away from the dispossessed people they exist to support. Those that know about how things are going wrong – and really know it from the experience of those they serve – have a duty to shout about that knowledge, and to challenge and question until something is done. In the long run the self censorship that fears reprisals and seeks to pre-empt them is as dangerous for the freedom of the sector as the abuse of position by the powerful seeking to silence dissent. But of far more concern to me today is the damage that is done to people in need by a voluntary sector that is too frightened to challenge on their behalf, The voluntary sector offers two sorts of challenge:
The historic duty of the voluntary sector has been to shine a light in the dark corners of society – to draw attention to the evils that persist, and perhaps will always exist, as well as the new horrors, lurking in the shadows. Shining a light that may be a spotlight – focusing the attention of all on one particular issue; or it may be a floodlight, illuminating a whole area and enabling us to see what is really going on; or it may be a searchlight, going outside the gates of our experience, seeking out the hardships that need to be addressed. Over the decades it is voluntary organisations which have:
But it has also been the voluntary sector that has pioneered different ways of doing things. Demonstrated that you can keep persistent truants in school, that there are better ways of caring for people with cancer, and that young children looking after disabled parents can be supported. My late grandmother used to say –better to light a candle than to complain about the dark, - and for many years I believed that this was her own saying. Eleanor Roosevelt, whose phrase it actually was, pioneered the sort of voluntary sector that could light more than just a candle, a veritable candelabra that forced social change after the great depression. Taking on the unpopular demand for equal rights while actively encouraging the development of schools in deprived areas, and later as a founding mother of Unicef, an early – and timely - international effort to harness civil society to end child poverty. And yet recently this historic duty seems to be frustrated. Too often the journals of the voluntary sector bemoan the end of a golden age, the end of a period of innovation, of challenge and of change. Reading some of the commentaries you might be left with the rather desperate image of a highly managerial sector, tied to ever more demanding targets, largely set by an ambitious government with its own diagnosis and prescription, and the voluntary sector as an able, terribly willing, but nevertheless passive provider. Listening to some of the leaders of the sector, you hear tales of organisations perhaps too wedded to providing, too busy doing good, too busy following an agenda, and no longer with the ability to shape that agenda, or make the political weather. At the same time another entirely contradictory image emerges. An image of ever more active, ever busier, ever more powerful NGOs and noisy high profile campaigns To illustrate the point I want to describe half a dozen contemporary phenomena – and I will deliberately make no comment on their validity or rightness, and all of us in this room will have different responses to each of them depending on our own political viewpoint, concerns and passions.
Are these examples of active civil engagement? Proof that when people really want to change something they can and they will? Evidence that in even our bland and homogenous social democracy it is possible for groups of people to express dissent, have influence and achieve change? Are these examples proof that Margaret Mead was right when she said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Or is it instead an example of unaccountable, dangerous mob rule. Minorities threatening the democratic process, and arguing for special interests, rather than the needs of the majority? Does the difference lie in our different attitudes to the cause? Or do we actually have concerns about the nature of these activities? I think I am here describing two aspects to what we call the voluntary sector. We have part of a sector that feels constrained, feels limited in what it can do, feels that it has lost touch with the golden heyday in which strong and resilient organisations were able to speak up for the needs of the dispossessed, translate their experience in ways that the powerful could hear, force those with the levers of power to amend their behaviour. A sector that feels that it has been so concerned to offer the public choice - that it has perhaps walked away from the need to give the public voice. And at the same time we have some fantastically active community based organisations, able to command support and activity, but we also have activity that is questioned – and increasingly so. Read the Davos commentators worrying about capture by the NGO agenda, and wonder what the NGO agenda is. Read the commentators about business growth who fear that our major companies are now blackmailed by pressure groups which don’t seem to be held to account. Civil society is messy, and political influence is frequently chaotic. Social change does not happen in reasonable and ordered ways. Currents of change and dissent are frequently contradictory, they cut across each other, they challenge cherished views, and they irritate the powerful and the comfortable. And often they are wrong. But just sometimes they