Keynote speech delivered by Jane Ide OBE, CEO ACEVO on 4 April 2023 at Third Sector C Suite Summit.
I’m going to start with a disclaimer. I’m not a futurologist, and I don’t have a crystal ball. But I am led by the words of Dame Julia Unwin who once said, “If you want to read the future, pay exquisite attention to what is happening right now, here, in the present.”
So I’m going to share with you six themes that I see around us right now, and hope to draw from that some threads of what we maybe should be thinking about when we look to the future for our sector.
The first thing is that this very topic is a reflection of where as a whole community we are right now. One of the dominating features of the first few months of 2023 has been the sense that we are navigating an unmappable landscape. CEOs and strategy consultants are talking about the impossibility of setting a five-year or even a three-year plan. The wisest trustee boards are encouraging their leadership teams to develop agile, responsive strategies because the future is so uncertain. In our own business plan at ACEVO we have deliberately built in sections for ‘unplanned activity’ throughout the year in an attempt to reflect the uncertainties of what we will need to do to support our members in the coming twelve months.
And some are taking a radically different approach – if you can’t see three years ahead perhaps it is easier to look ten years or thirty years, or even in my favourite example of this, 500 years ahead.
Now, I’m not actually sure the future is really any more unknowable than it ever was (if the future used to be more knowable then in 2019 we’d all have been planning for the pandemic.)
But we’ve all had an object lesson in just how fast the tsunami of change can hit, and the failings of the traditional business planning models so beloved of American business schools when it comes to navigating such unexpected, massive change.
Instead, we are seeing that imaginative, innovative approaches that keep the organisation’s mission as its guiding star and put trusted relationships and intelligent governance at the heart of their operations are really coming into their own in a post-pandemic world. That is exciting, and to my mind is likely to be a defining feature of those civil society organisations that really thrive in the next ten, thirty, fifty, even hundred years or so.
And if we are really to thrive as a sector, if we are really going to deliver against our own and others’ ambitions for us, we have to be prepared to be strong in how our sector holds and practices its power. Paying ‘exquisite attention’ to what is happening around us in our world right now human rights are actively and visibly under attack in so many ways – whether through legislation against LGBTQ+ and women’s rights around the globe, or through the racist, misogynist, homophobic structural systems within institutions such as the Met Police and the UK’s fire services, or through the insidious trolling and attacks through social media against individuals who dare to speak out on behalf of particular communities.
And in that environment, in a sector that is proud to see itself as values-driven in support of social justice, we have to work hard, very hard, to protect our rights and our ability to speak out against injustice, to claim the campaigning space that served our forebears so well in making the world a better place.
We must resist the blandishments made of us – sometimes with good intent, sometimes less so – to ‘play nice’, to be kind or polite, to ‘not be too political.’
There are, quite rightly, laws and regulations that give us boundaries to work within when we use our campaigning voice, but they also give us a space that we have to be bold and brave enough to hold and to use, effectively, impactfully and on behalf of those who do not have a voice or who are not given the safe space to speak out.
We see, whether through legislation or through the culture wars a definable narrowing of civil space and increasing disincentives to use our voice for the things we believe in.
Right now I see a very real risk that the pressures we see from on the one hand understandably nervous trustee boards, on the other politically-driven supposedly ‘antiwoke’ agendas, and in the middle those who genuinely want to see the quality of public discourse maintained or even improved but who perhaps have a different view of what that looks like in reality for disadvantaged communities, are between them creating a personally difficult and even career-limiting or health damaging environment for our sector’s campaigning leaders.
It is a tough environment in which to speak out and we have seen just in the last three months some very real damage being done to individuals and their organisations when the public discourse has been anything but kind.
My worry is that we could in the future see a sector that is less a roaring lion, more a squeaking mouse – and to be honest, it is not the sector that will suffer if that is the case. It will be the communities for whom we advocate, the issues on which we campaign that will be damaged.
So I believe we have to take this seriously, and strive, hard, to protect our rights to campaign, to speak out, to be political with a small p, within the confines of the law and regulation – that like any muscle, we have to use it or lose it.
But if we are going to advocate for a truly equitable society in the future there is something else we also have to do. We have to get our own house in order. The truth is, we don’t have a good enough story to tell here yet when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, and if I pay ‘exquisite attention’ to what is happening in our sector right now I see that we have a very long way to go before we can even think about claiming to be the intersectional, inclusive sector we need to be if we are to thrive in the future.
As a general rule, the mainstream charity sector does not reflect the communities it serves. Where efforts are made to increase diversity through recruitment we still see barriers to progression, to meaningful inclusion, to equitable opportunity.
And we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what it really means to dismantle the fundamental systems that uphold old power structures around funding, around leadership, around the ways our organisations are designed and operate. Paying exquisite attention to what is happening right now I see the very, very embryonic shoots of that work – but it is hard, and it is challenging, and it is expensive, and it is utterly, utterly necessary if we are not to become irrelevant to the future society we seek to serve.
