Who gets the biggest slices of the pie? And why your university seems still to matter
How well connected, truly connected, are those who make these decisions about who needs the money the most?
If you’re a funder working in social justice maybe just take 5 to look at who’s working for you. If your list of staff universities is entirely made up of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Durham and the London School of Economics (a true story, which inspired this blog post)… just exactly how well placed are you to judge what’s realistic or workable, and who’s best placed to deliver social justice arts, sport, health or other work in a context with which, let’s be honest, your team probably doesn’t have a lot of direct experience?
Are you going to cut through to the people that might be best placed to make the changes that our economic and social problems would respond to? How available or accessible are you to them?
Do you even know how to talk to the 93% of people in the UK who went to a state school?
I have worked in a charity where I knew I didn’t quite fit in, but wasn’t sure until somebody said, “of course, at the sorts of schools we all went to…” and I had to politely stop him there, and ask, “what sort of school was that, Peter*?”. He went a bit squirmy and awkward at the realisation that state-comprehensive-schooled people don’t always look or sound like something out of kids’ classic TV drama Grange Hill, especially if they have a hard-to-pin-down Midlands accent**, and he barely spoke to me again.
Why is this even a problem?
75% of the sector is small, with turnover under £100k (Charity Commission data). A huge number of people working in small grassroots frontline charities are unpaid volunteers, giving up time on the side of their day jobs to improve lives, places and spaces.
On the other, as we all look to more relational fundraising in the face of AI-generated ‘floods’ of applications overwhelming funders and causing them to close their open application routes… Who finds it easiest to tap into their network and reach a Trustee who can put them forward or solicit an application? And who’s asking around for anyone who might know someone whose aunty once lived next door to someone who did something in charitable giving?
Realistically, directing any money to the tiny charities is all going to come down to who actually decides where the money goes, and whether the people lower down the socieoeconomic pyramid have any access to them.
So what would make a difference?
I’m glad that more funders are asking charities to get out of their ivory towers and not only ‘consult’ the people who use their services, but actually collaborate, co-design and co-develop the services that are going to work better for people. It is making charities ask better questions of themselves and how they work. However, unless this is matched with the same sort of soul-searching and action among decisionmakers for some lived experience in funding decisions, we’ll be continuing to perpetuate the structural injustices that keep 93% of the population working harder for a smaller share of the pie.
The Arts Council, for one, asks for socioeconomic data of senior leadership and trustees of applicants - tricky to ask, but useful to know, especially in a subsector that is often criticised for elitism. How many funders have this data on their own decisionmakers or support staff? When recruiting, how many are still requiring a university degree? Especially when a specific degree in a relevant subject isn’t actually a requirement, it’s just traditional to set an expectation using that benchmark. And are structural biases and connections still limiting the pool of people being appointed to alumni of those few elite universities in the example that I stumbled across on LinkedIn this week?
Food for thought…
*not his real name
**not regional enough to be regional, not posh enough to be ‘standard’, according to a colleague in a different employer, when casting about the office for a voiceover for a film… wow thanks, Sean ***
***also not his real name