You can't put a price on the value of charity work
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Version 0 of 1. My challenge for the voluntary sector over the next decade is to find a new relationship with money. I don’t mean that money doesn’t matter, but I believe as a sector we have allowed it to dominate, distort and distract us from our greatest economic role – the creation of value beyond money. Long before I ever entered an economics classroom my father taught me something about money – “Remember that money has no value in itself. It’s just something we invented to let us do things. The only value it has is the value you place on what you could spend it on.” Paying a price for something you don’t like much will feel expensive, he explained, but the same amount spent on something you treasure will feel like a bargain. Their price is the same but their value is different. Value is a feeling, not a fact. In today’s society, where the price of one designer handbag could pay six months’ rent for a whole family, surely we cannot doubt that the value of money is subjective – a personal judgment for the individual, and a political judgment collectively. When government gives millions in guaranteed profit to giant private contracting companies, and yet routinely casts voluntary sector grants as ‘handouts’, we should be in no doubt that their spending decisions are value judgments. Charities today are routinely compared with commercial business or public services. We should, apparently, be more like one or both of them, less like ourselves. Sometimes comparisons are favourable, sometimes not. More often they are just wholly inappropriate. More than half of England’s 60,000 children’s voluntary groups have no paid members of staff. Nine in 10 support families in just one neighbourhood, few aim to expand beyond. They offer what Bobby Kennedy referred to as “those things that make life worthwhile”, of which money, GDP, and claims of economic recovery take no account. Most people involved in the voluntary sector feel it offers them personally, as well as their community, society and economy, a kind of value beyond money. Yet to quantify our ‘added value’ we talk in pounds and pence – the money we raise, the paid equivalent of volunteers’ time, the money we save others by helping people in need. How did our sector come to be so defined, and yet poorly described, by money instead of feelings? For over 30 years, the competitive public marketplace has set one charity against another, pitted them against private and public competitors, and claimed to offer a level playing field based on the ability to deliver more (value) for less (money). The industry of assessing ‘value for money’ offers the tantalising fallacy that value is an objective measure, a neutral science that can be applied in spending the nation’s money. Yet, this idea is itself a subjective import from business and measuring the voluntary sector using the values framework of another has wrought havoc on its ecosystem, even for those uninterested or unable to bid for public contracts. The contracting marketplace for public services is rapidly looking like yesterday’s inadequate answer to tomorrow’s public spending problems. We released the Declaration of Interdependence earlier this year in the belief that we must urgently move beyond price-driven contracting, stop fighting short-term battles for our separate organisational interests, and pool our resources to build sustainable community services. If we simply accept that the test of our worth is to do whatever it takes to survive in a financial hunger games, we sell ourselves short and devalue our currency. We have the capacity to act as a ‘currency converter’ between the core economy of family, friendship and community, and the cash economy where everyone and everything must be paid for. We can turn people’s feelings of love, solidarity, reciprocity, even their anger and frustration, into hard assets with which to create jobs, pay taxes, and raise budgets to add to public spending. But that currency conversion can’t happen if we’re expected to operate like a burger retailer competing for market share. Currency conversion can work the other way too. When we get money from government we can use it to build social currency and vast fabrics of human connection that no other sector could create for any amount of money. But that conversion can’t happen if we’re tied into contracts so tightly specified and monitored that we morph into professional bureaucrats. To a cash economy up to its eyeballs in debt, and to politicians with tough value judgments ahead about how to spend public money, what our sector can do is nothing short of economic magic. If we’re smart we’ll stop selling ourselves by our value for money. If they’re smart they’ll know that we’re not just a bargain, we are priceless. This essay is part of a series produced by the by Civil Exchange. It was written by Kathy Evans, chief executive of Children England. The book of essays Making Good: The Future of the Voluntary Sector is out on 10 November. For more news, opinions and ideas about the voluntary sector, join our community – it’s free! The charity money hub is funded by CAF. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here. |