Trusts and foundations week: Tariffs hit trusts. And is it the 'National Lottery Committee Fund'?
Trump's tariffs will hit trusts… because capitalism. And the National Lottery Community Fund wants you to demonstrate 'community' involvement.... But how?
Hello! Welcome to another week in economic and political hell. I hope you enjoyed that little respite from global economic downturn for the last few years, because…
…oh wait. There wasn’t one.
It’s 2008 again! Bear in mind that could mean it’s soon 2010 again.
STOP PRESS: Trump has backed down even since I wrote that. Writing about him is like chasing a greased, orange, racist, illiterate pig.
Meanwhile, in the voluntary sector, at least a thousand people have been made redundant in the last three months (I’ve been casually tracking announcements on Linkedin), but apparently everything is just great and everybody feels just chipper about it.
If this is you, what are you smoking, and can I have some?
And how does that relate to this?
Jo Jeffery’s forthcoming blog calls it all a ‘quiet crisis’. I’ll stick to shitshow.
Later, we’ll be looking at the new NLCF priorities, but first, let’s take a look at where the current capitalist horrors fit in with what grantmakers and charities are trying to do.
Capitalist shitshow: there is no outside
I want to start off by looking at some permutations of charitable funding, and how they relate to global capitalism. Just a light start then. But this was something of a thought experiment for me: seeing several permutations over the last couple of weeks, I wanted to understand for myself what did and did not trigger what you might call a sort of anti-capitalist Spidey-Sense. And why? Because I’m a realist, and as I will keep saying, there is no ‘outside’, and there is no purity, when it comes to economics and finance. But this is particularly interesting when it comes to philanthropy.
Manny Hothi, CEO of Trust for London, hit the nail on the head this week, when he talked about the impact of Trumpism and tariffs on the private trusts and foundations. I like Trust for London, even though they keep turning my organisations down for stuff (damn your eyes). They have an honesty and realism about them, alongside a laser-focus on social justice. And they support things that are quite radical and transgressive in relation to standard capitalist frameworks (eg on employability, rights, benefits). They seem confident and realistic, without being arrogant. Anyway, enough craven flattery.
What I liked was the frankness of what Hothi said about tariffs and their impact:
“Endowed foundations are, at their core, capitalist organisations. We invest our assets to generate a return, which we then use to fund grants and social investment.
At Trust for London, about 50% of our endowment is invested in the global stock market; the other 50% in commercial land in the City of London. (My colleague, Heather Taylor, recently shared more about our investment approach, and about how we decided how much funding to give out https://lked.in/1nMpAY).
So what happens when markets take a hit?
1. If markets fall and values don’t bounce back, our endowment shrinks in value. This matters most in autumn/winter, when we set next year’s grants budget. If values are still low then, we will have a lower grants budget next year.
2. We may have to sell low. A few times each year we sell investments to meet cash flow—mainly to fund payments to grantees. Selling during a downturn locks in losses. Our next sale is in June, so we’re hoping things will stabilise by then.
The news right now is grim and chaotic. It’s incomprehensible how the whims of one man thousands of miles away can so fundamentally affect everything. But the strategy is to sit tight and ride it out. The good news is that, at least in our case, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on funding. But if things don’t recover later in the year, it’s going to be really difficult.”
Boom: most trusts are capitalist organisations. Because of course they are. And indeed, they sit in a very tricky position.
We have seen this over the years as people complain about exactly where trusts’ money comes from. That includes investments we consider ethical or otherwise (tobacco, opioids, slavery), but it goes beyond that. As I’ve quoted several times before, some radicals in the nonprofit sector see the money in many trusts as ‘twice stolen’ - once through profit extraction, and once, in may cases, through tax avoidance. And of course, trusts cannot but be deeply bound up in markets - most actively speculate on markets (or at least, have others do so on their behalf), and this is how they make their cash that they give out. So yes, at heart they are capitalist organisations - because, frankly, everything to do with money is a capitalist organisation in, you know, capitalism. This is why purity culture is especially ineffective where it comes to economics. There is no outside to this system. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still lines to draw. And consequences when we don’t.
Who owns the assets? Probably BlackRock.
And then we have direct corporate donations - including by those who are among the biggest drivers of casino capitalism. BlackRock1 have just given a grant to the King’s Trust.2 Every day, all day social media are showing me ads about this, and telling me how much they care about young people’s futures. It has taken every fibre of my being not to post something sarcastic and make yet another enemy.