are right. As George Bernard Shaw said The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man’. I am sure the great feminist - if he had stopped to think - meant to talk about women being equally unreasonable, but I am sure too that he would look at the modern voluntary sector and say that the bits that really are making an impact are often staffed with the most unreasonable men and women. But reasonable or not, we know that social change comes because people make it happen. We also know that in complicated societies the job of politics is to make choices, very difficult choices, and that the pressures on the body politic are enormous and made more so by the clamouring, angry, self righteous voices of dissent and challenge. And I think we also know that without that clamour for change, change itself would be a long way off. We know too ,that a feature of 21st century social democracy seems to be a drift to the centre ground, a concern to protect the majority, or at least the vocal and powerful proponents of the majority view – a search for what will suit Worcester woman and Mondeo man may not provide best for Worcester woman as she flees her violent husband, or indeed Mondeo man as he struggles with the dilemmas of his mentally handicapped son. So if dissent is valuable and important we need to cherish it and build it. We need to resist the siren voices that argue only for consensus. Those voices promote a voluntary sector that is indeed useful, but leaves the poor and the dispossessed without a voice, and we need to focus on what can we do to enhance and build that voice. And given today’s audience, we need to attend to what the funders of the voluntary sector can do to ensure that the historic role of the sector to speak truth to power is protected. I want to consider what stands in the way of this activity. What are the constraints on organisations established by voluntary impulse, able to raise funds from anywhere they choose, statutorily protected in their independence…and yet, wherever you go those small voices worry: is the sector doing enough? Is it muzzled? And if it does speak out, is the voice authentic? Does it resonate? Or is it just dismissed as a minority interest, behaving more or less inappropriately? First there has been a dramatic change in the way in which government now views social change. A reforming and energetic government came to power in 1997 with an approach to policy making that was described as the Big Tent. Community and voluntary organisations were welcomed into the big tent, and much was made of the new inclusive form of decision making. Ministers, many of them graduates from campaigning voluntary organisations themselves, were more than willing to hear alternative views, and enthusiastically offered unlimited access, against the better judgment of their more experienced civil servants. At the same time voluntary organisations, or at least those who were invited, had plenty of access, which some confused with influence. The change in the terms of trade has resulted in some new and different contested space. It used to be the job of the voluntary sector to point to some social evil, and cry – what are you the government going to do about it? Far more frequently it is now the government that throws down the gauntlet. It is a disgrace they say that there are homeless mentally ill people sleeping on the streets tonight. What are you - the voluntary sector - going to do about it? A government that has been in power for nearly 8 years, and without wishing to pre-judge the popular will, seems likely to have another 5 years, remains keen to invite into the big tent – but often it seems to restrict the invitation to the applauding public. The government repeatedly sets wonderful objectives – encompassing diagnosis, prescription and remedy – and asks others to join in addressing problems in just that way. More sophisticated commentators than I have struggled to understand the government’s antipathy to dissent and challenge - we can all speculate but what we know for certain is that it is increasingly hard for politicians of all parties to tolerate and enable dissent, and yet, as I have argued, all social change has its roots in just such dissent. So things in the political environment have definitely changed And so have things in the wider operating environment. It is hard to remember how we did things when we couldn’t call up information at the press of a button, couldn’t communicate by pressing another button. Information and communication made so much easier, so much quicker, but certainly not so much better- means that it is very much more difficult to rely on simple assertion. Anyone who wants to can find out almost anything about the organisations that make up the sector, their strengths and their weaknesses, and – like the multi national corporations, and the whole of government, voluntary organisations are finding that there are very few places to hide. And so therefore a question of mandate, of legitimacy arises. The challenge thrown to any organisation itself engaged in challenge - On whose behalf do you speak? For decades the mandate was protected by deference. It is an accepted truth that we live in a less deferential, less accepting society. Automatic acceptance of the rights of any organisation no longer exists. While the stock of the royal family, the Church of England and the trade union movement has taken a severe beating, the share price of politicians, generically, and public institutions