I want to use my blog posts as an opportunity to get more prison officers involved in the reports and research that are being published about the criminal justice sector. While working as an officer, it has been important to me to inform my practice using the most up-to-date research being conducted about my place of work. This kind of research is available to everyone to see, but often it’s thought that the only people who need to see it are policy makers, or members of parliament. This is not true! In these papers is a wealth of knowledge that can inform the frontline workers who are coming into daily contact with the people the publications are aiming to help.
As a prison officer, I come into contact with so many different people, often with very different needs, and understanding why they have those needs can often be the answer for how best to help them. Looking at papers like how to prevent young adults being caught in the revolving door, coming in and out of contact with the criminal justice system again and again, I can see the men that I work with, in the middle of that cycle themselves.
Catching them before they come to prison is ideal, but I know that it is never too late to help them break the cycle of reoffending. Research into young people who are care experienced, and LGBTQ+ people, for example, is important as it recognises and highlights the impact of different environmental experiences, such as spending time in care, or being discriminated against because of your gender and/or sexuality. This can teach frontline workers, such as prison officers, about triggers, which will help them build trust, and inform them about what people need with respect to these vulnerabilities, whether it be building a connection with someone who has found it hard to access consistent support in the care system, or researching resources that will help a LGBTQ+ person get back on their feet when they are released from prison.
Sometimes, working in a prison can feel like you have a thousand and one jobs to do at once, and having to cater for individual needs seems like an unnecessary additional burden. While I understand that feeling, I also know that by understanding these individual needs, I can predict who needs what, and this helps me manage my time better, as well as building relationships with the men. This can be as big a thing as understanding how to help someone who has just experienced a bereavement, down to just wishing Eid Mubarak to the Muslim population who have just finished fasting for Ramadan. This is the kind of good practice that highlights the importance of frontline workers who want to see change in the men and women they’re working with.
Thank you very much for reading this blog. I hope you learned something from it, and I hope you read some of the reports I linked to – especially if you are another prison officer! Even though I work with male offenders, I think the reports are just as valuable wherever you work, whether it’s the male or female estate, young offenders or adults. I’ll be writing another blog next week, which I hope you will also enjoy. See you then!
The shockwaves that followed George Floyd’s murder, the distress and anger at continuing race inequality in the UK and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on racially minoritised communities have led foundations, like much of the third sector, to reflect as never before on what we do and how we do it. And, for the foundation sector, how we spend our money is of course of paramount importance to us and those to whom we are accountable. So many, probably most, funders across the UK are scrutinising their grant-making, aiming to increase their impact and extend their reach and accessibility, particularly into communities and sectors that have traditionally found it more difficult to secure funds.
The Funders for Race Equality Alliance is a peer learning, support and challenge network aiming to improve practice and increase the amount of funding going towards race equality and to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic-led organisations, currently with 43 funders in membership. Realising that we needed a benchmark of how members’ funds were being spent in order to measure progress, one of our first initiatives, in 2019, was to develop a straightforward racial justice audit tool that funders could use to analyse their portfolios as a first step in setting targets and developing strategies for change.
Developed by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, Lloyds Foundation, Power to Change and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation in consultation with the Coalition on Race Equality, the audit asks funders to analyse a sample of grants in their portfolios using four key questions: is the grant going to an organisation led by and for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people? Is the grant intended to benefit Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people? What is the funding for (for example capital works, services, campaigning) and, if the grant is for race equality work, is it designed to address the root causes or the consequences of structural inequality?
Recommended reading: in September 2020, following the launch of the Home Truths report, V4CE and ACEVO wrote to the 20 largest grantmakers. We asked these funders to publish data outlining the proportion of their grants that are awarded to BAME-led organisations or projects.
Composite findings from the first cohort of 13 funders to complete the audit can be found here. Of the £122 million-worth of funding audited, 23% was for work designed to benefit Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities. A further 19% of funding would benefit Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups among the wider community, but was not specifically designed to meet their needs. But when we analysed the types of organisations being funded we found very much lower levels going to the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic sector: 14% went to organisations with a mission or purpose of supporting BAME or minority communities and an even lower proportion, 6%, of funded organisations were led by representatives from the communities being served.
