The Voluntary Sector, sometimes called the Third Sector, is a broad category including a range of charities, social enterprises, community interest companies and not for profit organisations.
In the UK this sector has a long and honourable history of meeting social needs, of raising issues which have been ignored by government, of getting on and doing things. It is, or has been, a grassroots movement, often with a radical streak, based on mutual support, and at its best when campaigning and taking up unpopular causes.
Increasingly however the sector is being professionalised and larger charities have become in effect small corporations, with all the trappings of the business sector, or indeed of the statutory sector with whom they have such close working relationships. The mantra of “partnership working” has too often simply meant that charities and voluntary groups become providers, their services being commissioned - bought - by those holding the purse strings. But in the understandable rush to win contracts, and to expand their work, these organisations run the serious danger of abandoning their independent, campaigning role. That, at any rate, is an increasingly common view.
Too often, according to this view, they have become simply a means of outsourcing social care services, providing what is demanded, and delivering it in the way it is wanted. Local authorities have even taken upon themselves the task, ill equipped as they may be to carry it out, of developing a local economy of care providers.
Is all of this a problem?
It certainly seems to attract a political consensus. The government sees third sector organisations as ideally placed to deliver public services. They have a good relationship with service users and the general public, and they are trusted. The opposition seems to agree. Social care looks set to following same path as social housing.
And yet, alarm bells are ringing. People in the voluntary sector are increasingly waking up to the fact that their priorities are being set by others, that their organisations are being led not by users or activists but by commissioners and care service bureaucrats. For every charity worker or trustee who is anxious to take on the service delivery role, there is another who is beginning to question the whole process.
It may be too late to save many of the larger charities. They are now dominated by career minded professionals whose own career paths make further growth on business lines almost inevitable. This is, quite simply, what they do.
And so the realisation is beginning to dawn on many in the sector that a new sector will have to emerge, a fourth sector. Local communities will once again have to turn to their own resources, and develop new organisations to take up the challenge of addressing social need.