specifically, has fallen quite catastrophically. A 24 hour news hungry media accords little respect for anyone, and I believe that this lack of automatic respect is pretty universal and here to stay. The charity brand has been remarkably strong in the face of this collapse in trust. But it is not, and should not, be inviolate. Every time you hear a minister dismiss a voluntary organisation as a special interest group, every time you hear the voice of challenge being dismissed as the ‘usual suspects’, every time you hear a leader writer worry about the unaccountability of the environmental NGOs, you are hearing tiny blows to the armour that is the charity brand. And those tiny blows will grow in volume and in impact whenever the impact of the sector grows I am going to argue that there are three ways in which this legitimacy is created, grounded, given authenticity, before going on to argue that the independent grant making trusts have a crucial part to play in making this happen. And then bravely I am going to conclude by suggesting that it is some of our own processes and practices that make it hard for the sector to mount these challenges. So what limits the mandate? What makes people say – who do they think they are? What allows politicians to dismiss some charities as whingeing nobodies? First I would argue that the best legitimacy comes from knowledge. Those organisations who really know what their service users need, think and speak with an authority and credibility that their rivals will always lack. In the past it was easy to speak on behalf of service users. In an internet enabled environment where every homeless teenager can go to a cyber cafe not just to get warm but also to find out which hostel is offering the best deal, vague statements of need don’t wash. In a 24 hour media climate where journalists interview disabled peopled directly and then broadcast their views, the charities that seek to speak for them need to work ever harder to make sure that they are speaking clearly and with the authority that can only come from knowledge. Providing a platform for the dispossessed to howl their rage at society is a critical function. It is one that works much better from a stable platform of knowledge and understanding. Of course this doesn’t only come from knowing your users, it might also be a mandate derived from research – from real knowledge and what we must learn to call an evidence base. For far too long some voluntary organisations have managed to base their influencing strategy on the views of their staff, their founders and their trustees. The late great Sheila McKechnie who I was proud to call a friend certainly had no truck with a passive, non influential voluntary sector and used to growl when she was at Shelter, I am trying to run a campaign for the homeless – not a home for the campaign less. Too many voluntary organisations still offer a home for the campaignless. So an attention to information, to knowledge, to clear evidence formation provides a mandate for speaking with legitimacy. The second thing that seems to me to provide a mandate is independence. Charity law dictates that voluntary organisations must be independent - and as with all these words independence has proved to be a slippery concept. Independent of government yes. Wholly owned subsidiaries of local authorities, let alone offshoots of Whitehall masquerading as charities, will never have the ability to speak for the dispossessed of the world. But voluntary organisations need another sort of independence too, one which is much harder to protect in the current climate. Independence of thought, of being as the great Archbishop William Temple described it – unpurchaseable- this seems to me to be infinitely more precious, and infinitely more difficult to maintain. The certainty that you cannot be bought, that you are not captured by any particular ideology, that you owe nothing that you can operate freely. James Fulbright, an earlier Democrat from Arkansas in the 1960s said We must dare to think "unthinkable" thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about "unthinkable things" because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless. While voluntary organisations need to challenge the world outside, it is only their capacity - and courage – to think the unthinkable that will allow them to continue to champion change. Truly diverse boards are an essential part of that challenge. Frequently and properly the issue of diversity is described as the number of women and the number of black people on the boards of our great institutions. I worry just as much about boards made up of people who are similar in other ways. I am concerned at the large number of trustee boards that have people with very similar attitudes and views. Just as a board made up entirely of people who went to the same exclusive school might not be the best platform for an open, challenging form of governance, so a board made up of people who read the same newspaper, whether the Sun or the Guardian, may fall prey to group think in ways that are dangerous for the charity, and dangerous for its ability to challenge. Trusteeship matters because it is the way in which an organisation is held to its mission – and focus on mission provides the clearest mandate for challenge. We know that in order to offer challenge – or at least challenge that is rigorous, thoughtful and meaningful – we need organisations that are themselves open to challenge. It is too easy for us all