The Disillusionment of Black-led CSEs in a Sector Crisis
Last month, we wrote about being a Black community leader in a sector crisis. DiNN knew then that we would be following up with the below piece on the disillusionment that comes with this. In that time, the UK experienced riots across the country that were fuelled by vitriol and bigotry towards immigrants, migrant workers, and people of the Global Majority.
It is sadly apt that we were planning on writing about disillusionment, and yet a strong reminder that we still have so far to go to reach a state of true equity and inclusion. So with all of the recent events in mind, we hope that you take comfort in unity from the below piece. We continue to work hard to advocate for organisations that work ceaselessly to protect and secure Black and Global Majority communities in the UK, and we thank each person who chooses to give their energy to serving their people and building a future for all.
The Cost of Living crisis has significantly affected the number and types of opportunities that are available to our grantees and the wider community of Black-led charities and social enterprises (CSEs). Not to mention the effects of the continued and systemic underfunding of infrastructure organisations and the impending bankruptcy of the local council system.
In 2023, we surveyed our community, A Desert without Resources, when we saw a significant shift in the funding methods of mainstream grantmakers. We concluded from the experience of organisations funded in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that it is as though they had been set up to fail. The speedy decision-making processes that many organisations experienced and got used to during the height of the pandemic were no more. As the need for their services increased, funders responded by implementing strategic changes to their processes or halted funding altogether to find the time to study and reorganise themselves amid the changing landscape. A disillusionment set in that our community has not yet recovered from. The eagerness to engage with the system has died, and Black founders are doubling down inside their silos. To reaffirm an earlier used metaphor, there are only so many times you can throw yourself against a brick wall before you accept that it will not break apart and that, in fact, it is being consistently reinforced from the inside.
Beyond the disillusionment is the dissolution of support across the sector itself. The drastic and systemic defunding of infrastructure support organisations in local spaces across the country has had the effect of devaluing the importance of local action, influencing and advocacy despite the sector’s espoused strategic focus on place-based impact delivery. It also has the effect of raising the opportunity cost of engaging in capacity building across the sector as the existing infrastructure organisations have remodelled their work to follow the available money — council-based project funding to deliver employment, education and training programmes unfortunately in many cases this means they are directly competing for funding with their network members to create this impact locally. So even those that remain existing are losing trust and opportunity for influence with the organisations that are dealing in deep crisis.
Another dissolving entity of course are the councils themselves, the risk of bankruptcy rising across the places signalling another crisis that is bubbling under the surface largely unspoken and deeply felt as closures and asset sales become commonplace in media such as Third Sector Magazine who boldly proclaimed in their new podcast series that we are facing the end of charity as we know it and we are, but who will fall off first? Surely it is the organisations that did not have a strong foothold on the moniker and its benefits in the first place.
If the councils are no longer able to prop up the sector with discretionary funding and the funding sector is still not showing up to strategically prioritise core funding and capacity building, then as has been the case for the past decade or more, the inevitable has happened – the pipeline is weaker than it was when we began this journey and we are pivoting to understand what we can do to support organisations in our community to deal with the changing landscape while also navigating their own internal challenges. Sustainability has to be the key aim of the day – our core question, in keeping with our goal to the Black community’s foremost champion is, how do we feed our community vegetables (lower the opportunity cost of engaging in capacity building programmes) when they have been promised sweets by a sector that promised a new normal; incredible ease of access, equity, effective support, reduction in competition, human-centred processes, no need to meet the full and robust standards of the fund and no support to do so?
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