Failing to fund infrastructure is like leaving a restaurant without paying the bill

While out for a meal recently I found myself being slightly irritated by an optional service charge added to the bill. I hadn’t ordered a service charge.

I couldn’t eat it, drink it or take it home with me, and there was nothing tangible I could point to and say: ‘That’s what I’ve bought.’

Although, being British, of course I paid it without complaint.

But yet, of course, somebody had cleaned the place, maintained it, organised everything and made sure that all the things I had paid for actually worked.

It made me think about how reluctant we are to pay for the things that sit underneath the things we value. Which, rather unexpectedly, brings me to charity infrastructure.

The closure of Reach Volunteering is more than just sad, it raises a fundamental question: how on earth do we expect infrastructure organisations to fund themselves?

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the way we think about infrastructure.

We all say it matters. We talk about the importance of strong networks, good governance, skilled volunteers, collaboration, shared learning and organisations having somewhere to turn when they need help.

We recognise that a healthy charity sector needs more than individual charities doing good work. It needs organisations that connect, support, convene and strengthen them.

And importantly, infrastructure bodies advocate for the charities in their network, which are often either too small, too under-resourced, too fearful, or just too damn knackered to speak up.

But when it comes to paying for that infrastructure, it’s a bit like your old schoolmate who suddenly was nowhere to be seen when it was his round.

It feels like those people who leg it after their meal without paying the bill.

We see funders make a mad dash for the exit when infrastructure bodies ask for longer-term funding, even though they benefit from the charities they fund being better run and resourced.

Of course, infrastructure bodies can and do charge for their services. We can have membership fees, run training courses, offer consultancy, organise events and develop other sources of earned income.

And we should. I am certainly not arguing that infrastructure organisations shouldn’t think commercially or be imaginative about how they generate income.

But we have to be realistic about who we are selling to. Our customers are charities, and many of them are struggling too.

They are looking at every pound they spend and asking whether it could be better used delivering services, supporting beneficiaries or keeping their own staff employed.

So, if our purpose is to strengthen those organisations, particularly the smaller ones, we cannot simply keep putting our prices up until our own business model works.

The charities that most need what we offer are very often the ones least able to pay for it.

That isn’t a failure of entrepreneurship. It is an inevitable tension created by our charitable purpose.

Most funders want their money to go to the frontline, and I understand the instinct.

If you can fund a service that directly helps a child, an older person, a family in crisis or a community, why would you fund the organisation that supports the organisation doing that work?

But let’s turn it on its head – how much stronger that frontline would be if we properly funded the infrastructure around it.

Certainly, at DSC all our feedback from folk who use us is that their charity is run better, fundraises better, leads better, manages its finances better, complies with legislation and regulation better and so on.

And so we end up in this rather extraordinary position where everyone tells infrastructure organisations how important they are, while very few people actually want to fund them.

We’ve created a system in which infrastructure bodies are expected to perform an impossible balancing act – be affordable enough for charities with very little money, provide free support where it is most needed, demonstrate enormous impact across a whole sector, and somehow generate enough income to sustain themselves.

Then, when an organisation can no longer make those numbers work, we talk about sustainability as though the problem sits entirely with them.

But it simply doesn’t.

Charities like Reach Volunteering are not disappearing because they weren’t good enough, innovative enough or commercially minded enough.

It’s because they’re operating in a funding environment which doesn’t favour them.

So, I hope the closure of Reach Volunteering prompts something more than sadness and warm words about the contribution it has made.

I hope it prompts funders, government and all of us who care about the health of civil society to ask a much harder question.

#NotAllCharities applies here of course because, while some see the value of infrastructure, they tend to be in the minority.

But if we genuinely believe infrastructure is essential to a strong charity sector, are those with the funds actually prepared to pay for it?

We are not an optional service charge – we are a necessary part of the meal.

This article was originally published on the Third Sector website, take a look here.