‘Frazzled’ charity leaders are worrying about recruitment and retention as well as exhaustion, according to new research.
A new report published by the research charity IVAR identified three main concerns that charity leaders in the UK share.
They are continued social and political volatility, difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff and exhaustion across the sector from “moving from one crisis to the next”.
The report comes from 32 charity leaders from across the UK sharing their experiences of the cost-of-living crisis.
Participants said that their charities, which “desperately” needed a period to wind down after the Covid response, had now been stretched to unprecedented lengths.
One participant said: “I have been leading charities and social organisations for the last 20 years and I’ve never known an environment that’s this difficult to predict.”
Many leaders said that they found the idea of “building back better feels like a pipe dream”, with the entire sector now “running on empty”.
A participant said: “Funders are tired, we are tired. We dealt with Covid and now we have the cost-of-living crisis looming. All of us are only just about managing to keep up.
“We’re all being expected to mop up and take on more with less and less. We’re all frazzled.”
Participants also spoke about the growing challenges of recruitment and retention, with charity employees more likely to leave the sector due to wages falling behind inflation.
The report provided a series of recommendations on how funders can support charities, including giving charities greater support to their own resources through multi-year and unrestricted funding.
Leaders also said that funders must give the cost-of-living crisis the same level of importance as they did Covid, with many feeling that although the impact of the latter would be greater, funders seemed eager to look to the future.
One participant said: “It isn’t helpful when funders continue to focus on the “new” and “innovative” instead of focusing on real and emerging needs.
“Funders need to listen carefully to where the need is and decide the most effective way to respond. Hungry people don’t want to deal with innovative things: they want a sandwich.”