The numbers starkly highlight a story that we already know, that relatively little funding, even from foundations with an interest in tackling race inequality, goes to organisations led by and for racially minoritised communities. But, encouragingly, the process of auditing grant portfolios has provided a stimulus for change. Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales introduced a 25% ring-fenced fund last August for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic-led charities; the Smallwood Trust has looked at the systemic barriers to Black and Minority Ethnic women’s groups accessing grants and has increased its funding to that sector from 7% to 21% and Barrow Cadbury Trust has set aside funds that it will use, with other foundations, to co-develop a leadership offer for the Black and Minority Ethnic criminal justice sector as part of its drive to reduce the disproportionate number of people from racially minoritised communities in the criminal justice system.
The racial justice funding audit has also catalysed wider change, with 360Giving adopting a new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) data standard to encourage funders to collect DEI data as part of standard practice, leading to a continuous cycle of improvement.
For more information about the Funders for Race Equality Alliance, get in touch via email and follow FREA on Twitter. Please note that the Alliance does not provide funds; it is a learning network for funders.
Criminal courts should take account of age and lack of maturity when imposing sentences on people between the ages of 18-25. Guidelines say that young adults should be treated less severely when their level of psychological development makes them less responsible for a crime or increases the impact of punishment on them.
But what about the decisions courts make prior to sentence – in particular whether a defendant should be remanded in custody awaiting trial? Should age and maturity be relevant factors here?
A new report I’ve written for the T2A (Transition to Adulthood) argues that more should be done to keep young adults out of pre-trial detention. For one thing a spell in prison on remand can be just as damaging as a prison sentence – sometimes more so. Earlier this month inspectors sharply criticised the treatment of young adults in prison and, separately, argued that increased time spent on remand as a result of court delays will inevitably add to the anxieties and frustrations of individual prisoners of all ages. “A growing, and increasingly-frustrated remand population has the potential to have a serious adverse effect on the stability of prisons”. The remand population as a whole grew by 24% during 2020.
It’s also the case that defendants should only be remanded to custody if they are likely to receive a prison sentence in the event of conviction. As sentencing guidelines make prison terms less likely for under 25s than over 25s, maturity should be taken into account at the remand stage too. But it seldom is.
As the Sentencing Council has recognised, many young people who offend either stop committing crime, or begin a process of stopping, in their late teens and early twenties. Therefore, a young adult’s previous convictions may not be indicative of a tendency for further offending. This is an important consideration for courts to take into account when considering risk.
Young Adults on Remand finds that – until the pandemic at least – the last ten years have seen a welcome fall in the use of custodial remands. But there is scope for both the CPS and judiciary to incorporate a greater recognition of maturity factors in relevant guidance on remand decision-making for practitioners. Courts in particular should adapt their ways of working to ensure a fairer and distinct approach to young adults at the remand stage.
Magistrates who routinely deal with children in the youth court may place a higher weight on maturity on the occasions when they sit in the adult court. But youth magistrates (about 15% of JPs) may not always be able to persuade their adult court colleagues of its significance. The view that “he’s 18, he’s old enough to know what he’s doing” is still heard.
Pre-trial arrangements are very different for under 18s and today’s report argues that the welcome policy of further restricting the use of custodial remands for children should be extended to young adults. In the shorter term, there is a case too for removing young adults, as well as children, from the remit of the emergency law extending custody time limits during the pandemic.
If custodial remands are to be reduced, sufficient services will be needed to support and supervise young adults on bail, whether from the probation service, local government, NHS or voluntary organisations. And bail information schemes need to ensure that courts are made aware of non-custodial options in individual cases.
The local authority may have continuing responsibilities for young adults who have been in their care and may be able to contribute support which could help secure bail. The report suggests that transferring budgetary responsibility for young adult defendants to a more local level – as is the case for under 18s – could stimulate better provision of community-based measures, including suitable accommodation. Current bail hostel arrangements are inadequate.
The report also recommends that more is done to monitor bail and remand decision-making in respect of young adults to inform efforts both to reduce custodial remands overall and tackle any disproportionate use for black and minority ethnic defendants.
Thanks in large part to the determined and longstanding work of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, recent years have seen a growing consensus that young adults aged 18-25 require a distinct and tailored approach from the justice system. Making the necessary changes to law, policy and practice has been a slow and chequered process. Remands are an area where the pressures of the pandemic could help to accelerate progressive change.