BlackRock are one of the biggest asset managers on the planet. They buy up housing, land, agriculture, businesses, your water and public services including schools, energy, everything - and then suck the money out of it, siphoning it off to the wealthy. Countless public assets have been sold off to them around the world - and now they make money for their investors, and not for the public who originally paid for them, or need to use them. It’s a massive wealth transfer – and if you’ve got a pension, chances are you’re in on it. (Some very much more than others, of course...) If you want to know more, you can read about them in Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World by Brett Christophers. This is the guy who also wrote Rentier Capitalism, which tells you something in itself, I think….
So what do we think about this particular case? As I say, investments, financialised assets, the whole casino of the stock market, and the turning of everything we ought to own into profit for shareholders, is a fundamental of modern capitalism. Indeed, as Christophers notes, asset managers have largely taken over from banks since the global financial crash as the investment of choice, because they feel like more of a safe harbour. Or did, until Trump tanked their value too.
When the King’s Trust take cash from these guys, they will not be doing anything fundamentally different than most trusts will be doing. Indeed, I’d be surprised if TfL didn’t have any exposure to BlackRock or Blackstone, or any number of other firms named to sound like they’re boiling down orphans for soap. But when our own cash in delivery organisations comes from trusts, it allows us to feel a little bit removed from the nasty realities of casino capitalism, because they take on the unpleasant and grubby burden from us - out of sight, out of mind. (Of course, many, but far from all, of the major trust funders now have ethical investment policies.)
But once they’re on a social media post, there is a strong feeling of unease, for me at least, that BlackRock are using King’s Trust to launder their reputation. But that, my friends, is pretty much philanthropy in a nutshell. I’d have taken the money too, and, when in the past I could stomach it, chased it.
Meanwhile, I’m told that, these days, the large pharmaceutical family funder who cashed in on opioids make you sign an agreement that you will accept any money offered when you apply - because people were turning it down for publicity….
The question is always ‘where do we draw the line’?
‘Jack the Ripper makes substantial donation to women’s reproductive health charity.’
Meanwhile, a very interesting story on the Beeb about what appears to be a secret donation by Meta and Pinterest to the Molly Rose Foundation, the charity set up in memory of Molly Russell. Molly took her own life in 2017 after being exposed to harmful online content on social media. According to the BBC, “Meta and other social media companies face multiple lawsuits in the US from families who claim their children were harmed by social media. The cases also involve attorneys general from more than 40 states, who claim that the design of the platforms caused harm to children. The first trial is expected to be heard in November.”
Now this is tricky. Can a charity take money from the very companies that contributed to the harm they were set up to address – and still retain the freedom to challenge them? If they sued the social media giants and won compensation, would that allow them to have a greater impact - and perhaps a freer hand - or are they better ‘in the tent’? To what extent can they take the money and then use it to directly challenge those giants and their pathogenic effect on our society, especially now those organisations have removed the safeguards that might have made a difference? Well, they have since been vocal about the dangers, and critical of those companies’ approaches as they have removed the slim protections on content which had been introduced partly as a response to Russell’s case. But how far can that go - not least simply because of the sheer size of those behemoths?
The fact that this grant was intended to be confidential - it is said - should theoretically reduce the chance of Meta to so overtly using the cause they caused to destink themselves. Except, of course, that strangely now we all know about it - and they were trying to keep it soooo quiet….
So here is another permutation - you take the money from the malign forces doing the damage, but use it at least directly to challenge the power of those monsters. Tricky to pull off. Perhaps it could only be possible in a case where you hold the upper hand due to potential international legal consequences for the ‘funder’. This delicate balance may be the best of all worlds - take the money/ resources, and use it to challenge the oppressor’s subjugation. 3Since this is about active challenge of systems - at policy and campaign level - perhaps it’s a good balance? Only time will tell.
Again, there is no outside – but still, there are choices. Difficult, difficult, choices.
Erm, really?
