Voluntary Action Westminster

In an age of competition, the local voluntary and community sector needs to re-discover the value of collaboration, says Bernard Collier, Chief Executive at Voluntary Action Westminster.

There has never been a more difficult time to be a civil society leader.

Government spending cuts continue to bite, and in our work we see the negative social impacts of the recent recession, not least of which are the unpredictable outcomes from the one million unemployed young people.

Medium-sized organisations, with some paid staff, are in a particularly difficult position. They’re not small enough to rely solely on donations or ad hoc income, but there is some evidence that they are not yet able to compete as successfully for public service contracts as are their larger cousins.

I know that many organisations have been running deficits on fairly meagre reserves, hoping for the financial situation to turn round.

Hope has been held out for social impact bonds, or for a new philanthropy. We’ve been encouraged to sell our services to the community, or to generate social enterprises to fund our charitable work. But while these are interesting ideas, they do not yet represent a viable option for most local voluntary and community action.

So what options does this leave leaders in the local voluntary and community sector?

The time has come for the local voluntary and community sector to step outside of its comfort zone and develop some truly radical approaches to delivering social value. And that’s why I am calling for voluntary and community sector leaders to take this opportunity before it is forced on us so that it can be done in a rational, thought-through way.

We need to set aside competition and to rediscover collaboration. That doesn’t just mean that we need to investigate partnerships and joint working in delivery, with which we are familiar. It also means that we need to investigate consortia working, formal mergers, joint back offices and “super charities” or holding companies that can hold valuable projects currently located in unsustainable organisations.

The local sector needs to find a way of retaining social capital held in local organisations. This calls for a new approach to competition and collaboration. The sector at a local level needs to return to a specifically voluntary sector approach – eschewing competition in favour of collaboration and co-operation.

Competition is destroying the bonds of trust that holds networks of organisations together and undermines rather than enhances social value. Competition and the marketisation of the sector is easing the path for national and regional not-for-profits, as well as private sector organisations that offer little in additional social capital and often create wasteful duplication.

Join me and other local voluntary and community sector leaders on 24 January 2012 for a discussion and debate event about how we can work together in the new age.