This blog on racial justice in the VCS comes from Jeremy Crook OBE, Chief Executive of BTEG. It was planned as one of our 2020 centenary blogs. December’s Covid-related events pushed it into January – but it’s much too good to miss.
The Trust has had a strong involvement in racial justice issues over many decades. But this is a challenge to our own governance and management, and we are very aware that our board and senior management team are not sufficiently racially diverse. In a majority family governed foundation, racial diversity is an issue, and working with a small staff team we can only make new appointments when posts become vacant. The board has not been monochrome over the past five years and we are committed to increasing our Black and Minority Ethnic membership in the coming year. This has been written into our performance objectives as a Chair and a Chief Executive and we are currently working on it.
Erica Cadbury and Sara Llewellin
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The Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG) was set up 30 years ago. We focus on helping children and young people succeed in education, employment and minimising their involvement in the criminal justice system. As one of the longest serving chief executives of a national charity, I want to reflect on how the conversation on race equality has changed in the voluntary and community sector (VCS).
I joined the VCS in the early 1980’s by volunteering for the Afro-Caribbean Youth Council, a charity in Walsall. The driver for its creation was social exclusion of black youth from mainstream organisations, school exclusions, lower educational attainment, youth unemployment, access to housing and police racism.
Race equality always felt like a peripheral issue in the VCS and was only supported by a handful of charitable trusts. The VCS was content to support race inequality initiatives if it did not reduce the resources available to the mainstream sector.
Last year an explosion of global anger was ignited by the killing of George Floyd in broad daylight on a public street by a group of police officers. Many parts of the world were awakened to how people of African origin are treated by the police, at work, on the streets, in the media, in the justice and political systems. The Black Lives Matter movement gave voice to more black people, many of whom have suffered in silence and/or been under-valued in the workplace for many years.
Reinvigorated scrutiny of the VCS highlighted that the presence of black and Asian people at senior levels in the VCS is extremely poor. There are some black and Asian individuals leading large charities and charitable trusts but, overall, their representation at senior levels is inadequate. According to ACEVO only 3% of charity CEOs were from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (2017).
It has also brought into focus what it means to be anti-racist in the VCS. Unacceptably, we still find race equality conversations in the VCS taking place without any black or Asian people present.
In the VCS the conversation shifted to discussions about the distribution of opportunities, the distribution of resources and the control of those resources. Whilst this is not the first time these issues had been considered it did feel for the first time that there was a cross-sector impetus, and more people are demanding more from their own leaders and organisations.
For much of the last thirty years [some] national VCS leaders engaged in discussions about racial inequalities but did not improve their own organisational performance. Equalities policies were adopted but there was no change in the ethnicity of those making decisions.
Young black, Asian and white people have demonstrated for change and are rightly rejecting tokenistic change in the VCS. It has been difficult, traumatic and uncomfortable, but it has provided a sense of hope that there will be change.
The issue of institutional racism has re-emerged with the usual denials that it exists in many large organisations. Structurally it would be easy to say that race equality never really featured in the core policy conversations within the VCS and, at best, it was a marginal issue often characterised with tokenistic gestures, e.g., the lone black or Asian individual employed to deliver the time limited ‘ethnic minority’ project.
In 2020 black and Asian colleagues in the VCS sector have demanded change. I think there are white leaders in the VCS that are prepared to listen and change their behaviour. They are prepared to use their influence and levers to tackle racial inequality. But there are leaders in large or influential organisations who are oblivious to the need for any change in the VCS. We all need to challenge and support these leaders to do better.
The conversation in some parts of the VCS has not changed – race equality is still not discussed. In other parts of the VCS what has changed is that the treatment of black people has been elevated up the management agenda. However, there is a risk that many white colleagues and leaders in the VCS view this as a moment and not the start of a transformation process.
Charitable trusts have also come under pressure to look at themselves and the equity of grant making decisions. Some have embraced this and have had a serious look at their organisation cultures, ethnic representation, and their relationship with black, Asian and minority ethnic organisations. Charitable trusts also have the lever of their grant making and must use this to drive change in the charities they support.
Government too has its procurement lever but has been reluctant to drive change. Large charities receive millions of pounds per year to provide public services and they should be held to account for bringing about change. For too long they have been dismissive of the need to reflect the ethnic diversity of their service users within their hierarchy. All too often black and Asian organisations have been excluded from the real decision making.