So this last one was what made me decide to do this comparison. I don’t want to name the charity, because I really don’t want to make yet another enemy. (Two mortal enemies per blogpost max.) But I have been scratching my head about this all week, because this isn’t just about where the money comes from. It’s about how far trusts will go to protect their financial position – even when it collides directly with reforms that would benefit the majority of the people they support. A major charitable funder seems to be actively campaigning against leasehold reform because it wants to be exempt from plans that scrap "marriage value" charges, arguing that the change would cost them millions and reduce funding for their beneficiaries. They’ve launched a legal challenge, saying they’re a charity, not a profit-driven estate, and should be treated like the Crown Estate or National Trust. Now it’s not clear here whether they’re just seeking an exemption for them alone - they own large amounts of freehold properties in an extremely wealthy and upmarket area of London. Are they just seeking an exemption for themselves, or for all non-profits? Or could this be a broader attempt to challenge leasehold reform itself? I hope not.
They claim that in this instance, the change in leasehold law, and the fact they would no longer be entitled to the same size of financial settlement on lease extensions, would amount to a ‘wealth transfer’ to the already wealthy, and the rich non-doms on their estates. But that seems like a somewhat acrobatic contortion. Aligning themselves with the Crown Estate also doesn’t seem a good look - but is perhaps to be expected, given that both leasehold, and the Crown Estates, are feudal relics….
At this stage, it seems to me that the uncomfortable interrelation of the demands and interests of vast private wealth and private non-profit foundations becomes difficult to ignore. How many people’s lives will be improved by leasehold reform? Can a charity really attempt to intervene in such an important legal reform for working class people across the country just because it will reduce its income for ‘charity’? We can’t opt out. But we can still draw lines.
There is no purity. But…
So in all of this, the knife-edge balance that charitable funders, and those who choose to take their money, becomes clear. In the middle, it becomes hazy. And then, at either end of the spectrum, there are places where I think the lines are anything but blurry. (I haven’t even gone into an example of the US tendency for foundations to be actively set aside to achieve the goals of their wealthy donors - or the right-wing ‘charitable’ think tanks in the UK campaigning for policies that will benefit the wealthy.)
What I think this does show is that nobody can sit outside the ethical minefield of an unjust society where casino capitalism rules. As I’ve said before, I think it comes down to having a strong sense of short, medium and long term goals. But values, and day by day, blow by blow careful ethical calculations, are all we have.
And meanwhile, we will all feel market capitalism’s spasms and shudders as it goes through yet another period that shows us just what a terrible idea it is.
The ‘National Lottery Committee Fund’: How to involve communities
A cautious homage to a national treasure
I’m not sure people appreciate what unicorns the National Lottery Community Fund and National Lottery Heritage Fund are globally - at around £670m per annum, they are between them the 9th largest charitable funder in the world in terms of annual giving.4 It’s very hard for me to admit that something a Conservative government created is a good thing. But it really is. I also know the people are pretty much 100% full-on community champions. It’s a deeply good thing.
When Rachel Reeves said during the employer NI debacle that the Government already funds the UK charity sector to the tune of X through the national lottery, some people got a bit ornery. That wasn’t real government money. But wasn’t it? I mean, if we consider them, at root, a Government funder (they’re a non-departmental public body), albeit funded by voluntary means, our VCS actually looks much better funded than we often imagine. And indeed, far better funded than most of the similar sectors in the rest of the world. 5 I would imagine it is one of the main reasons for the flourishing and growth of the VCS in the last 31 years.6
So they have now announced their new priorities, after a soft pause for the last six months which was not widely publicised. Health, children, and the environment are foregrounded, but throughout all of it a central plank is ‘community involvement’. This is mostly good stuff. But the last one is where my anxiety kicks in.
The end work they do, and the projects they support, are often amazing. Their impact - of the main programmes, not always their offshoots - is amazing. But their weakness has always been their tendency to demand a kind of rigid approach to community inclusion that never seems to map very closely with what those of us who have spent many years working in different communities have experienced.
It always feels rather like a sort of non-departmental public body’s idea of what communities - and community engagement - should look like. Unsurprisingly, they tend to foreground governance structures to steer, and market research to engage communities, in much the same way that a local authority would. As we’ll see, I’m not alone in this perception, and many of us have experienced it in various forms over the last twenty years or so.
Funder relaunches £362m programme with new priorities
01 April 2025 by Emily Harle
‘Applicants will need to demonstrate how communities are actively involved in their project.
“By focusing our funding on equity, empowerment and alignment with our four community-led missions, we are ensuring that every pound we invest drives meaningful change,” the NLCF said.
Pauls Streets’ response was positive and typically sensible:
Very encouraging approach The National Lottery Community Fund. If there is any lesson to be drawn from over the pond (and the success of the right in Europe) it’s that we fail to engage people & communities on the brunt end of the cost of living crisis at our peril. Especially when this comes on the back of a globalisation agenda that has served to concentrate wealth in a small number of people and places, leaving many forgotten or written off as the collateral damage of competitive advantage and the seatch to find the cheapest place to produce - irrespective of the impact on people & place.
