NCVO / GMCVO CONFERENCE 2010
Shifting sands – where do we stand?
Alex Whinnom, Director of the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation
I’m very pleased to be here at the third northern conference run by NCVO in partnership with GMCVO. Once again we were sold out, proving that national need not mean London, and that NCVO is as serious as we are about collaboration. I have to admit I am also a little awed to be in a space between a number of knights – which I understand is a kind of chess move - but hope this simply indicates that I will soon be made a baron.
Before I go on, I would like briefly to introduce GMCVO– but only briefly, because many of you do know us, and if you are curious we have a perfectly good website which I hope you will visit.
The GMCVO vision is a strong, diverse and influential voluntary sector in Greater Manchester. We are a support organisation which operates across the ten independent local authorities that make up the Manchester City Region. We support voluntary action by local people, working in partnership with other support organisations and with the public and private sectors.
This conference is about putting the heart into Big Society. Sir Stuart has spoken about Big Society. I want to talk about the heart. A couple of months ago, feeling I’d had a lot of conversations recently with people who were not just anxious but disoriented, I sent a note to a wide range of voluntary sector contacts as follows:-
At the NCVO/GMCVO conference in November I will have the opportunity of making a “keynote” speech. I want to talk about the moral and ethical issues that are arising for people employed as staff, volunteers and trusteesin the voluntary sector at the moment. I think this is going to be one of the really big issues for us all over the next few years.Some obvious areas are things like compulsory “volunteering”; payment by results; partnerships with private sector businesses.
People are also worried about prioritising who we help when resources are limited; about how far quality will or should be sacrificed to reduce costs; about whether our sector is taking jobs from unionised workforces. And so on.I would be very grateful if you could spare five minutes to give me your opinion on any of these or other moral dilemmas you face. What personal principles and values are at stake? How far would you compromise your principles and for what? What wouldn’t you be prepared to compromise on?
Many of us subscribe with some enthusiasm to the concept of Big Society, yet in the midst of the current confusion, have no idea which way we should go to reach it. The storm born of recession, public spending cuts, the voluntary sector funding crisis and rising demand is still raging. Few organisations are well placed to ride this out – reserves will be exhausted long before new kinds of resources materialise. This storm, however, was at least predicted....
But we now face a crisis of a more profound kind – a crisis of identity and morality. There is a growing uncertainty about who we are and what our role is within society, “civil society” or ‘Big Society’. New resources on the horizon come with a price that many existing organisations may feel compromises their mission or presents unacceptable risk. New kinds of organisations are already evolving, but innovation is constrained not only by resources but by skills and structures. In these shifting sands, I believe that we must above all be true to our own hearts, and hold fast to the values on which our organisations and our movement were founded.
The response to my notewas immediate, enormous and thoughtful. I had certainly touched a nerve - the question I had raised was at the front of people’s minds and many people were good enough to provide live illustrations. For example: -
What do you do when a person comes into your volunteer centre in great distress, saying “you have to find me a volunteering place, or my benefits will be cut”?
What do you do when you are told your organisation will not be paid unless you can get one of your clients into an unsuitable job – although you know this will damage her mental health?
I’m afraid I won’t be giving you the answers to those dilemmas or any others. There are of course no answers, only choices. But I do want to suggest how we might think about them.
I also believe we must think about them, because every voluntary organisation is going to face these kinds of questions. As another respondent said, “Nothing feels black and white anymore.”
Many people felt they faced a potential clash between their personal values and what they saw as perhaps unacceptable compromises in order to save services:- “Whatwe arebeginning to seearepeople who are putting their personal and professional values and principles - about doing a complete and thorough job - to one side in order totry and ensure they keep their posts, inevitablyleading to a deflated staff and no job satisfaction.” Mission drift, a disease already as familiar in our sector as the common cold, was thought to be occurring in more virulent forms:- “We are being forced into a more competitive, outcome-focused funding environment which means there are likely to be more pressures on us to act like commercial organisations - competitive, secretive or even acquisitive. It's going to challenge our values as a sector a lot.”
People are worried about the erosion of long term professional relationships:-. “The potential for us to be seen to support the replacement of previously paid posts with unpaid ones is a real concern. The potential clash with our public sector colleagues is a worry.”
There was also a high level of concern for vulnerable people:- “How will a voluntary sector which is itself struggling for resources ‘square the circle’ when fighting for marginalized and unpopular minorities?” - “How do we target resources fairly – to need – rather than what commissioners want us to deliver?” - “What campaigning stand should we take on cuts -are they inevitable or not? As most of our funding comes from the local authority, are we too soft on challenging them?”
