Could Covid-19 be the knockout blow for our nonprofit heroes?
Thousands of voluntary organisations have beaten tough times before. Can they do it again, asks
THE entire social economy has been thrown into chaos by the coronavirus pandemic.
By social economy I mean NGOs, community and voluntary organisations, charities, social enterprises that measure their value in public goods not private wealth.
How will these resilient, battle-scarred organisations cope with what comes next? How much do we actually value what they do? What will each of us do to help?
Ireland has an extraordinarily high number of voluntary organisations established for every conceivable purpose.
In the Wicklow mountains, there’s a small group which gathered at the weekend — when this was still permitted — with their mattocks and hoes to repair the wear and tear caused by walkers and bikers. There’s a voluntary air ambulance service funded and run by the local community in West Cork. In Leitrim, there’s a social farming movement that promotes wellbeing by helping vulnerable people to join in the work on a family farm. And these are just examples you might not have heard of.
Another kind of richness is the wealth of supports provided for people battling depression, for families that include a member with a disability, for the victims of domestic abuse, for the homeless.
Yet another kind of intangible wealth is embedded in our thousands of arts, language and culture organisations — amateur as well as professional. There are a dozen amateur drama companies within a 10-mile radius of Swords, Co Dublin. In Schull, Co Cork, last year there was a fundraising concert put on by local choirs. Six of them.
Nonprofit companies number fewer than 5pc of the population of active enterprises in Ireland, but it’s probably fair to say they punch above their weight when it comes to household names. It would be invidious to start naming them — but most of us encounter their work every day whether as campaigners, cultural producers, recreational clubs or service providers. How many of us realise that this is a sector that employs 165,000 people and has a turnover of €14bn.
It is sector of extremes — just 150 big organisations (turning over more than €12m), 10,000 small or micro enterprises, and another 20,000 local clubs or societies.
New ones are set up every year, and last year the 541 nonprofit start-ups outnumbered wind-ups by nearly 2:1.
And they don’t all stay small for long: just as in the private sector, a small startup with big ambitions can grow and grow and grow — as Men’s Sheds, Food Cloud, Music Generation and Grow It Yourself have shown.
And yet compared with private, for-profit companies, nonprofits turn out to be exceptionally durable. Their value is not represented by return on investment, it’s something each one of them has to persuade us of over and over again when they ask for our support. It’s no accident that they’re household names — for anybody under 50, the majority of small, medium and large Irish nonprofits have been around forever.
Nobody gets rich setting up these organisations — by definition their only equity is sweat equity. But then maybe it depends what you mean by rich.
The coronavirus is teaching us to place a value on the wellbeing of the communities we belong to. It is not surprising that hundreds of local clubs and societies have been mobilised in cooperation with local government and other branches of the State to put all kinds of creative solutions in place for vulnerable citizens.
Other small nonprofits have found that — like other service businesses across the economy — they have been able to transition to online working. These are the lucky ones — the professional networks, the advocacy organisations, and the providers of services like social housing, whose work doesn’t require high levels of personal interaction.
But for many, the pandemic and everything in its wake represents a fundamental threat — to their organisations or their livelihoods or both.
Providers of residential, respite care, homelessness and other kinds of social services are profoundly challenged. The performing arts have been very badly hit. Fundraising has fallen off a cliff. Who will look after the clients of these organisations?
The recent announcement of a €40m package of emergency funding has been welcomed by sector leaders. But it is a temporary measure. It will buy time for nonprofits — mostly small and with limited resources and no reserves — to think fundamentally about what they do and how they do (and fund) it.
Nonprofits are used to facing challenges. Indeed, for many it’s a way of life, because the nature of their relationship with their funders is provisional, hand-to-mouth.
When will we start to hear government ministers routinely name-checking this sector (which, remember, employs 165,000 people and turns over €14bn each year) as a player when choices are being made about how we get out of this, or at least how we start to learn to live with it?
Is it possible that the old narrative — “too many charities”, “do-gooders taking the place of the State” — will give way to a recognition that the social economy is part of the foundation of everything we value, not an optional extra?
‘Nonprofits are used to challenges: for many of them it’s a way of life...’
Patricia Quinn is the managing director of Benefacts — a company she founded five years ago to convert raw data into public information about Irish nonprofits. Benefacts’ fourth annual analysis of the Irish nonprofit sector will be published this Thursday