But what I do worry about is that word ‘demonstrate’. As the Lottery put it,
“Under the new programme, all applicants will need to demonstrate how they plan to reach people who find it hardest to access support and show how communities are involved in their project – including in the leadership of the organisation, participation and voice.’”
‘Demonstrating’ involvement
Why does 'demonstrating' involvement make me uneasy? For me, there are two key issues. The first is about how you show you are listening. And the second is how you steer and make decisions. Both are methodological questions - but not just of ‘method’. It’s about how your method more fundamentally affects what the outcome will be.
I’m going to leave aside questions of co-production, and all manner of terminologies that are often introduced to cover over fundamental problems in what it is to understand human relationships and what it is to engage and involve people in decisions. I’m just going to focus on how we listen, and how we make decisions. And the goal is practical. I want small community organisations who know their communities to have their indigenous forms of knowledge and methods of action respected.
Let me start by saying this, before I get jumped on and kicked to death by social researchers. Good social research - including market research methods - are fantastic ways to understand some of your community, if they are done well. (The former is a big part of my day job.) Sadly that is often not the case.
I would also add that solid governance in terms of organisations and their decision making is important. And I would further add that projects need to have the right people involved in decisions. But for all of those things, the question is the form they are forced to take. And we have to avoid governance being the end in itself - a committee is not a community.
The problem is that, for many years, community organisations have had to try and reinvent the ‘consultation’ work they do for the benefit of funding applications. Funders will prompt applicants with things like: ‘How many people did you consult?’ ‘Did you use focus groups or surveys?’ ‘What kind of research did you do?’
“They have such a strong focus on "tell us exactly how many people you spoke to" - which makes sense in the context of focus groups and surveys, but is incompatible with the organic approach that works so well for small charities. Those informal conversations in the corridor or the kitchen after an activity session are so valuable, but seemingly so hard to get credited”.
Now if you question these methodologies, you’re likely to be written off as an anti-science numbskull or floaty anti-intellectual bleeding-heart charity sector sandal-wearing pleb. Oh yes - make no mistake, that is what is underneath the response people have to those who question the logics of what my good friend Herbert Marcuse called ‘instrumental rationality.’
The thing is, much of the work we do in the charity sector is experiential, lived, embodied, felt. And ‘community’ is one of those words I feel some so often look at with suspicion because it is ‘difficult’. (Notice, by the way, how quickly ‘difficult’ becomes ‘impossible’.) Community does not exist in places or actions - those are either sites or signs. Community doesn’t exist in the building, or in the consultation event—it exists in shared understanding and the concepts human beings carry around in their heads, which drive and are driven by action, and yet are experienced and lived. You ‘feel’ community - and if you feel it, it’s ‘real’.
And this is where the clash between community practice and funding logic becomes glaring. What the discussions often reveal is a narrowness of understanding, not just in sector approaches, but the range of range of epistemological questions (questions relating to how we ‘know’ things, and how we know what we know) which are commonplace in deeper academic research, but often missing in the ‘applied’ policy, industrial and commissioning world’s stripped-down versions of social science. While social sciences have a vast range of approaches and types of knowledge, that range does not get imported into ‘industry’, or to the public sector. That’s because industrial bureaucracy tends to flatten everything into simple, quantitative transactions. And in those systems, metrics atop being tokens of reality. They quickly become the reality itself. - And they work fine if your bottom line is as simple as ‘money go up’. But how to understand and ‘measure’ a much more complex worldview, and shifting set of goals, is a constant question for those of us who work with human lives, emotions and relationships. Much as we can turn them into souped-up happy sheets (Warwick Edinburgh, I’m looking at you)7, those are difficult things to measure.
“There's a genuine issue underneath this around the misunderstanding and appropriation of research tools and methods from an academic / knowledge production context and the blanket application of them across funding criteria and commissioning. Researchers know that all tools - like surveys and focus groups - come with strengths, weaknesses and considerations in use. These tools don't work unless you are aware of how, when and why to use them. Just because someone did a survey doesn't tell you anything other than that they know what a survey is.”
