Luke & Shaun: our loves and worries in the charity sector

We’re Luke and Shaun: friends in the sector drawn together by similar passions and concerns. We met at a workshop run by The Social Innovation Partnership almost exactly a year ago and quickly realised we were excited and angered by similar things in the charity and social sector. We both have “fire in our bellies” and “skin in the game”, whilst acknowledging that you can quickly burn out in the fire, or get flayed by the game.

We’re both socially proximate to the people we work with, in significant respects: Luke works with young people and families in Hackney, having grown up in that community himself. Shaun has experience of the criminal justice system from his youth and has a particular passion for working with those who’ve been involved in, or on the fringes of, criminal activity.

But we’re socially remote from those we work with in important ways, too, especially when it comes to our educational experiences: Luke went to grammar school in Edmonton, then to Cambridge. Shaun has a Masters and a doctorate from Brunel. Our educational privilege, compared to those we’re working with, is substantial. We think it’s important to reflect honestly as individuals on our social distance from those we’re working with, just as Jo Wells has advocated for on an organisational level.

Between us, we have 20 years’ experience in the charity and social sector, across 15 organisations – large and small, brand new and well-established – where we’ve been involved as frontline staff, senior staff, trustees, consultants, and volunteers. Whenever we meet we end up talking about the same things, broadly: the things that we love most in the sector, and the things that most worry us about it.

In this short series of blogs, we briefly introduce three of our biggest loves and three of our biggest worries, alternating between them. We’re reflecting critically on ourselves and our own work as much as anybody else’s: the worries we present are things that have concerned us about our own projects, as much as other organisations’. 

To use a crap and very cheesy metaphor: We don’t want to ruffle feathers just to piss off the bird, we hope to help it fly higher. 

 

Our loves and worries in the charity sector, No. 1

Community advocates; self-appointed gurus

Love no. 1: Community advocates; especially youth advocates

We love meaningfully community-led change. We love those community advocates who might speak too loudly in meetings and don’t quite follow the decorum of council consultations, but who actually speak raw truths about what their community is going through. Those people who bring heart and hope to even the most procedural occasion, if the community’s interests are at stake.

We love the work of young people leading change, supporting one another but also campaigning for decision-makers to listen to them and address their concerns. Take Back the Power in Camden and the Account group in Hackney are brilliant examples of this. The projects are driven by their young leaders’ lived experience, but also by a recognition that a superficial account of their particular life experiences is not enough if they want to present an authoritative analysis of local youth issues – in both projects, they are researching and interrogating the factors that influence the lives of young people across their community. They’re a great example of taking lived experience seriously, as opposed to just engaging in condescending credulity, that all-too-common simplification much-beloved of politicians and some senior managers (“I spoke to one Young Person From The Community and they spoke The Truth and I believed every word because they have Lived Experience.”) 

Worry no. 1: Fads & self-appointed gurus

Lived experience. Co-production. Systems change. Public health approach. Place-based. Sustainability. All of these are incredibly important ideas which have helped charities and local authorities think differently about what they do. But, at times, their popularity seems to exceed their usefulness, and they become fads. Funders ask about them. Council officers get promoted for using them. At worst they become an exclusionary orthodoxy: those who don’t understand or talk about them become outcasts in the cliquey world of elite charity “thought leaders”. Those organisations that don’t incorporate them into their visions get dismissed as hopelessly out of touch and old-fashioned.

In worst cases, self-appointed gurus with incredibly limited front-line experience pronounce upon “the way that things should be done” – all charities should become social enterprises; all projects need hugely elaborate theories of change; any organisation not “thinking about the ecosystem” is obsolete – as if there’s some clear line of direction that all social organisations should be following. 

At times, fashionable concepts seem to circulate like currency in the hermetically-sealed world of well-connected charities and consultancies, exchanged for boosts in career and cash, regardless of how thoughtlessly they are used. As Nick Stanhope points out, what really matters when theorising about the social sector is the “intent, thoughtfulness & commitment to make something real & useful”, rather than indulging in the intentional obfuscation that unfortunately, sometimes, seems to help people get taken seriously. 

As Luke has written elsewhere – “the point is not that we need fewer good ideas, or that they should never become too popular, but that the precision and rigour of our thinking and our self-reflection should increase in tandem with the power and influence of the concepts we’re wielding.” The litmus test for ideas in the social sector should be their helpfulness for frontline professionals. All too often, it’s the narrow interests of managers, consultants, service design enthusiasts, policy wonks and politicians that seem to give jet-boosters to certain concepts and ideas. 

 

Our loves and worries in the charity sector, No. 2:

Frontline thinkers; the horrors of the marketised, precarious charity sector

Love no. 2: Doers who think, thinkers who do

For every one self-appointed guru, there should be 25 frontline professionals whose ideas, experience, and insights are valued, recognised, rewarded, at the highest levels of policy and decision-making. Every senior decision-maker should have a steering group of 10-20 paid advisers from the frontline of their services: imagine if every change to Children’s Social Care had to be put to a group of frontline social workers; imagine if every Department for Education decision had to be run past a group of teachers, parents and students.

Between us, we’ve met at least 50 frontline professionals who could write incredible books about their experiences, if they had the time and inclination. Our social workers, teachers, mental health professionals, youth workers, community development workers, etc., are often providing incredibly sophisticated support to our most vulnerable people, and their wisdom should be listened to. The most insightful analyses of social issues often come from the frontline, like junior doctor Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt about the NHS, or prison psychologist James Gilligan’s Violence series.