to accept the commonly received nostrums in whatever field we operate in. To believe that "everyone knows" is a sound basis for action; to be influenced only by those we know and like and resist external challenge and scrutiny. But we know from even a cursory glance at the big corporate failures of our time – that the single thing they all have in common is that they became too inward looking, they didn’t take into account the changing environment in which they operated, they didn’t listen enough to their customers, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Whether Enron creating a culture in which astonishingly bad corporate behaviour was seen as normal by all the people who were involved, or M & S where they seemed to believe their own propaganda – the common thread of failure is the inward looking organisation – unable to invite challenge and dissent. The third plank in securing a mandate is capacity. Voluntary organisations which are struggling to survive will find it enormously difficult to articulate a well evidenced, carefully thought through position. Their influence will be inevitably constrained by their capacity. But the capacity is not just one of money, although money is fantastically important. It is also the intellectual capital of any organisation, the capacity for creativity. These will partly be provided by the internal resource of the organisation but will also be enormously influenced by the environment in which the organisation operates. Some of the really successful campaigning organisations of our time, and those that have had most influence, have benefited as much from their friends – their champions, their ambassadors – as they have from the formally recorded resource base of the organisation. I was reading last week Chris Holmes fascinating story –the Other Notting Hill about the growth of Notting Hill Housing Trust which grew from the kitchen table of some very angry people to become a multi million pound housing association, part of the essential framework of housing support in London and very much part of the establishment. But its roots as an organisation were in the fury generated in the poor areas of London against the appalling practices of both local authorities and slum landlords. He tells the vivid story of the parish priest of a wealthy church who told his evensong congregation that it cost the trust £325 to house a homeless family. He said he wanted to house a homeless family that night. The collection was taken, counted and found to total only £253. Lock the doors, he called, we’ll take another collection. This was done. Later a smiling vicar announced "its £435. Open the doors". Today I fear that vicar would be the subject of an anti social behaviour order, and would certainly fall foul of the new rules about fund raising from the public… but as a friend to the Notting Hill Housing Trust, and of course an ally of homeless families everywhere, the vicar added to the capacity of the trust to grow and flourish. And capacity to challenge involves building organisations that are themselves resilient, connected, well respected. As public bodies work hard to gather public trust, organisations like the Food Standards Agency where I am the deputy chair have, I think demonstrated, that it is only by being obsessive about openness, meticulous about sharing your evidence, and creative about working with stakeholders that you can build public trust. So too the very best of the big corporations have focused on understanding their environmental footprint, measuring their impact on stakeholders, and not just on shareholders. They invest in getting to know their customers in every detail as well as scanning the horizon to see what is coming down the track. There is a real risk that in these corporate revolutions voluntary organisations will get left behind and will be more than ever vulnerable to the charge that they are simply not up to the job. So far I have argued that in order to act as a platform for influence, in order to be an effective champion of the needs of the dispossessed, voluntary organisations need to attend to their mandate, underline their independence, and build their capacity in a wide range of ways. But as I argued in my book the Grant Making Tango, the shape of the voluntary sector is inextricably linked to the funding economy. I want to conclude by describing the ways in which I think funding organisations, and especially the grant making foundations, can positively help to foster an imaginative, innovative voluntary sector, capable of articulating dissent and offering real challenge. Those of us who follow the debates in the United States know that foundations there are increasingly seen as anti democratic creatures of the establishment, choking off new ideas and partisan in their support. We also know that a group of ideological foundations, those favouring a small government agenda, have been focused and disciplined in the ways in which they have set out to create both an intellectual hinterland for their views, as well as developing organisations that are capable of promoting their perspective. Here in the UK we are – perhaps in a very British way – more reticent about our leanings, more inclined to let a thousand flowers bloom – although the attempts I have made in the past to trace the influence of some of our larger foundations suggests that, when they want to, you can still pack a powerful punch. However, I’ll start with the negative, and describe how some of our systems