Good qualitative research will get past the pat answers. My thing is stories (in fact I originally studied literature). Narratology. Ethnography. All that good stuff. What we all know in those fields is that people will tell you things in the kitchen that they won’t tell you in the focus group.
And more simplistic methods, if they are inappropriate, can actually damage the work itself that you are trying to do. For example, asking older men who didn’t like talking about mental health a question like ‘Have you been feeling loved’ for a Warwick Edinburgh scale measurement on one project I developed did not elicit a numerical answer. In fact the answer usually began with a capital F. And it meant that our relationships were undermined as we tried to capture the information. “But it has a BASELINE!” the NHS commissioners cried, and “Look, it’s all that fluffy shite you people say you like!” Sigh.
“It's an ongoing "discussion" we are having with our grants officer. I explained that when we do traditional focus groups it's so false and often just rotates arround one current subject, so last month it would have been benefit reform (not something we can tackle), so it's just a waste of resources and has the impact of destroying our relationship with our community.”
- Charlotte Williams
The point anyway is that how you measure things affects the thing you measure. There’s also always the danger that you start to do the things you do because they’re easier to measure, not because they are the right thing to do. In this case, with the National Lottery’s demands for ‘demonstrating active community involvement’, to what extent will the demands for evidence shape the projects themselves?
So for many, the best qualitative research methods are often those that are embedded and narrative. And whether they are captured or not, those are where community charities excel. But those methods are often seen as somehow invalid.
The most authentic community-centric work comes from simply living and breathing within that community - being there day in, day out. But that's hard to prove and quantify, so sadly doesn't usually go down very well when answering the funder's questions.”
- Rachel Cross
Steering groups
It’s not for nothing that I sometimes call the NLCF the ‘National Lottery Committee Fund’. Because real, place-based community involvement isn’t just endless committees and steering groups. And yet increasingly that is the only understanding of some major funders (the lottery are far from alone in this). Again, this is a culture clash: they want to see their own models mirrored in the organisations they fund.
Before getting into this, I want to say: I know many people on the Big Local who worked incredibly hard to make these programmes succeed. And in some places, they did. This is not a dismissal of all that work, but a reflection on some of the recurring patterns and tensions I’ve seen and experienced close-up. There is often a sense that the governance models funders recognise and insist on - not for organisations, but also for individual projects and programmes - just replicate existing local democratic structures which we already know work very badly for communities, concentrating power in a few voices while silencing others.
For example, The Big Local programme spent 15+ years and a quarter of a billion pounds on setting up parallel governance structures to local ward/ community councils, and new community organisations, when well-established, high-functioning local charities that were deeply embedded in their communities already existed. In the best cases, communities made great strides and lasting impacts. In the worst cases - far from uncommon, I’m afraid - it put people in a room with nothing in common and invited them to fight like dogs in a sack for money. The conception of the programme itself acted as if some cash, a steering group, and endless supply chains of consultants and fundholders would automatically create some kind of coherence, or lasting benefits for communities. For some, it did. Those are the stories you will hear in the coming year. For many, it did anything but.
That is an issue that has plagued the Big Local project over the years— while some good things have come out of that £250m (I have deep knowledge of several), many of those projects became essentially small-scale committee machines, where the governance process itself became the point. Indeed, sometimes it felt like the sheer existence of 250 committees was evidence of— achieving? creating? demonstrating?—community. Again, I don’t mean this as a universal truth – some groups made these structures work well. But for many, especially in areas with existing strong organisations, the structures felt imposed and disconnected from real community practice.
Long-term, embedded organisations are able to listen to their community and actively involve them, while retaining some ability to make decisions and lead. Indeed, they also have the skills necessary to make them work. Meanwhile, shake-and-bake community projects often just draw many disconnected but vested interests to a Crystal Maze-style cash bonanza. Whenever I hear a funder say ‘community co-production’ I out on my elbow-pads and take a beta-blocker.
This isn’t about malign intent. Far from it - people in those organisations really want to do the right thing. But structurally, these initiatives can end up repeating the same patterns. Programmes like Power To Change have foregrounded innovations and capital projects rather than supporting long-term already-established models that both predate and outlast the novelty of another familiar model: a new community space that becomes a funding black hole, a new committee dominated by enthusiastic professionals, and a few local residents left feeling excluded or tokenised. The urge to incorporate and find a ‘vehicle’. The urge for ‘legacy’ when countless other powerful and living legacies predate it.
