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| DSC Director of Policy and Research Ben Wittenberg argues that charities need to speak clearly, not in code – otherwise they lose their ability to communicate with the people they exist to help, and risk becoming indistinguishable from the State. |
Communication is essential for most charities and voluntary organisations. It is how we connect to the people and causes we aim to help, and how we communicate our passion for the cause to those who support us. But as charities get closer and closer to government, there is a risk we start adopting jargon and bureaucratic concepts which actually make this harder.
Government’s obsession with what voluntary organisations can do for the state has divorced policy makers and some charities from the grassroots activists who make up the majority of civil society, yet those policymakers increasingly make pronouncements and laws on behalf of the communities they alienate. They do not speak the same language, in more ways than one.This threatens the legitimacy of decisions that are made on behalf of people and communities.
When the public discourse about charities and their work consists of references that are unintelligible to the public – which charities exist to benefit – it threatens to undermine public confidence in civil society. It threatens trust, and if public trust in civil society is eroded then the very thing that should be the solution will be seen as a problem.
If charitable or voluntary organisations speak in a code that people and communities neither recognise nor understand, they are unaccountable. If they find it easier to speak to each other in this code than the people they are serving, they are irresponsible. And if they justify their activity in the terms and concepts of this code they are untrustworthy.
Take the following list of words; stakeholders, beneficiaries, hubs, portals, champions, sustainability, engagement, service delivery, entrepreneurship, scaling up, second-tier infrastructure bodies, maximising impact, community cohesion, community anchors. Familiar terms to anybody in the charity-policy world, but meaningless to most people.
A large proportion of us who work in ‘the sector’ use these words all of the time out of necessity. This is the language of policy makers, and for many organisations it is a language they need to learn and speak fluently if they are going to influence policy and secure funds to achieve their objectives. However, it is not a language that the people most important to us, the people we exist to help, speak.
Openness is part of the solution. The public no longer trusts political rhetoric, but it does still broadly trust the voice of charitable and voluntary organisations. It is crucial that in the drive to influence policy we do not adopt the rhetoric, spin and jargon of political parties and government bureaucracy, which is not understood or trusted.
George Orwell argued that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. The flipside of this is that if thought can reinvigorate language, language can reinvigorate thought.
We have to demonstrate our independence of thought by speaking clearly, not in code. Otherwise, as far as the public is concerned, we will be indistinguishable from the state.
by Ben Wittenberg, Director of Policy and Research, Directory of Social Change