and processes can strangle at birth the innovation and challenge we say we want to foster. I speak with some humility here. Like anyone involved in the grant making world, and I calculate that I played my first role in making a grant in 1978 – I have made mistakes and know that there are things I have done which I would not do again. I am after all the woman who wrote a report for the trustees of a major foundation saying that I thought it was highly unlikely that the plans to create a modern art gallery on the south bank of the Thames would ever come to much. I also counselled caution about the creation of the Big Issue, arguing that most of the organisations in the sector were sceptical about its impact. On both of those I was shatteringly fantastically wrong and on both I am delighted to say that wiser counsels prevailed. But on both those examples I was building on caution – adopting a conservative approach. Taking my views from the majority, not daring to risk the new. I also recall going to talk to the redoubtable Sister Eileen 25 years ago when she was setting up the Passage day centre in the precincts of Westminster Cathedral. I told her what my superiors had told me, that she really must be very careful about not spending any money until we, the strategic local authority, had authorised it. If she did we could take no responsibility. Pulling herself to her full impressive height she glared at me. Didn’t I know she said that God would provide and that anyway, there were people in need here and she had no intention of waiting for the decision of a local authority committee before she could alleviate their suffering. Again, she was right, I was staggeringly wrong. The Passage celebrates 25 years of service to homeless men and women this year – and God has continued to provide. So caution, bureaucracy, a desire to do things in their proper order, a wish to create consensus, all create obstacles for the new and challenging idea which unreasonable people, working for the dispossessed must promote. So my first recommendation to grant making trusts is that we must repeatedly and rigorously check our own systems and processes to make sure that we are not by our very actions driving out the challenge we want to foster. We can do positive things too. First I want to talk about independence. Virginia Wolf famously inspired generations of women when she said that A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Voluntary organisations I would argue need to have money and a room of their own if they are to develop a voice that can really speak up. A set of accounts that shows a range of funding sources is one indicator of an organisation that may not be too afraid to speak its mind. When I was Director of Homeless Network many years ago in the late 1980s we received a surprisingly large amount of money from the government. It enabled us to do a good deal, and despite the severe warnings of many other voluntary organisations, we were well funded by a government which we also staunchly criticised. What I had in my handbag throughout that whole period, however, was something worth far more than any grant from the dear old Department of the Environment. I had a promise from a major foundation that if at any time the government threatened to withdraw our funds because we were speaking out, that foundation would replace the funding. Colloquially known as my running away fund, we never needed to call it in. But I know it gave me and my trustees enormous reassurance that we could speak truth to the government, could refuse to clear homeless people from the Strand, and could do so in the knowledge that we were not at the same time composing redundancy letters to our staff. These days the independent funder would be more probably engaged in a strategic alliance with the very same government department whose bullying we were seeking to avoid. Independent funders can make their processes more suitable for risk; they can help with a running away fund to underpin independence, they can provide the funds that are needed to build the mandate – create the evidence base, and help to modernise the organisations. But if they also want to fund a sector that can have real influence and can champion real change they need to also think about what it is they are funding. Funding nearly always goes to the architecture of the voluntary sector. It pays for the pillars, the structures, the platforms and the foundations. I want to close by suggesting that real influence and change comes from a rather different discipline. It comes from engineering as much as it does from architecture. We need to find ways of funding the engineering of the sector – the levers of change, the channels of communication, the networks of influence – and yes, sometimes the safety valves - and make sure that we have the engineering we need to enable the sector to challenge with confidence. This may mean funding relationships, funding new ways of working together, being much cannier about the nature of influence, and the way in which it works. It may mean supporting the eccentric or the downright difficult, knowing full well that it is sometimes the extreme position that helps to shift the centre ground. If it is the historic duty of the voluntary sector to shine a light into the darkness, it is the historic duty of the independent foundations to make that possible. After all, it is only worth speaking truth to power if we can do it in a way that makes power really sit up and listen. |