Charities do not need to remove all possible risk in order to campaign responsibly, leaders have urged.
Speaking at the Directory of Social Change’s virtual conference today (8 October), charity leaders warned organisations against becoming too risk-averse in their campaigning.
Kolbassia Haoussou, director of survivor leadership and influencing at Freedom From Torture, said that when public debate becomes polarised charities tend to retreat from the conversation.
“We worry about our reputations, about funding, about regulators or about being accused of becoming too political,” he said.
But Haoussou said silence can leave harmful narratives “unchallenged” and cause further harm to the people who charities exist to serve.
“Charities do not need to enter every political argument. We do not need to respond to every headline,” he said.
“But when a policy or public narrative harms the people we serve, speaking out is not mission drift. It is the purpose of our mission.”
Haoussou said that charities do not need to remove every possible risk before speaking up in order to campaign responsibly.
“If that became our standard, we would never say anything important,” he said. “Risk assessment should help us speak responsibly. It should not become a way of finding reasons to stay silent.”
Rebecca Horne, head of communications and campaigns at Pregnant Then Screwed, agreed, saying that “silence isn’t neutral”.
She said: “I think organisations sometimes overestimate the reputational risk of speaking out and underestimate the reputational risk of saying nothing, because reputational risk can run in two directions.
“You can damage trust through recklessness, but you can also damage trust through silence.”
She added: “For me, the biggest risk for any charity is becoming irrelevant to the people that it was created to support.”
Horne said charities should not avoid polarised public debates, but instead must “stay rooted in evidence, lived experience and purpose; while at the same time refusing to be dragged into what feels like […] tribal politics”.
But Louise Calvey, executive director of Asylum Matters, said that while charities must continue to be “bold and brave” in campaigning amid increasing polarisation and hostility, this will not be easy for all organisations to do.
“There are some charities that are based in Reform areas that are just keeping as quiet as they can, because they want to continue delivering their services and they don’t want to draw attention to themselves,” Calvey said.
She also spoke about the rise in far-right hostility and threats towards charities supporting asylum seekers and refugees, including direct threats to staff and trustees.
“I’ve had some of my trustee details circulated by the far right,” Calvey said, adding that trustees with non-anglicised names had been particularly affected.
“The Charity Commission needs to absolutely be doing more to safeguard the information of trustees and other charity office-holders,” she said.
Calvey added that the far right had also been “weaponising” the commission’s regulatory framework, saying: “Many charities are having complaints submitted to the Charity Commission about them.
“And although those complaints generally are quite vexatious […] they take up an awful lot of organisational capacity and bandwidth.
“That is the object of the far right at the moment – it’s to slow us, to frustrate us, to hit us with so much red tape that it stops us doing our day job.”
Calvey said the Charity Commission should streamline its regulatory processes in light of these types of “regulatory attacks”, which are costing small charities both time and money in legal fees.
She said the government and the civil society minister must step in to “reform charity governance in light of these fascist attacks”.