Taking inspiration from charity campaigns - Trustees’ Week 2025

This Trustees’ Week takes place in a discouraging world out there.  

There are horrible wars in Sudan and Ukraine, deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, dreadful infringements of women’s rights in Afghanistan, a resurgence of authoritarianism, and long-term environmental devastation. At home, there is disillusion with democratic politics, a stirring of reactionary and racist insurgency, corrosive inequality and child poverty, dire social care, threats to nature and environmental progress…. 

Yet it has always been one of the voluntary sector’s hallmarks to generate hope in the face of intractable challenges. What seems hopeless when passively observed by isolated individuals gives way to a sense of encouragement and possible change when people get organised together behind a shared cause. 

Consider the history. When the thirty-year campaign to abolish the slave trade and then slavery throughout the British Empire began, who would have believed it possible? But it was. Think of all the other charitable campaigns that adopted apparently impossible goals: the rights of minority faiths; women’s rights and position in society; children’s rights (as opposed to the untrammelled rights of parents); gay people’s rights; challenge to racial discrimination; challenges to child labour and cruel working hours in factories and mines; the challenge to animal cruelty. 

Add to that the defence of the distinction between town and country, the establishment and protection of our National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Green Belts; the Clean Air Acts that abolished deadly pea-souper smogs from our great cities; and the challenge to unregulated and greedy use of natural resources that impoverishes nature and threatens long term destruction of the planet. All of these are charitable campaigns that give hope – even if some of these battles are far from “over”. And behind all of these were volunteer Trustees who decided they must engage in (non-party) political activity in pursuit of their charitable causes. 

Taken as a whole, it has always been a vital part of the contribution of the charitable sector – not just a nice-to-have add-on – to influence public awareness, debate and decision-making on the crucial challenges of the day, and to campaign for a better world.  

We should therefore lay firmly to rest the untenable but persistent trope that “charity” is the opposite of justice and activism. The actual history and continuing work of very many charities demonstrably belies the stereotype of top-down and apolitical service provision that leaves the causes of injustice unaddressed.  

I was privileged to be a member of the Board of the Charity Commission which published CC9, the official guidance on political activity by charities, which is still firmly in force. That makes it perfectly clear that charities may pursue non-party political activity in pursuit of their charitable goals. It gives great leeway to do so, and the anxieties of some trustees that this is inherently risky and might offend the Charity Commission is ill-informed. If you haven’t read it recently, have another look. I would go further and suggest that the trustees of charities that currently major on service delivery should at least consider, carefully and regularly, whether their charitable objectives might be better served by engaging in some political activity aimed at driving more systematic change. 

We must indeed be thankful that the trustees who decided on and persevered in the campaigns that have transformed our history did not suffer from an excess of misguided caution or playing safe. If we are to have hope, this Trustees’ Week, we need today’s trustees to have similar courage and belief, and get stuck in.  

For over fifty years, DSC has championed the positive role of charities in the public arena and spoken out against any efforts to curtail it. Looking at the world around us, and the difference charities can make to those daunting challenges, we shall be happy to do the same for the next fifty years, too. 

View DSC’s full range of governance resources here.