In my day job as a grant maker, I am frequently invited to be part of collaborative efforts bringing together charities, think tanks and policy makers that have too often worked in siloes. They are coming together to find common ground between multiple, overlapping and reinforcing challenges including climate breakdown, social justice and migration. There is an awakening happening to the fact that this set of crises requires a greater joining up of ideas and a response that is proportionate to both its depth and complexity.
The place these macro crises flow down to, where the impact is most potent, is at the local level among the poorest in society. We could all learn from how small charities, often led by volunteers, are addressing these complex social challenges in holistic and effective ways. This article explores the approach of one of these offering advice and support to refugees and asylum seekers in a Northern English city.
The charity in question, which we are calling Poppy, became the focus of a 14-month long study during 2020–21. In this study, I was particularly seeking to understand how the charity was led. This was not in terms of who was in charge or what its results were; rather I was interested in the influences that drove what the charity’s workers and volunteers did and how they really made a difference in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers.
Life for refugees in the UK during the early 2020s is full of challenges on multiple fronts. The people Poppy works with have generally fled deeply traumatic situations, often compounded by trauma on their journey and illegal entry into the UK which leads to lengthy periods of uncertainty and a life lived in legal limbo. Government policy towards them has been explicitly ‘hostile’ for some years which has both fed and been fed by media narratives framing those who arrive as asylum seekers as the worst of a bad bunch of immigrants here to exploit the generosity of the British state. With their entitlements – including rights to work and freedom of movement – strictly curtailed, asylum seekers find themselves in unwelcoming environments with next to no personal agency to change their situation. In the case of those who Poppy works with, they are housed in a city with a history of racism and among people who have directly borne the brunt of austerity and suffer very real hardship and poverty in their own lives.
Faced with these multiple, overlapping and reinforcing challenges to the people it serves, there are four patterns that stand out as being leading influences in Poppy’s work.
The first is working in a collaborative way. Poppy brings together all of the service providers in one place for a weekly drop-in where practical support, social activity, food and connection to local groups are opened up. Whatever needs people bring to these drop-ins, they are either met or a plan is made to meet them. In a world of shut doors, this place opens them and breaks down the bureaucratic and social barriers that exist outside of it.
The second pattern is being truly client driven. The first priority for Poppy is that people feel safe and heard. Every request is listened to and responded to, allowing needs to shape the work of the charity, even where this can lead to overstretch for staff and overwhelm Poppy’s small office space.
The third is working collectively. Poppy operates as a partnership between settled local residents and the refugees and asylum seekers who are at once clients and volunteers. At the time of writing, Poppy is entirely staffed by refugees and the board is a blend of refugees and longer-term local residents. This collective, shared effort means the lived experience of refugees, and the people who are learning to welcome and integrate them, blends and influences everything the charity does.
The fourth pattern is voluntary action, which delivers most of Poppy’s work. People volunteer for altruistic reasons, and this keeps care at the core of what they do. It is also a practical approach, allowing a very small organisation to do much more than its tiny budget and staff of two would suggest. Volunteers gain a lot themselves in terms of self-identity and a sense of purpose. This is hugely significant to asylum seekers as they live in limbo, not valued by the society they have come to.
Most academic research on charities looks at larger organisations; where small charities are considered then it is through quantitative data that can be aggregated and tell us things about the sector as a whole. For too long, the evaluation of these organisations has attempted to distil what they do into statistics which often completely miss the point. This in turn drives funding only for measurable outcomes rather than backing these organisations for their innate value to society. What this study of Poppy does is begin to unpack that value by giving us insight into how small charities make the impact they do. I conducted this study inspired by the work of Joe Raelin on Leadership-as-Practice (L-A-P), a research approach that has echoes across post-heroic leadership theory. L-A-P frees you from the constraints of management thinking and allows you to uncover leading practice where it occurs, rather than where you may expect to find it or through what you can measure.
It’s time that we look again at how we understand small charities, to do justice to the role they play and fund them appropriately. We may find that the kind of change they enable, built from the ground up, can teach us all some bigger lessons about how to navigate a world in which we are all now living amid multiple, overlapping and reinforcing challenges.
Sally Vivyan PhD, is a visiting Research Fellow at the Open University’s Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership and is Co-Director of the grant-making charity Gower Street.
The role of small voluntary sector organisations in Tackling Complex Social Challenges: lessons from a charity serving asylum seekers and refugees by Sally Vivyan in Voluntary Sector Review and is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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