After the initial consultation period ends, 2025 will soon see the publication of the government’s new civil society alliance. Its broad aims are to support a closer partnership between government and civil society “that restores civil society’s place back at the center of our national life”.
This seems both reasonable and achievable. Among its more ambitious goals, however, is a union that recognizes the role of civil society in the defining tasks of government – from driving economic growth to unlocking opportunity – a role that the DCMS describes as “central” to such tasks.
So how realistic is it that civil society—charities, volunteer-led organizations, community groups and the like—must play such a central role in promoting growth and opening up opportunities? And what challenges might such organizations face in doing so, particularly in the cultural sector?
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Through the Cultural Development Fund (CDF) network, Five10Twelve works directly with local authorities, delivery partners and – in some cases – volunteer-led organizations who play an integral role in the delivery of multi-million capital development projects.
These include the Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservation Trust (MWGPT), which received £2.78m of CDF funding from DCMS for capital improvements to restore the magnificent ‘Albert Hall’ in the North. To date, among CDF’s main partners and recipients, the trust is an entirely volunteer-led organisation.
So what can we learn from the CDF network and how does this learning relate to the Civil Society Federation published by the DCMS in October last year?
Principles of civil society
The framework is based on four high-level principles:
- Recognition
- Partnership
- Involvement
- Transparency
Some of the challenges presented below are not specific to cultural organisations, but arise because cultural and creative voluntary organizations – like their private sector counterparts – tend to be smaller or more local organizations with more limited capacity than many of the larger national charities.
Recognition
Recognizing the value of civil society means recognizing the organizations that drive it, the people of its vitality, and also recognizing and mitigating the challenges. This must be structured, relevant and properly supported.
As a recent recipient of the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, MWGPT is one example of how successful organizations can be recognised, although such awards rarely extend to grants that allow individual volunteers to share such recognition.
It is also important to recognize the effects of volunteering on the lives of those most engaged. The key is agency and flexibility, regardless of whether you work full-time and balance volunteer work around this, or retire and work around the home or family.
Flexibility can be especially challenging when it comes to partnerships. For volunteer-led organisations, such as Morecambe Winter Gardens, capital projects work inevitably involves partnerships between funders, public and private sector organizations – including architects, engineers, contractors.
Although funders and partner organizations often work Monday to Friday, 9-5, this can be challenging for volunteer members who fit things around their regular work lives.
Partnership
I have previously written about the way of thinking of partnership in relation to cultural organizations. The importance of shared values is key when it comes to volunteers. There are many great examples in the industry where this alignment of values and aims works really well – including the recent collaboration with London Festival Opera, which presented over 2,000 school children’s operas in Morecambe’s Winter Gardens.
What is important is that effective partnership operations cannot rely solely on goodwill and shared values. It requires revenue funding to activate buildings and facilities that unlock capital funds. Wisely, the CDF includes some revenue funding, but this is increasingly rare in private equity.
Ironically, funding can present particular challenges in collaboration with other local community and volunteer groups. Local organizations with £millions of capital funding can give the impression of a cash-rich organization that can afford to waive venue hire fees, for example.
But for anyone who has managed a program funded by public capital, the profitability of the operation.
So however much of a locally funded organization might want to spread the love and spread opportunities to other local groups, it’s likely they won’t always be able to. Nor should they wait.
Involvement
One of the alliance’s challenges in terms of participation is ensuring that it reflects the wider experience and demographics across the country. This is particularly the case in some of the UK’s ‘leftist’ cities and areas which are most in need of regeneration and support – which is common in most of the cities involved in the CDF network.
Volunteering is generally a middle-class activity undertaken by those who can spare the time to participate. This is compounded by structural support – including, for example, employee volunteering (EV) schemes that allow people to take time out of paid work to volunteer. Inevitably, this is more common in larger companies and large cities and often excludes the creative and cultural sector.
Representing the voice of a community means reflecting the demographics of that community as manifested among MWGPT’s many passionate and committed volunteers. This must be balanced with strong, clear leadership and good governance – especially for smaller organizations typical of the creative and cultural sector.
MWGPT is not atypical of, for example, a skills-led approach to government recruitment. As such, its board’s strong leadership and skill base-all volunteers-is also 100% professional and includes a real estate lawyer, electrical engineer, quantity surveyor, and its chairman is an expert in building restoration, heritage organizations, and culture-led renewal. This kind of expertise has been crucial in giving financiers confidence that the organization can implement large projects.
Transparency
The annex aims to “support honest discussions about funding and the challenges we face”. This can be tricky to negotiate when the need to pivot mid-project due to unexpected challenges or changing circumstances can affect the expected or agreements required by funders.
In capital projects, the stakes are much higher, and construction costs and unexpected issues—especially with heritage sites—often require significant turnarounds and value engineering midway through the project. This is challenging enough for local authorities, who have more options for raising additional resources, expertise, cash flow or funding—something that is not remote for a small volunteer-run organization.
So if part of the government’s plan is to support civil society to play a greater role, this means opening up mechanisms to support them. For financiers, this may mean a return to the first principle of the union – recognition. In this case, recognizing the nature and limitations of the organization, the pressure it may be under and the additional support it may require.
Perhaps here is an opportunity to move away from the typical post-project evaluation model – where learning is usually retrospective – and lean towards the test and learn approach suggested by Pat McFadden. This is what we aim to promote through the CDF network through study visits and knowledge sharing ‘gatherings’ that we host regularly throughout the active project delivery period.
There is much to be learned from the Live projects and much that can be applied to the benefit of the CDF network, the wider sector and current policy development – including civil society alliances.
Join the volunteer team at Morecambe Winter Gardens
Donate online to Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservation Trust