“Having worked with some of the people that have driven this approach, I know they have a nuanced understanding of community-led approaches. Of course, whether that can be reflected in the direction of a juggernaut like NLCF is another matter.”
- Sophie
I always remember being in community anchor organisations where we spent all day every day talking to people (inside and outside the organisation, believe me), involving people in developing their own projects, involving people in ‘our’ projects, trying things out and seeing if people wanted them, and most of all just being there and listening—and had for 135 years. But for a lottery bid, we had to invent a regular steering committee, and a programme of ‘consultation’ which nobody wanted, and led to much less innovative and effective work. In other places, we’ve done the same, and ended up with only the most ‘active citizens’ - usually code for ‘the loudest voices’.
So what actually works? Day-in, day-out presence and trust. Some of the best community involvement, especially in place-based work, comes from being there every single day, listening, learning. It’s about the importance of embodied involvement in a community where the organisation is part of that community - not just consulting it. And not setting up miniature committees-as-‘democracies’ which mirror all the issues with democracy at a macro level.
That is hard to put in a funding bid - but even harder if you insist on frameworks designed to manage local councils, or to find out the most popular flavour of crisps.
And that brings us to the big question: what might funders - and delivery organisations - do differently? Well, the last word goes to a grantmaker:
“Who are there every day? The community groups we support.
- Who are trusted by the community? The community groups we support every day.
- Who hears 'the lived experience' voice (the loud, usual voice and the quiet, often unspoken voice) every day? The community groups we support every day.
My aim as a funder is to (1) get more flexible, unrestricted funding in (old, restricted endowments are killing me and our purpose) and (2) offer larger, multi-year unrestricted grants to empower the community groups to work in their hyper-local place to address issues, help with social cohesion.
It will take time to achieve this (and I am not patient) and I am not daft enough to think my level of grant making can change the world. But I hope it is a help.”
Indeed it is…. it’s not sexy, it’s not necessarily ‘scientific’.8 But everybody knows it’s just the right thing to do.
And finally…
As a tiny consolation, to the current global misery, there has been a particularly wonderful flurry of entries relating to Trump and economic collapse happening on my favourite subReddit at the moment, ‘Leopards ate my face’ - check it out. (Named after the immportal tweet: “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.”
And if you’ve only just noticed I’m a horrible person, well, you clearly just haven’t been paying attention.
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Let’s work together! As a consultant, I have some capacity from May. I work with a wide range of charities and funding organisations to help you do what we do better. That ranges from social research and learning partnership, to strategy development and organisational consultancy.
And don’t worry: like most charities, I become very tame if you pay me.
As for Trump, and the markets, one of the places many of us are going to see that is in pensions. My US friends are worried, quite rightly. But it is hitting us all here as well. And, if you do have a pension, the likelihood is that a large part of it will be invested in these guys: BlackRock.
I still can’t get used to calling them that, but I also keep calling him Prince Charles and forget the Queen is no more. Does anyone else find it harder to like them now they’re called the King’s Trust? Weird.
(And not just, as in the case of the live music charity taking 50p from Ticketmaster to make grants to a few venues.)
Although it’s worth noting that in the US, contrary to what some believe on this side of the pond, nonprofits receive very significant funds too, at around $300bn per annum, compared with £7bn from the UK Government - although of course we have a much more substantial public sector.
It’s hard to find data on the size of the VCS beyond the early 2000s. The growth in the number of VCS organisations has not been particularly large:
2000/01: Approximately 146,429 voluntary organisations were operating in the UK. NCVO
2007/08: The sector experienced growth, reaching a peak of 171,074 organisations. NCVO
2012/13: Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the number declined to 161,202. NCVO
2019/20: The count slightly decreased to 163,150. NCVO
2020/21: A marginal increase brought the total to 163,959 organisations. House of Lords Library
[It’s interesting to note in the above that the sector had a very visible contraction during ther glibal financial crisis, which indeed I remember partyl because I couldn;t get a job for a year and everything started going under. Strap in, folks….]
But the real change over that period has been in the number of people actually employed nd the size of the sector’s workforce. This speaks of a level of professionalisation - or at least . Again, tough to get data much before 2010, but by 2023, the VCS employed about 925,000 people (that’s about 3% of the UK's total workforce) - and that’s a 24% increase on 2011 (745,000 people).
Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, for those lucky enough not to have met it.
And actually, this is such a daft thing to say - it’s perfectly scientific, unless we take a ‘scientific’ approach that cuts out 90% of science…