A few were more sanguine, for example:- “We should have no fear of working with organisations in the private sector as long as we can assure ourselves that their practices are not exploitative of vulnerable employees, consumers or communities.”
But again and again, it came back to values and to what people believe is right. Which brings me to the approach I want to advocate. It is summed up bluntly by this comment:- “I think as VCS organizations collectively we need to decide our bottom line and stick to it.”
How often do any of us really think about our values? As individuals or as organisations? And have we thought through how we prioritise them?
I expect many of you will have come across the old classic train track dilemma. A train is thundering down the track. In front of it five people are tied to the rails. You have no time to release them, but you do have time to pull the lever to change the points and divert the train to another track. Unfortunately another person is tied to the rails on that one. What would you do?
Most people say they would pull the lever. But when asked instead whether they would be prepared to push someone in front of the train in order to divert it, most people say they would not. Although the result is the same we feel that we are more personally involved in the pushing than in the pulling. Additional knowledge can complicate the choice and highlight still more strongly the fact that our choices are always driven by personal values and priorities. For example, what if your mother were the single person, or what if the five people were mass murderers?
Hopefully this particular situation is unlikely to confront us in real life. But this silly story is just a metaphor for the real choices we do make. We are all willing to “do evil that good may come” - to a point. We all believe in “the greatest good to the greatest number” – to a point. But we differ over where we draw the line in the sand, and say “this is a step too far”. Different people will make different choices in the two dilemmas I mentioned earlier – whether to collude with “compulsory volunteering, and whether to risk one person’s welfare for the sake of maintaining a service to others – they will make their choices with varying degrees of enthusiasm and certainty, depending on the position of their line in the sand and on what they value most. Not making a choice is also a valid choice, but it is a choice – we can’t escape it.
Organisations also have values, whether or not they are articulated, and they too make choices. For the people in the organisation – the staff, volunteers and trustees - and the cause the organisation serves – the choices of the organisation have huge implications. This is why we have to talk about our organisational values.
Last year I quoted a number of poems in my talk, and this proved so popular that I thought I’d offer one or two again this year. Wordsworth says:-
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
I think that nicely sums up the risk to our organisations in the current environment. We may desperately want to respond to the needs we see around us. We may be prepared to make compromises between what we think is right and what we know is necessary. But if the burden of compromise is too great then we – and our organisations – lose our integrity.So it is not survival, or growth, or even crucial services, at any price. The hearts of our organisations matter.
By way of illustration, my own organisation, GMCVO, has been going through a bout of soul-searching over the last eighteen months, aware that in the near future we would be facing up to some difficult choices. Our board and management team put aside considerable time to ask ourselves, what does GMCVOreally believe in? After much debate and revision we have identified three priority values: Our primary loyalty is to the people of Greater Manchester; we are predisposed towards those who are disadvantaged or discriminated against; and we believe in working with others in a spirit of trust. Locality, equality and collaboration, are operationally effective core values, which we can all relate to and use to take decisions.
Different organisations will prioritise different values, so the idea that the voluntary sector, or even less, civil society, could stand by a set of shared values, is ambitious and maybe unrealistic. But I would be very interested in that discussion. Are there voluntary sector values? Are there Big Society values? I wonder whether we would all agree for example on the importance of the tolerance of difference? Do we all believe the weak deserve our compassion and help? Do we all think we are obliged to speak truth to power? Is there perhaps a shared “Big Society value” around self-help and mutualism?
I’m not sure, but I am sure that being “value-led” is the defining characteristic of a good voluntary organisation. Having very clear values, with careful definitions, is the essential moral compass that will allow an organisation and the people associated with it to take tough but right decisions on priorities, compromises and relationships at a time when it really does feel that the ground is shifting under our feet. It will allow individuals to understand whether their personal values are sufficiently aligned with those of the organisation for them to wish to belong to it. It will enable the organisation to recognise and affiliate to other organisations that share its values – regardless of sector or size.
These lines are well known, they are the introduction to Dante’s Inferno – the journey through hell:-
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the right way had been lost sight of.
As we continue our journey across the shifting sands, I urge everyone involved in voluntary organisations to continue to think and talk and negotiateyour organisational values. This isn’t a pleasant diversion from the real work. It is the only way to keep our hearts, our only chance of keeping sight of the right way.
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