Today more importance is being placed on intersectional considerations – black and Asian individuals want to be respected and treated fairly for all their characteristics and not only in relation to ethnicity and colour. Black and Asian communities are demanding that they are not treated as a one-dimensional monolithic group.
We must be careful not to aid an inclination among leaders in the VCS to state the race equality box has been ticked now – “we’ve reviewed our policies so let’s move on now”.
Jeremy Crook OBE
In the spring we began a programme of publishing centenary blogs. We covered the Funder Commitment on Climate Change and the successful campaign for marriage equality in Ireland in February. Gender equality followed in March, and finally, in April, a blog on the anniversary of the Strangeways Riot – which led to the Woolf Report and its radical changes to the prison system. In the months that followed it seemed inappropriate to continue the focus on centenary blogs when all around us was so chaotic and with so much else that we needed to address.
When lockdown began in March trustees and senior staff put their heads together and resolved to carry on doing what we know from talking to our partners that we’re good at, rather than venturing into new territories or approaches, or throwing our doors wide open to meet huge emergency needs. As a small foundation we don’t have the resources to respond with financial support as others did.
But we immediately contacted all our partners to find out how they were faring, what their immediate needs were, and how they thought we could help them. We also wanted to reassure them that our support was secure for the long term and we wouldn’t be reassigning those funds for emergency support elsewhere. What remains important to the Trust is addressing structural inequalities through alignment with partners, advocacy, and influencing policy. None of that has changed, although the way we and our partners do that work has of course shifted and adapted.
Our programmes concentrate in the main on policy, campaigning and public opinion, and so we do not substantially fund frontline services. For this reason, we haven’t seen an enormous rise in new or emergency applications, nor have we thankfully experienced a drop in our endowment income – though this may of course change depending on numerous factors including the Brexit transitional process and economic downturn.
Like the majority of the social justice sector, we have all moved to home working and online trustee meetings, and the events held in our meeting rooms – part of our offer as a trust with meeting rooms in central London – have all moved on line. Using Zoom and Teams is now almost second nature but that is of course challenging for our relational model and we would all much prefer to meet in person and will hopefully return to that in the coming months.
In October we delivered £5m of National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) emergency funding to organisations working with refugees, migrants and asylum seekers whose work had been affected by COVID-19. Nearly 200 organisations across England were given emergency grants up to £50k to use before April 2021. These were mainly service providing bodies, which are not our usual partners. Their work spanned grassroots community groups in Leicester helping abused and abandoned women with no migration status, to a London organisation providing bicycles to refugees and asylum seekers, run on a shoe string primarily by volunteers.
So, what have we learned from these past months? That the values we share with our partners are constant, but that we cannot be complacent about progress around inequality. Economic, gender, and race inequalities are not going away. On a positive note – public and political awareness about those issues and how they might be addressed and tackled has undoubtedly increased. The will to challenge institutional and structural racism is gaining ground and we hope to see that momentum translated into concrete changes. The ‘hostile environment’ is in lots of ways more hostile, but the strength of resistance challenging some of the hatred is palpable, however it manifests itself.
Examining our own house has been part of that process; in July I wrote a blog about the origins of our endowment, scrutinising the early commercial activities of Cadburys in relation to the labour which produced cocoa and sugar. You can read about what we found out here.
The Kruger report on civil society could be a useful tool to address some of the fall-out from the pandemic, though many of the ideas contained in it are reworked ones, and we are conscious that the government might be hoping the foundation sector will make up for the civil society funding gap which is inevitably approaching.
The sector is jittery and understandably so. Who knows how the next twelve months will pan out? For now our sights must be set on the nearer term recovery period rather than the next 100 years I alluded to in the January blog. Yet the climate crisis must remain front of mind as we cannot afford to lose any momentum on that. As the year ends, we are all utterly convinced that the need for a strong civil society is greater than ever.
The Barrow Cadbury COVID-19 Support Fund is one of nine expert partnerships, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, to ensure almost £59m of National Lottery funding reaches communities most vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19.
The 198 organisations which have been awarded funding are working tirelessly in straitened circumstances to relieve hardship caused by the pandemic among refugees and migrants, many of whom were finding it difficult to access services.
Initially open for a three week period, the application ‘window’ was extended as was the eligibility criteria to ensure it reached those organisations that provided services and support targeted at refugees and migrants which they were seeking to maintain. Our funding panel was made up of trustees and senior staff from the Trust alongside people with lived experience and knowledge of the migration sector.
