Kevin Carey,
chair of the RNIB, didn’t hold back yesterday at the CFDG conference. He gave
the sector both barrels, in fact. At close range.
He told
audiences that the sector was cripplingly undercapitalised, focused on helping too
few people, and too often prioritised preserving the organisation instead of
helping the beneficiaries. The sector, he said, thought of itself as a fleet of
speedboats, nimble and able to change direction quickly, but actually, it had
the ponderousness of an oil tanker.
At that last
point, the bloke sitting next to me, FD of a medium-sized charity, shrugged and
nodded. “Getting anything changed in my charity takes forever,” he said. “The
trustees are disconnected from the senior management, and the management mostly
want things to be the way they’ve always been.
“No one wants to
change direction, even if it would suit the beneficiaries.”
Another FD, later
in the day, said that he’d tried getting his charity to assess what its most
effective interventions were, and had been told this was a waste of money.
“Imagine that,”
he muttered sarcastically, “wasting all that cash finding out whether what
you’re doing works.”
It’s interesting
that when Martin Brookes criticised the sector’s fundraising last week, he was
mobbed with indignant protesters. But Carey’s broadside on strategic direction met
with broad agreement from an audience comprised largely of finance directors.
Now this may to
a certain extent be down to the natural character of the two constituencies.
Fundraisers are by nature optimists, FDs not so much. But in any case, they
certainly seemed clear that the sector could do much to improve.
So if charities
are so bad, are they worth saving? Carey himself seems to think so. Possibly
this is because, while the charity sector is not as good at it thinks at
responding to social need, the public and private sectors are both far worse.