Disrupting the charity sector in 4 not so easy steps.

You could argue that if charities were already working, then why do we still need them? Are we a society of do gooders who are obsessed by the idea of doing good, but with no clue about how to get down to the bottom of, and prevent the root problems causing us all to be here?

Funders' approaches to targeting their funds towards families or communities suffering from issues certainly do not help the notion of getting down to the root causes. Funding by ‘issue’ is common in the sector and creates not only services that only serve someone once they have a specific problem, but also within specific ages, situations and postcodes. This specificity of funding also creates services who can’t serve large swathes of people because they don’t meet criteria ‘led’ services. Services become bureaucratic, inefficient, and make poor bed partners for local authorities and health who like blanket, whole population approaches. What is worse still is the tendency, as a result of a prioritisation of certain issues, this creates a perverse incentive. Anyone in housing will tell you the number of people who seemingly stay pregnant almost continually in order to prevent their own homelessness, even with next to no chance of keeping the baby, is a pretty common thing, and this is indeed reflected in the data trends around gendered homelessness. Whilst homelessness is a 50/50 gender split, representation in services is more like 80% young men/20 % women.

I once had a detailed conversation with a young woman who was anorexic and had not been eligible for a severe eating disorder service because her weight was too high, and would not be seen by outpatient services because her weight was way too low and her mental health issues too complex. She accessed a therapeutic service I managed, which was not intended nor funded to work with her, we were designed to work with young homeless people and she was not homeless. We worked with her all the same, funded by our own reserves as a charity, recognising her innate vulnerability. She eventually died and I can’t help but think if she had more intense time spent with her in those early stages, saving her might have been possible. She was not the only one, but one of many caught up in bureacracy instead of getting much needed help.

It is time that as a sector we move towards more radical ways of working, and helping funders to understand the fragmented services they create by designating criteria led services focused on specific types of beneficiaries, or even specific types of work. Is it really funders roles to shape the charity sector? Or the charity sectors role to educate funders about how they want to work? Who is the pied piper? More to the question, did anyone tell the pied piper that the world is changing and needs to dance to a different tune?

There is much change ahead. Critical, brutal cuts are going to continue year on year in children and social care. Health, despite the increased funds for the NHS 70th Anniversary will not only continue to struggle, but with growing need year on year and taking the outflow of children and families from other statutory services will continue to struggle.

Accelerated disruption is at the heart of everything around us. We need to respond by redesigning our organisations, adopting new working practices designed for more rapid achievements and success and go back into designing charity models, and rethinking the finances of charities. With this there is also great uncertainty. Changes we make to our organisations today can be turned on their head tomorrow. The invention of new technologies and apps that are central to all of our lives creates a rapid pace of change unprecedented before now. Young people don’t report technology as separate from them, they have lived with it all their lives and it has become a part of them, a part of their identity.

It's easy to feel threatened, if you are anything like me, a nearly fourty something managing director. I consider myself pretty tech savvy- I have a Smartphone, I tweet, Facebook and post this kind of thing on LinkedIn. I also work for a charity fundraising for their digital services. Its hard imagining, having come from being CEO of a service provider, that digital will replace the human interactions we value so much. But its not tomorrow. Its now.

Apple have moved into health provision. Private digital health companies have moved into childrens therapy online. Adults are accessing adult psychotherapy services through Facebook. Our Facebook Messenger is now managing our personal finances. Seamless digital integration is no longer for the tech savvy, as our millennial generation grows up, it will be central to existence. Competition is no longer just from charities, but from entrepreneurial start ups, digital tech companies and major blue chip companies.

It is pretty scary staring at the level of change needed to move with the agility to keep charities operating in parallel ways to the communities they serve. The truth is we have adapted to this level of change before, and we can again. We just need to not hide our heads in the sand, run away or assume that someone else will get their head around it first and then dish us the rulebook. You can’t just weather this trend and hope it will pass.

Developing an inner compass for disruption takes more than just the will, we need to move towards accepting that our usual ways of working are on their way out, and that to move forward we need to embrace ways of working that are not only unfamiliar, but also will put us, as leaders, back to the beginning, as quiet, mostly uninformed observers. Our role becomes guiding the professions of those who can teach us a new way of working.

Here are the five things you can do:

Pause. Take time to reflect on what has worked until now, take stock. Stop blindly chasing the money and think very carefully about what is the new reality you are seeking to address.

Drive innovation. Understand that the answers are no longer going to all come from you and you need to look at, and get staff to look at the world around them for ideas and innovation. See your role as curator of ideas, not the owner of them.

Set a transformative vision. Your vision for your work is more important than how you do it. The Centre for Social Change can help you grow your vision through our leadership programmes for CEO’s. Creating an outstanding vision isn’t just about setting a direction but setting a steer that excites everyone around you to help you fulfil your goals.

Stop FOF’ing. (Focusing on Failure). I know a fair number of charities that have services that are failures. People don’t come to the programmes, benefit from the impact of the work, or a project or programme fails to get the type of impact it was intending. Charities are always trying to suppress the bad news, the flops, the mistakes, the bad evaluations. They keep hammering away when perhaps the concept has just not succeeded the way they wanted it to, reluctant to give up. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses are key. Don't try to be good at everything.

The Centre for Social Change is a newly founded social business (founded in June 2018) by me, Anna Day, to bring about change in the way we lead charities to enable charities to become ambitious, sustainable and transformative and to challenge and change the way we work. We offer consultancy services in leadership development, training, fundraising consultancy, HR and we particularly specialise in 'people' charities. We provide help scaling up ambitious ideas. We are an ethical consultancy focused on driving quality and excellent leadership in the charity sector. For more information please visit our website. www.centreforsocialchange.co.uk