Out of almost 200 charities it is impossible to give a comprehensive overview of such varied work covering a range of ages, mainstream and specialist organisations, regions, and those led by refugees and migrants themselves. However, here is a snapshot of just four which might give a flavour of the cross-section and extent of the amazing work being undertaken.
Fairbeats Music is a charity based in Lewisham operating across a number of South London boroughs. It believes that every child, including the most marginalised, has a right to a creative life, so provides music-based activities, working with about 170 per year. Activities include music-making, instrument lessons, song-writing, ensemble playing and performances. Its £13,200 grant will enable it to increase its capacity to respond during this pandemic, including additional hours for existing staff and freelancers, and new equipment to ensure it can continue to provide its activities. It will also allow Fairbeats to undertake recorded video activities, provide care packs and paper resources for children with no internet access and live on-line music sessions for those who do, undertake a special song-writing project in a distanced way, and continue to promote the importance of music-making.
Europia is a registered charity and community development organisation established in 2008. It is the only organisation supporting and empowering European nationals who have come to live and work in Greater Manchester. The charity aims to help people feel at home, connect them with their local communities and give them the knowledge and skills they need to make their hopes and dreams a reality. Europia provides a legal surgery, welfare advice, EUSS application assistance and emergency funds for the most vulnerable, as well as facilitating community development groups including an art collective, a Roma Project and a Women’s Group. The £25k they were awarded will enable them to work with community leaders and community navigators to develop appropriate public health information about COVID-19 in Polish, Roma, Romanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovak, Czech and Hungarian. It will collaborate with community networks, consulates, High Commissions, cultural bodies, supplementary schools and East European businesses to disseminate the resources.
Love146 aims to end the trafficking of children globally. It runs a Survivor Care Programme for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who have been trafficked to the UK or are potential trafficking victims. This involves providing specialist supported accommodation, wrap-around support, a rapid response placement service and outreach support. The organisation rents shared houses in London and Hampshire for young people, and supports individual care leavers who it has helped into independent accommodation, or who have been referred to it for specific support by a local authority. Love146 also runs an Outreach Programme, providing training for individuals involved in safeguarding. It operates mainly in London and the South East, and supports approximately 40 beneficiaries each year. £8940 will enable Love146 to continue to respond to the needs of young people at risk of going missing, and/or of being trafficked.
Zinthiya Ganeshpanchan Trust (ZGT) is a Leicester charity established in 2009, working to alleviate poverty and reduce all forms of abuse. It has received several local awards for its work. Originally set up to support disadvantaged women from any background, it has found itself increasingly supporting migrant and refugee women fleeing domestic abuse. It is one of the few providers of support for women affected by domestic abuse and FGM in Leicester. £40k will enable ZGT to provide emotional support, help with reporting abuse to the police and obtaining injunctions, referrals to housing providers, and assistance with housing benefit and welfare claims, access to legal aid to enable women with NRPF to pursue status independent of their abuser, money and debt advice, provision of emergency supplies including food and period products for women and girls fleeing abuse.
Zinthiya Ganespanchan, CEO of the Trust said: “We are delighted to have received support from this Fund to support migrant women, including refugee and asylum seekers, not only to provide advice and guidance but also to provide practical support such as emergency food and clothing. Through this funding we have already been able to transform the lives of many women.”
A new report: Stories of Injustice: The criminalisation of women convicted under joint enterprise laws, prepared jointly by authors from MMU and the national campaign group JENGbA, highlights new and disturbing evidence of the hidden and ongoing injustice of Joint Enterprise in England and Wales. Drawing on personal testimonies the research uncovers over 100 girls and women convicted as secondary parties, most serving long and life sentences for convictions of murder or manslaughter, who have not committed violence.
The research examines the process of criminalisation, revealing there are a number of critical moments, decisions and actions, or omissions that lead to these wrongful convictions. This begins with the early actions of the police and the CPS and their decisions to charge women with serious violent crimes. Significantly, once in a trial as a defendant, the findings then reveal a range of strategies drawn on by the prosecution teams to support the conviction of women regardless of their lack of involvement, lack of violence or presence at the scene.