And one of the ways in which we risk rapidly experiencing that irrelevance, if we don’t do that work with commitment and authenticity, is in our workforce. The challenges we feel right now in recruitment and retention are reflective of what is happening more widely in the labour market, and as economies change those factors will also change. But I suspect we have some more fundamental problems ahead.
We have traditionally been able to compete for talent on the basis of what we do and the cultures we offer, when we can’t compete on salary or benefits or societal status.
But when the private sector is moving closer to the middle ground in terms of the ESG agenda, when social value is starting to be seen as core to some big name brands, young people coming into the workforce (or others already within our workforce) will find that they can have the job satisfaction, the sense of purpose AND the financial benefits all wrapped up together.
And if the diverse and talented communities that will make up the UK’s workforce in the decades to come don’t see themselves reflected in our organisations, don’t see that there are opportunities for them to build their careers in the ways that others around them can, or worst of all can see that despite our supposedly values driven work that they will experience the same toxicity that they might expect elsewhere, why should they choose us over the alternatives?
We have to start thinking hard as a sector about the workforce we need for the future, the skills we are already deeply short of, and how we can be sure of being an employer of choice in the decades ahead.
We may have to start challenging ourselves, and our funders, to think differently about salaries and financial benefits. We absolutely have to do the work, the hard yards, to becoming truly intersectional and equitable. And we will certainly have to work harder at making a career in civil society an attractive, deliberate option if we are to thrive in the future.
And that brings me to another area of exquisite attention – a conversation that is washing around me all the time right now. As a sector, we are not, let’s be honest, great at technology. I don’t think that’s from a lack of interest or ambition – but the truth is, for the majority of our sector the funding just isn’t there to invest in the skilled people who understand how we can better use technology in all its forms, and without those skills then as a sector we lack confidence to make choices about how to spend our scarce resource on technology, and so we go round in a circle.
But technology advances around us whether we go with it or not, and right now the rapid advances in data, user experience and artificial Intelligence are likely to have quite an impact on our sector. The charity sector in the UK will need to embrace innovation and experimentation to stay relevant and effective. With new technologies and ways of working emerging all the time, charities will need to be agile and adaptable to keep pace with changing trends and user needs. This will require a willingness to take risks, learn from failures, and constantly iterate on services and programs.
At the very least, in a world in which you can already ask ChatGPT to help you write your fundraising bid, your strategy for improving youth services in your area, or indeed that last paragraph of mine in this presentation, we need to be aware that others will be using these tools even if we are not, and we have no idea in what ways, good or bad, they will be doing so. It could be to assess that funding bid. It could be to counter your proposed strategy because they don’t like your views. Your staff, probably your volunteers and in many cases your beneficiaries will be using this technology in their daily lives, and as sector leaders we can resist those new ways of doing things or we can be open to the opportunities we have to learn from them.
Which brings me to my sixth and final thread. None of us can do this stuff alone. Collaboration has long been an expressed aspiration within our sector – although I have noticed it tends to be expressed as a desire for others to collaborate better, along the lines of ‘we’re really good at collaboration, it’s the other buggers that screw it up’.
But I am proud to work in genuinely, generously collaborative relationships with my peers in the sector – people like Sarah Vibert at NCVO and the other leaders of the infrastructure bodies that make up the Civil Society Group – and we are seeing tangible outcomes in terms of delivering impact for our members and for the sector more widely, making change, gaining political influence and modelling a different style of leadership.
What I am now starting to hear far more discussion around is the ways in which we as a sector could/should/must collaborate more with other sectors. This is not a new conversation at all, but I think we are far past the time for moving it beyond the traditional view that we should ‘collaborate’ with either the public or the private sector in ways that rely solely on the dynamic between funder and funded.
It is time we understood for ourselves, really believed for ourselves, that we are equal partners with the other sectors that make up our society; we have different but equal strengths, capabilities and contributions to make. We need to find a confidence in ourselves that moves us on from being the poor relation with the begging bowl to being able to take our rightful place in the conversation, whoever that conversation is with. We need, as Poppy Jaman very memorably said at the ACEVO conference just a couple of weeks ago, to be brave enough not to ask for a seat at their table but to say, actually this is our table – and we welcome you to join us at it.
None of us can see what lies ahead, and to be honest, thank God for that. What we can do is prepare for what lies ahead to the very best of our ability, for the sake of our causes, our beneficiaries, our organisations, our sector and our society – by investing in leadership skills that enable us to be agile and responsive to whatever comes our way;
- by being bold and brave in protecting our hard won space to campaign and advocate for those who need us;
- by being honest about the very hard work we still have to do, and be committed to doing it, to make our sector truly intersectional and equitable.
We need to think carefully about the workforce we need if we are to be effective for our communities in the future, we need to learn to be confident in keeping abreast of technology and all it brings with it.
And we need, always, to seek out the relationships that can help us do this amazing, difficult work of making the world a better place and to do so knowing that we bring our unique strengths and talents as a sector to every one of those relationships.
