Alliance Online - September 2007

Killing civil society with kindness?

Barry Knight

Since 1997, the Government in the UK has embarked on a remarkable experiment with the voluntary non-profit sector. Ministerial speeches have extolled the virtues of voluntary action. There has been more public money made available to the sector, a commitment to include it in public service delivery, a strategy to build the capacity of the sector, new legislation, a new enhanced Government Office of the Third Sector, and a host of ways to influence government policy. Never before has a government intervened so much in civil society with such apparently benign intent. This looks ideal, but do these gifts come at the price of independence and are voluntary organizations becoming a creature of government?

Opinions within the voluntary sector are polarized. One side, led by the Association of Chief Executives in Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO), sees government policy as a major opportunity to gain access to money, revolutionize public service delivery, gain a seat at the table, and grow to scale so that the non-profit sector is a leading force in society.

The other side sees a government plot to buy off the voluntary sector, tame it with public service contracts, and blunt its pioneering and campaigning edge, leading to full privatization of public services through a compliant subcontracting arm of government. A National Coalition for Independent Action has recently formed to resist government policy and to promote radical action among voluntary groups. Such fears about the loss of independence are not restricted to the radical fringe. At the latest Annual Conference of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the Chair of the Charity Commission (the body responsible for regulating charities) warned the sector of the consequences for independence of taking too much government money.

So, what’s the truth of the situation? Seven charitable trusts asked CENTRIS to find out by conducting an empirical study of the field to assess the effect of government money on the sector’s independence.[1] We studied a total of 135 non-profit organizations; 121 of them we selected randomly, and 14 we selected specially and studied in depth.

Not the problem we thought

The results surprised us. We had expected to find independence much impaired, but the vast majority of organizations in our study said that they feel ‘independent’ or ‘very independent’ and that their feelings of independence have changed little in the past three years. Although the proportion of money received from government significantly reduces an organization’s sense of its independence, the effect is not dramatic.

It seems that an organization’s independence is determined by more than where it gets its money. A statistical model identified six factors which, when present together, tend to produce a strong sense of independence:

receiving grants from charitable foundations;
raising a proportion of their own income;
having a positive attitude towards commerce;
engaging in advocacy;
feeling effective in the work they are doing;
responding creatively to the demands of funders.

Independence is as much about attitude and behaviour as it is about money.

We found that voluntary organizations prize their independence highly. Typically they regard independence as one of the values that govern how the organization works. Values determined who an organization works with, how they use their resources, and how they deploy their technical prowess and cultural competence in favour of their goals. Organizations typically manage their funding relationships in this light, ensuring that money reflects their core values. Organizations have stock ‘workarounds’ to cope with funders’ demands, such as recycling programmes to conform to the new buzz words that accompany the ever-changing fashion in government funding programmes, developing a ‘cash cow’ to bring in income, or having a small core staff with a flexible fringe of associates to ensure organizational survival in the face of dips in funding.

We found some examples of ‘mission drift’ where the availability of government funding had enticed an organization to seek cash in an opportunistic way. But such behaviour was rare. It was more common for a funding agency to be excited by the pioneering work of a voluntary organization and commission it to conduct services, and in that process subtly change the way that the organization works to make it safer and bureaucratically sound.

To take an example, Young Disciples works with 400 young people who are at risk of becoming involved in gang life, making contact with them and offering them a potential route to safety. Workers from Young Disciples, many of whom are former gang members, go wherever gang members congregate – from streets to nightclubs to crack houses. Relations with the police can be fraught, since youth workers have found themselves caught up in raids by the Armed Response Unit. Police have sometimes complained that Young Disciples aren’t sufficiently open about their activities. In the light of current concerns about the rising level of gun crime among young people in the UK, funders are keen to support Young Disciples, yet in the process want to bring it into partnership with statutory agencies, including the police. To do so would mean the organization losing its edge. It has to be in a risky place alongside young people in order to have credibility with them.

Two types of independence

This brings us to two kinds of independence we detected in the study. Some groups seek ‘independence outside’ the system, while others seek ‘independence inside’ it.

The clearest indication of the difference is the refusal of some organizations to take government money. Typically, such organizations are seeking changes to the structure of society or the systems that govern it, and feel that taking government money would produce a conflict of interest. Examples include London Citizens, which is a membership organization whose 90 members range from diverse faith congregations to primary and secondary schools, student groups, trade union branches, and community associations. They have campaigned for a ‘living wage’ for low-paid workers in London. Now almost every national bank in London pays the rate to its cleaners. They are now targeting hotel chains, primary care trusts, local authorities and universities. They fund themselves through membership fees and – independent of state funding – and are free to criticize government policies candidly.

Organizations that take government money typically seek ‘independence within’ the system. Rather than wanting to change the system in its entirety, they want it to work better to meet the needs of people typically excluded from it. An example is the Derwent Initiative, which promotes joined-up thinking about sexual offending. It has built a strong reputation over the last 12 years for promoting inter-agency working based on its independence from those that it works with. ‘We are not masters of any agencies of the community,’ they say. ‘We have become brokers of our own values.’

A more nuanced approach

Findings from our study suggest that a more nuanced debate is needed. ‘Independence’, a bit like ‘freedom’, is a great idea until you try to find out how it works in practice. A key finding from our study is that organizations realize their values through relationships with other organizations and that the idea of independence has to be framed within a concept of interdependence. All relationships and all funding reduce independence. The real question is what type of funding is most suitable for what kind of task.

Government funding is vital for the vast mass of voluntary organizations that are working within the system, and government should ensure maximum independence within that system. As government minister Ed Miliband has suggested, ‘the goal is to make government more like the third sector.’

We concluded that charitable foundations have a key role in ensuring that there is a cadre of feisty voluntary organizations that are pursuing structural and systematic change outside the system. Such funding should, among other things, ensure that voluntary and community groups check the state – no matter how benign it appears. One difficulty is that such groups are in short supply, leading to what Alison Harker and Stephen Burkeman describe (in Stepping up the Stairs) as ‘a loss of fire in the belly’. We recommend that the Woburn Place Collaborative, an informal grouping of progressive funders in the UK, think about ways of increasing the supply of organizations pursuing structural and systemic change.

1 Barrow Cadbury Trust, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Carnegie UK Trust, City Parochial Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Northern Rock Foundation

Barry Knight is Secretary of CENTRIS. Email barryknight@cranehouse.eu

This article is based on The Value and Independence of the Voluntary Sector by Barry Knight and Sue Robson. Both an executive summary and the full report can be downloaded from www.bctrust.org.uk/reports.htm

Click here to send this article to a friend

Why should I subscribe to Alliance?

Subscribe now to Alliance magazine and receive:

4 issues of Alliance to your door
8 issues of Alliance Bulletin to your inbox
Access to all back issues (since 1998) in PDF format
Click here for more information or call +44 20 7239 1405.