This involves a dual process, simultaneously obscuring the context and silencing the immediate and longstanding experiences of violence that many women have experienced, yet over highlighting their ‘involvement’ or ‘role’. To construct the women’s role or culpability the prosecution draw on a number of lines of argument: her presence was encouragement; she should have foreseen what would happen; she intended the violence to occur for X reason; her non-action during and / or after the event indicates a common purpose.
These arguments rely heavily on a number of myths, stereotypes and gendered narratives. These can draw on, echo and feed on and into wider mediated narratives and often draw attention to the ways in which they have failed as girls or women. Importantly, the findings show how defence teams are complicit in silencing by failing to introduce important contextual factors or engage in adequate challenge to these gendered narratives.
The report highlights critical concerns, calls for intervention, and asks us to reimagine justice and what this means for girls and women marginalised and criminalised by the continued injustice of the legal principles underpinning joint enterprise legislation.
In this year of unprecedented challenges for charities, we asked two of our trustees, Esther McConnell and Cathy Pharoah, to tell us about their experiences of being trustees of Barrow Cadbury Trust during the pandemic, what’s made a difference, what was difficult, and what might be round the corner.
Esther McConnell
Esther is the great great granddaughter of Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury. Esther became a Trustee in 2016. She currently works at the East European Resource Centre as the Deputy CEO. Previously, she worked at the Anti-Trafficking and Labour Exploitation Unit (ATLEU) and volunteered with Stop the Traffik. She studied Global Migration at UCL with a focus on community responses to migration and change.
“I don’t believe our risk register or strategy embraced the possibility of a pandemic or a national lockdown, though we had included the fallout by other means. Being a Trustee over the past eight or so months has meant grappling with this fast-changing and ever-complicating landscape – a landscape which has affected our charity, our people, and our partners.
Working with a grant-making charity often gives you a marvellous overview of the work and profile of a sector. From this viewpoint – it has been clear that COVID-19, the lockdown, and the associated economic fallout, have exacerbated existing inequalities and created new ones. Across our programmes there has been a whole lot of hardship and, at times, this has felt overwhelming. But there has also been a good amount of hope. Hope sprung, primarily, from the hard work and dynamism of our partners in all their different guises, and their staff.
But what of the finer details of governance operations? We have adapted ourselves to work remotely – with a simplified meeting structure and regular updates. We have missed speaking in person and sharing thoughts in that easy way we took for granted. But our staff have supported us to recreate a sharing environment by enabling small discussion groups within our agenda.
It has certainly been a very strange and disrupted year – but the consistency and steadfastness of BCT staff and fellow Trustees has meant that being a trustee has felt like a calm and steady ship in the storm”.
Cathy Pharoah
Cathy has been a non-family trustee since 2015. She is Visiting Professor of Charity Funding and co-director of the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School. She is an expert on voluntary sector funding, specialising in research on philanthropy. She is a founder of Voluntary Sector Review, and presents widely on giving and philanthropy.
“The pandemic has brought challenge, change, privilege and opportunity to trusteeship. In a future of continuing uncertainty, it will continue to do so. Looking back to the anxieties of March the Trust might breathe a sigh of relief. Operations have been moved successfully to online and home working, a substantial programme of emergency and other grant-making has been delivered in a timely way, finances are still afloat, thankfully few staff and trustees have suffered from COVID19 infection, and Zoomed Board meetings have been efficient. And Board and staff are all still allies and friends.
However, none of the effectiveness in responding to the impact of the pandemic can be taken for granted. In the case of the Trust, it has been – and will continue to be – underpinned by the principles and ‘capital’ of good charity governance already in place. This includes high standards of financial and risk monitoring and oversight, clarity and unity around the charity’s mission and purposes, efficient managerial processes, regular detailed Board reporting and an organisational culture of learning. We have been able to draw on a well-oiled machine to develop rapid-fire, flexible approaches to the fast-changing landscape of grantee and beneficiary need. CEO and Chair leadership in steering the organisation through change, and supporting staff through the personal and professional challenges of the pandemic, have been vital. Trustees have had a key role in recognising the need to work differently, and providing fit-for-purpose oversight to enable staff to get on with the job in a timely way.
