SUPER OR BLOOPER?

01-07-2009

Leading figures in the charity world are calling for smaller organisations to absorb their smaller counterparts to improve efficiency. Pete Millington remains unconvinced.

Third Sector magazine reported yesterday on the trend of big national disability charities taking over smaller local organisations which provide services to the same client group.

More specifically, John Plummer of Third Sector reports that Lesley-Anne Alexander, chief executive of the RNIB is encouraging a new model of working in which the larger charity becomes the sole shareholder of smaller associate members, which continue operating under their own names but are in affect now controlled by the RNIB.

Lesley-Anne Alexander is quoted as saying "I hope we are setting a trend, when I came to the RNIB I was astounded to find there are more than 700 sight-loss charities. That's lunacy.

"If I had my way, we would have one national sight-loss charity that was responsible for campaigning, infrastructure, strategic marketing and quality initiatives, and a whole carpet of local sight-loss charities delivering services within a framework”.

Initially the idea makes strategic sense; better coordination of services, less competition and duplication, a potentially more powerful lobby – a single voice.

But the history of the disability sector as a whole shows that the reason there has been such a dramatic growth of small, local user-led organisations over the past three decades has been precisely because so many people were totally disillusioned over several generations with the big, powerful institutions who took the lion’s share of the funding, rarely involved service users in decision making and perpetuated the model of disabled people being dependent on the rest of society and therefore reliant on charity.

Surely it is for the government to plan a national strategy for making services more logical, not a self elected champion from the Third Sector?

For many years disabled people have organised themselves through representative and democratically elected groups on a local level, with a coordination (though ultimately not a controlling) role from national groups such as the British Council of Disabled People.

These groups saw all disabled people working together through networks to develop the social model of disability and in turn these ideas led to disability based anti-discrimination legislation introduced in the UK from 1995 onwards.

But the reason many of these small groups have struggled and even gone out of business in the past five or six years is because the big, professionalised organisations continue to take the lion’s share of the resources, both locally and nationally but haven’t been seen to support smaller groups on the ground.

In the current climate, where government and local authority agendas in regards to disabled people appear to be about deconstructing large, paternalistic, over professionalised services, replacing direct social service provision, for instance, with direct payments and individualised budgets which will in principal give service users more choice, variety, control, autonomy, diversity and freedom in how, where and from whom they receive services, how ironic that national charities like the RNIB have plans to potentially reduce the very same variety of choice and independence.

Lesley-Anne Alexander’s ‘carpet’ of local organisations might sound groovy, but it all depends who’s boots are stamping all over that carpet and who has the authority to pull the rug when certain groups don’t lie down obediently.