The best doers on the ground are those who think and reflect carefully on what they’re doing, the best thinkers are those who have extensive on-the-ground experience of the issues that they think, talk and write about. It’s understandable if the doers don’t have enough time to prioritise thinking; it’s less forgivable if well-heeled thinkers have barely met any of the people about whom they happily theorise.

Worry no. 2: Organisational insecurity, and the tomfoolery that results

Charities, social enterprises, local authority departments, Whitehall departments, schools, consultancies, and businesses are often scarce in resources, especially since 2010. In conditions of scarcity, stupidity can result: desperate for more funding, organisations that could and should collaborate end up competing in hugely counter-productive ways. If one community centre is shortlisted for funding along with a similar centre down the road, predictable problems ensue: local politics and gossip can run wild. If social enterprises put their income above their mission, exploitation can flourish.

All the chat about systems change and income generation can sometimes just be an apologia for resource scarcity: we should be fighting for our organisations to be properly funded, not squabbling amongst ourselves for the crumbs that fall from the philanthropists’ and politicians’ tables. When this squabbling happens, at worst, those who should be benefiting from our work – young people, local residents, citizens – can be treated as commodities: one youth centre holds a possessive grip over its young people, even if they could benefit enormously from the centre down the road, too; one social enterprise hoards customers to the detriment of another, even if those customers would be keen to buy from both. 

 

Our loves and worries in the charity sector, No. 3:

The unfashionable organisations we most need; questionable approaches to “diversity and inclusion”

Love no. 3: Long-term, relationship-focused work

Some of the least innovative, least fashionable organisations are the ones having the most impact in their communities (not that they’re likely to shell out for expensive evaluations to “prove” it).

There are youth and community centres that have supported vulnerable young people for decades, doing highly effective work on the ground, who miss out on funding awarded to the well-connected, snazzily presented, larger charities who have the capacity, processes, back-office and systems to quickly win bids. Those larger charities will then sometimes end up phoning the centres for access to their young people: “we’ve just won £100,000 to work with disengaged 16-24-year-old NEETs: can we work with your young people please (and give no funding or support to you or your young people, aside from the one-off project we use your young people for)?”

Some of these organisations operate like bouncy-balls: lurching from one community to the next, bouncing down with projects and ideas, but hopping off at the earliest possible opportunity. We need more support for those organisations which are rooted in and dedicated to the particular community they serve, and which are staffed by people who know and love that community. 

Imagine if youth centres, charities and community centres were treated a little more like the valuable institutions they are, and were given the secure funding, scrutiny and accountability they need to deliver high-quality, long-term work, without having to spend days on bids and number crunching. These places don’t need “capacity building”, they need thorough-going, long-term organisational, political and financial support. This can sound almost utopian in an age of ruthless efficiency and diminishing community resources but is more a matter of national and local budget priorities than it is of utopianism. 

Worry no. 3: Nonsense attempts at “diversity & inclusion”

Too many organisations (and schools) have a narrow funnel approach to diversity and inclusion: “let’s get as many different backgrounds and ethnicities represented in our organisation as we can, and let’s force them all into the narrow mould we are comfortable with.” Young people we have both worked with have expressed this sentiment passionately – presented with what some might consider a fantastic work opportunity, they fear losing their authenticity, identity and uniqueness in the mould they know the company will try to force them into.

Countless new employees, school pupils, university students and even sports team players have to struggle with institutional incongruity: coming from a background which is remote from that of the group they are joining, they feel they have to contort themselves in order to fit in. When David Cameron went from Eton to Oxford, he was gliding from one elite institution to another: the two have similar architecture, are dominated by the same accents and lifestyles, and are imbued with similar values. When Jamal goes from Pembury Estate to Google, he may feel he has to fundamentally alter himself to belong and to survive. And let’s not forget anger: when Luke went to Cambridge from Hackney, the culture shock caused more rage than discomfort; when Shaun went from St Peters estate in Leicester to ministerial meetings, it inspired more fury than status anxiety or “imposter syndrome”.

Any meaningful attempt at diversity and inclusion has to recognise this issue. We need fewer funnels and more consideration of a practice central to Shaun’s doctoral research: cross-cultural dexterity. This means having the flexibility to engage with people’s talent through empathy rather than a sense of obligation – not treating people with well-intentioned condescension, in order to boost your tick-box diversity, but getting to understand their skills and their identity, to truly make the most of their assets and abilities.

This requires operating with a deeper sense of what culture means: it isn’t just the music or food that people like, or the colour of their skin, it’s what they value, what seems meaningful to them, what they love, what drives them, what gives them hope, what makes them different. An organisation demonstrates cross-cultural dexterity when it can truly get to grips with this. This means developing shared values which aren’t some vague platitudes for email signatures, but are the principles that guide and drive their every action, and around which they can mobilise a genuinely diverse group of people. You can’t inspire genuine belonging in a diverse group of people if you don’t know what you stand for.

The most impressive people we’ve met over our 20 years in the sector are those who demonstrate this dexterity as individuals: those who can communicate with a government minister before lunch, and banter with a lad on a street corner by dinnertime.

shaunWebsite Editor2019