Most importantly, however, and critical in holding all the initiatives together, are the strong relationships of trust between staff and board members. From the perspective of a Trustee, these build up over time, through face to face engagements in Trustee meetings, events and joint project visits, not to mention invaluable, informal opportunities to get to know staff and other Trustees better at social occasions. We have lost these to the pandemic, and they are sadly missed. In the process, however, it is important also to recognise that trustee boards and staff have been sharing new experiences and partnerships together around fighting the impact of the pandemic and responding to calls for greater equality and diversity in the sector. These are providing the new platforms on which to build future governance, and more effective programmes for social change.
http://www.barrowcadbury.org.uk
We recently hosted a conversation for small charities with those who fund and support them, to explore their social change role over the next 12-18 months. This was partly to build on our recent publication of Small charities and social change, a study which describes the approaches of 11 small charities to advocacy; and partly because through our work in response to Covid-19, we’re hearing a lot about the need to strengthen the sector’s collective voice: ‘We have to have some real conversations. We’re lots of voices, collective voices, but we’re being drowned out with all the noise’.
The pandemic has presented many and varied challenges for small charities – and uncertainty is now part of the new normal. Alongside this, we have all been affected by the events that followed the killing of George Floyd – the protests, the debates, the anger, the pain, the calls to action. Profound questions are being asked about diversity, equality and inclusion – these need to be front of mind as we turn our attention to the process of recovery and renewal out of the crisis that we have been living through.
We were privileged to hear from four people with different experiences of social change: Raheel Mohammad, Director of Maslaha; Christopher Stacey, Co-Director of Unlock; Debbie Pippard, Director of Programmes at Barrow Cadbury Trust; and George Barrow, Civil Servant at The Ministry of Justice.
Seven things stood out from their reflections and the discussions that followed:
- ‘Covid-19 has pulled back the curtain and demonstrated the number of people that have been marginalised’ by previously unfair and closed decision-making processes. Small and medium charities undertaking social change work have to look at ways in which they can link up with other groups who are led by and/or represent individuals and groups whose voices and experiences are going unheard.
- ‘Majority white-led organisations do not have the specialist knowledge or expertise to understand how certain social issues affect communities of colour.’ Work to unpack and respond to the experiences of communities of colour must be led by or run in partnership with them so that it ‘registers emotion, vulnerability, heritage, culture and religion’. If this social change work is being carried out ‘through partnerships between black and brown-led and white-led and organisations’, it is most effective when based around something tangible: ‘it’s in the action that you open up new parameters and new horizons’.
- Ensure that you are actively and demonstratively accountable to the individuals, groups and communities you are advocating on behalf of. We must avoid being the creators or perpetuators of ‘artificial examples of good practice’, only putting forward solutions for policy and practice that are based on the genuine experience and voice of those you represent Always ask yourself: ‘Do you know what good looks like?’ for a particular group or community.
- Collaboration is essential, particularly between large and small charities. Larger charities are often more likely to have a seat at the table and have their voices heard, and they have the time and capacity to engage in decision making processes. But small charities tend to have the proximity to lived experience and in-depth knowledge of how policy and practice plays out on the ground.
- We must continue to work both inside and outside of the system. For example, building relationships with local and national government, but also being willing to mobilise and challenge where necessary. Recognise that it’s about understanding what is the most appropriate and effective strategy for the change you are seeking to influence at a given point in time.
- When attempting to influence central government policy or legislation, there are three things it is useful to keep in mind. First, develop personal relationships with key civil servants, or work in partnership with an organisation who can build or has these relationships. Second, work together in loose networks: ‘If you’re all on the same page we do get the message’. Third, understand that government moves slowly, so being able to commit and be in it for the long term is important. Small charities also have a very important role to play in being able to bring the ‘corporate memory’ on certain social policy issues and previously tried and tested solutions.
- More funders need to commit to funding social change work and understand what it takes to fund this kind of work. Be willing to fund over an extended period of time, stick with social change processes for the long term, and allow those doing social change work the freedom and opportunism to act in a responsive and adaptive way. More work may need to be done with trustees of trusts and foundations to help them to understand the importance of investing in social change work alongside service delivery.
You can read more about how and why small charities are challenging, shaping and changing policy, practice and attitudes here.
A statement from Erica Cadbury, Chair of Barrow Cadbury Trust
The killing of George Floyd in the US, together with the spotlight on the origins of philanthropic capital, taken up around the world by the Black Lives Matter movement, has prompted Barrow Cadbury Trust to scrutinise more closely the early commercial activities of Cadburys, specifically in relation to the labour which produced cocoa and sugar. We have asked ourselves “how was the wealth of the business, and therefore the endowment of the Trust, created?” The wealth which ultimately provided the endowment which funds, and has funded, the Barrow Cadbury Trust’s work for a century.
