Money For Old Rope Anyone?

Volunteer Centres across the country are not happy. The reason? Well, according to Third Sector magazine, it’s due to the ‘cash and grab’ approach perceived to be coming from BTCV and CSV, two of the charities running of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) volunteer brokerage scheme. Third Sector have claimed that both are offering Volunteer Centres as little as 10% of the funding available from DWP to do what is claimed to be 95% of the work.

If this is true then Volunteer Centres are right to be angry. Both charities have placed themselves in a position that is, on the face of it, hard to justify. In the current climate of national apathy towards public servants who are seen to be abusing the system for personal gain, this sort of behaviour does little to invoke confidence within our sector. Big national charities like these should be leading by example and not taking advantage of their smaller local colleagues. Although I’ve not seen the budget breakdown for this scheme, I’m finding it hard to see how either could justify their cost allocations. The fact that one felt able to up their initial offer of £20 to £65 per volunteer placement, after a local Volunteer Centre showed them the proverbial finger, exposes the level of their mark up and implies that their involvement in the scheme has been primarily motivated to make money. It seems ironic that VCs, the agencies that need the funds the most, are the least prepared to sell out, preferring to stick to their guns and challenge the big boys – hats off to them for standing up for themselves in this way.

To me this incident is symptomatic of a wider issue in our sector that has been bugging me for some time. Libby Purvis wrote a piece in The Times back in December which really struck a chord with me (link here http://bit.ly/UZktL). In it she laments about the over professionalisation of the sector, where charities are trying to mirror the corporate world and in doing so “create a whole cadre of employees whose expectations and behaviours rapidly become expensive, potentially wasteful and at times merely self-aggrandising.”

Although I don’t agree with all of Libby’s views, I do agree that many larger, national charities seem to have morphed themselves into quasi corporations, who treat their funds as their own private profits rather than the generosity of the public and statutory grant makers. When I worked in the Home Office I was often approached by be-suited, slick CEOs looking for new funding opportunities. Often they would boast about their turnover and the number of staff they had, and seemed to think that this qualified them to be in the best position to deliver a particular scheme or initiative - rather than a passion for the cause or a unique approach to the problem we were trying to solve.

Of course charities do need to be professional – public money after all has to be accounted for and we need competent administrators to ensure this is done. But not at the expense of trying to ape our commercial cousins by screwing the competition, especially when you need them to deliver the goods. Stephen Bubb, the head of ACEVO, has recently called for a national campaign to help ‘educate’ the public about the work of charities. His call seems to be as much about justifying to the public why charities need to spend vast amounts of money on marketing and salaries, as to reminding them why we are here and why they should continue to support us. I don’t believe that this approach will yield anything other than further scepticism and confusion from the public and I just hope that no one is daft enough to fund it.

I wonder if we are about to witness the demise of the big national charity. I think that the public wants to see charity as an independent and alternative way to respond to social issues – led by people that care enough about people or places to do something rather than wait for the government to respond. Yet many of the nationals appear so commercialised, so far from their roots that they are becoming almost inappropriate in this context. Those that think it’s ok to pay commercial companies to ‘chug’ the public for cash seem to be more about making money and expanding their empires, than standing up for an unpopular cause or innovating in the solution of social problems and challenging the government of the day. Indeed many have simply become agents of government, delivering government services and brokering government cash. Of course not all are the same, you only have to wander round Comic Relief’s offices to see how a big charity can still be beautiful, but they seem to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

But all is not lost. Thankfully local charities are still out there, innovating and rarely losing sight of their reason for being. And in recent years we’ve seen the rise of the 'social entrepreneur'. Not a new concept as such, more a new avenue for those frustrated and creative people that really care about the world but can’t see how to make their ideas happen within the established charity sector. Many are volunteering their time, some are running sustainable social businesses, and all are out there to make things happen, driven by a real hunger for change and passion for their chosen cause. It is these people that will represent the future spirit of charity in my opinion.

Jamie Thomas
(Jamie writes in a personal capacity and his views are not those of Red Foundation)