Culture and civil society

With the initial consultation period now closed, 2025 will soon see the publication of the government’s new Civil Society Covenant. Its broad aims are to support a closer partnership between government and civil society “that restores the place of civil society back at the centre of our national life”.

This seems both reasonable and achievable. Among its more ambitious aims, however, are for the covenant to recognise the role civil society plays in the government’s defining missions – from driving economic growth to opening up opportunity – a role DCMS describes as “pivotal” to such missions.

So how realistic is it for civil society – charities, volunteer-led organisations, community groups and such like – to play such a pivotal role in driving growth and opening opportunities? And what are the challenges such organisations may face in doing so, specifically in the cultural sector?

Asking more of Morecambe

Through the Cultural Development Fund (CDF) Network, Five10Twelve works directly with local authorities, delivery partners and – in some cases – volunteer-led organisations that play an integral role in delivering £multi-million capital development projects.

These include the Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservation Trust (MWGPT), which received £2.78m CDF funding from DCMS for capital improvements to help restore the magnificent “Albert Hall of the North”. Uniquely among CDF lead partners and recipients to date, the trust is an entirely volunteer-led organisation.

So what can we learn from the CDF Network and how does this learning relate to the Civil Society Covenant Framework, published by DCMS in October last year?

Principles of civil society

The framework is based around four high-level principles:

• Recognition
• Partnership
• Participation
• Transparency

Some of the challenges outlined below are not specific to cultural organisations but arise because cultural and creative voluntary organisations – like their private sector counterparts – tend to be smaller or more localised organisations with more limited capacity than many of the major national charities.

Recognition

Recognising the value of civil society means recognising the organisations which drive it, the individuals who are its lifeblood, and also recognising and mitigating the challenges. This needs to be structured, meaningful and properly supported.

As recent recipients of the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, MWGPT is one example of how successful organisations can be recognised, although such awards rarely extend to bursaries enabling the individual volunteers responsible to share in such recognition.

It’s also important to recognise the impact of volunteering on the lives of those who are most committed. Whether working full-time and balancing volunteering duties around this or retired and working around home or family, burnout is a factor and flexibility is key.

Being flexible can be particularly challenging when it comes to partnerships. For volunteer-led organisations such as Morecambe Winter Gardens, work on capital projects inevitably includes partnerships with funders, public and private sector organisations – including architects, engineers, contractors.

While funders and partner organisations often work Monday-Friday, 9-5, this can be challenging for volunteer board members fitting things around their own regular working lives.

Partnership

I have written previously on the partnership mindset in relation to cultural organisations. The importance of shared values is key when it comes to volunteer-led organisations. There are many great examples in the sector of where this alignment of values and objectives works really well – including a recent collaboration with London Festival Opera which introduced more than 2,000 schoolchildren to opera in Morecambe Winter Gardens.

Crucially, effective partnership activity cannot rely on goodwill and shared values alone. It requires revenue funding to help activate the buildings and spaces that capital funds unlock. Wisely, CDF includes a proportion of revenue funding for this, but this is increasingly rare in capital investments.

Ironically, being funded can pose particular challenges when partnering with other local community and voluntary groups. For local organisations looking in, £millions in capital funding can give the impression of a cash-rich organisation that can afford to waive venue hire fees, for example.

But anyone who has managed a public capital-funded programme will know all too well that such funding is (a) highly restricted, (b) never enough and (c) usually comes with clear objectives around developing a business plan, generating revenue and achieving operational viability.

So however much a local-funded organisation might want to share the love and spread opportunity to other local groups, the chances are they won’t always be able to. Nor should they be expected to.

Participation

One of the challenges of the covenant in terms of participation will be ensuring it reflects the broader experience and demographics across the whole country. This is particularly so in some of the ‘left-behind’ towns and areas of the UK most in need of regeneration and support – which is common across most of the towns involved in the CDF Network.

Volunteering is commonly a middle-class activity, done by those who can spare the time to contribute. This is compounded by structural support – including, for example, Employee Volunteering Schemes (EVS) which enable people to take time out from paid work to volunteer. Inevitably, this is more prevalent in larger corporations and major cities and often excludes the creative and cultural sector.

Representation of community voice means reflecting the demographics of that community, evident among the many passionate and committed volunteers at MWGPT. This needs to be balanced with strong, clear leadership and good governance – particularly for smaller organisations typical of the creative and cultural sectors.

MWGPT is not untypical in taking a skills-led approach to board recruitment, for example. As such, the strong leadership and skills base of its board – all volunteers – is also 100% professional and includes a property lawyer, electrical engineer, quantity surveyor and its chair is an expert in building restoration, heritage organisations and culture-led regeneration. Such expertise has been crucial to giving funders confidence the organisation can deliver major projects.

Transparency

The covenant aims to “support honest conversations about funding and the challenges we are facing”. This can be tricky to negotiate when the need to pivot mid-project due to unexpected challenges or changing conditions may impact expected or contracted outputs required by funders.

For capital projects the stakes are much higher, with escalating construction costs and unforeseen issues – especially with heritage properties – often necessitating significant pivots and value engineering mid-way through a project. This is challenging enough for local authorities that have more options for pulling in additional resource, expertise, cash-flow or funding – something not remotely feasible for a small voluntary-led organisation.

So if part of the government’s plan is to support civil society to play more of a role, this means unlocking mechanisms to support them to do so. For funders, this may mean a return to the first principle of the covenant – recognition. In this case, recognising the nature and limitations of the organisation, the pressure it may be under and the additional support it might require. 

Perhaps here is an opportunity to move away from a typical post-project evaluation model – where learning tends to be retrospective – and lean into the Test and Learn approach proposed by Pat McFadden. This is something we seek to foster across the CDF Network through a series of study visits and knowledge sharing ‘gatherings’ which we host regularly throughout the active project delivery period.

There is a lot to learn from live projects and much that can be applied for the benefit of the CDF Network, for the wider sector and for the benefit of current policy development – including the Civil Society Covenant.

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