In the spirit of transparency, we want to answer honestly any questions our partners and colleagues, and the organisations we support, might have about the origins of funds of the Trust. We also recognise that governing a family foundation is both public service and a great privilege in equal measure. Although our board is still comprised mainly of family, we do also recruit non-family trustees who bring complementary skills and perspectives.
For those not familiar with the Barrow Cadbury Trust, it is celebrating its 100th anniversary of social justice work this year. Our founders, Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury, were very different from other philanthropists in that they didn’t believe in helping only the so-called ‘deserving poor’. True to their Quaker convictions, they believed that all humans were of equal value and entitled to equal treatment. Though our focus today has shifted from that of Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury in 1920, there are many elements which remain the same, particularly the focus on inequality and the importance of structural change.
The religious denomination known as Quakers was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century. The involvement of individual Quakers in the eighteenth century slave trade is problematical. Eric Williams, in his groundbreaking book ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ (first published in 1944) found that: “Quaker non-conformity did not extend to the slave trade. In 1756 there were 84 Quakers listed as members of the [West India] Company trading to Africa, among them the Barclay and Baring families. Slave dealing was one of the most lucrative investments of English as of American Quakers.”. In the course of the eighteenth century both American and British Quakers sought to outlaw the ownership of and profit from slavery amongst individual Quakers. In 1774, in America, after the campaigns of John Woolman and Benjamin Lay, any Quaker owning slaves was expelled from the community. At the beginning of the 19th century in Britain, as the abolitionist movement gained traction, many Quakers were involved in campaigning for it and supporting William Wilberforce. During the civil war American Quakers were active in the “underground railroad” which enabled slaves to reach freedom through networks of safe houses.
This, however, pre-dates the Cadbury cocoa business which was started in 1824, 17 years after the 1807 Slave Trade Act. By 1833 slavery had been formally abolished under the Slavery Abolition Act, though it is common knowledge that it was many years before slavery truly ended, and there was considerable political and commercial resistance for decades. The common view was that as pro-abolitionists, the Cadburys did not knowingly do business with plantations which used enslaved or indentured labour. And, for the most part, it appears they did not.
In the early 20th Century William Cadbury, Barrow’s brother and fellow board member of Cadbury Brothers discovered that the firm was buying cocoa from plantations in the Portuguese colonies Sao Tome and Principe, where there were indentured labourers – as good as slaves. The matter was investigated over several years, but the issue it does not seem to have been pursued with great haste although eventually the firm moved their business elsewhere. An investigative journalist Henry Nevinson took up the issue but it was successfully challenged in court by William Cadbury as a libel. You can read more here. Other than that, we can find no evidence of any support of the slave trade itself – direct or indirect – in the commercial activities of Cadburys. But we cannot be 100% certain.
So, how has the Barrow Cadbury Trust’s endowment been used for a century? The concern of Barrow’s uncle, George Cadbury, in addressing the fundamental causes of poverty, was a huge influence on Barrow. To this end George Cadbury had created Bournville, a model village for the workforce and other residents , with decent housing, gardens, and green spaces. He also argued strongly for effective intervention from central and local government to do something about the shocking poverty of late Victorian society. For the Cadbury family, a better, fairer society could only be achieved by a combination of state action and individual effort. With their increasing wealth and influence Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury were in a position to encourage both and address the root causes of social problems. The introduction of welfare reforms during the Liberal government of 1906 were wholly supported.
This continued with the foundation of the Barrow and Geraldine S Cadbury Trust in 1920 (renamed as Barrow Cadbury Trust in 1994) and throughout the following century.
Undoubtedly in the present there is still a huge amount of work to be done on structural and racial inequality, and these have been areas of the Trust’s work for many decades. As a relatively small foundation we are involved in policy, advocacy and campaigning, rather than service delivery. And we are strong supporters of BAME-led and other equalities infrastructure, as well as working on migration issues with migrant organisations. We are committed to tackling racism in all its forms and believe that the best way to do this is by building alliances. There is still so much to do, we welcome this renewed focus on such vital issues and are by no means complacent about what it will take to move the dial.
Erica Cadbury
July 2020
