When the challenges we face need some tough love…
We’ve all seen the announcements over the last few weeks about infrastructure bodies on the edge.
Reach Volunteering almost went last month. And just last week, the Directory for Social Change announced its shuttering.
It’s worrying and frustrating, disappointing and heartbreaking, for the thousands of organisations who’ve relied on their support, for those who’ve given years to their missions, and for all of us who’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with them.
But it’s also a wake-up call. For all of us. Because this is on us too.
I’ve spoken before, as have others, about the crises rolling through the sector, almost to the point where it’s just become wallpaper. Every year, reports by groups like CAF and NPC highlight the widening gaps and declines.
Some of it is the rising costs of operating, cost of living, the steady emptying out of the middle-class banks of mum and dad. Some of it is the ongoing attacks on social values, civility and empathy, by a whole host of algorithms, grifters, bad actors and bot-farms.
Some of it is the fact we’ve never recovered from the brutal cuts of austerity, the costs we bore through the pandemic, the hollowing out of overseas aid and of all kinds of state services. No doubt we could add more to the list.
But whatever the drivers, the reality is this: there isn’t enough money coming into the sector to fund what we’ve always done in the ways we’ve always done them. Let alone to meet the growing needs we face.
If we accept that diagnosis we have three choices. Bring more money into the sector. Change how we work with and alongside each other. Or try to fight our own corners, as economic reality picks us off one by one.
No organisation can do either of those first two alone. And you’re welcome to do the third, but count me out.
Because there are times when we need to have tough conversations with each other. And I don’t mean the “tearing off a strip” kind. I mean the kind of conversation that just feels really difficult to have.
The times we need to give a bit of tough love. I think this is one of those times.
Among the techniques I share with clients for “tough love”, is a set of four questions. Use them enough, and most of your people will start answering for themselves before they ever come to see you, and the difficult conversations will become increasingly easy.
But more than that, they’re incredibly powerful when you start to ask them of yourself.
The questions are these:
- What’s the problem?
- How have you contributed to the problem?
- What do you think needs to be done?
- What support do you need from me?
What’s important here is that you make sure you don’t move on to question three before you’ve really, properly interrogated question two.
You might start with a problem like “Government and those in power don’t listen to us”. But then you look at question two, and you wonder whether it should really be, “we don’t speak with a single, clear, loud voice when they do”.
Or you your problem might be “the system forces us to compete for contracts and grants that are too short and too small”. But then you look at question two, and maybe you consider that “we have allowed ourselves to become commodities, complicit in a dysfunctional system”.
And of course, we can think of the problem I opened with as “we are losing all our infrastructure bodies because nobody is willing to do the decent thing and fund them”.
But question two challenges us to recognise that most of these organisations rely on the sector itself for their funding, their membership subscriptions, training material, advice and support.
As long as we think it’s someone else’s problem, we get to blame them and get on with our lives. Until the next one goes down. Then the next one.
Hence, my answer to question three, and my tough love if you wish to accept it, is that if you want sector infrastructure, you need to support it.
Use the training. Pay the membership. Sign up to the mail-shots. Let them put the occasional ad from a corporate sponsor in your inbox.
Because if you’re not there for them when they need you, they won’t be there for you when you need them.
Needless to say, I do offer this advice with love, if something comes out in your question four, just drop me a line.