Rethinking community: new challenges for charities

This is the first part in a two part series exploring “the future of communities”.

This article considers how communities are changing and how established charities might not be set up to deal with these shifts. In the next article, we will discuss the potential strategic responses. 

What does “community” mean to you?

Many of our clients, especially traditional charities, are asking themselves questions about “community”.

They see new communities emerging, self-organising, and making new demands. They are seeing new communities emerge as old groupings fade away. They are seeing surprising coalitions of unlikely partners forming effective communities. They are realising, belatedly, that there are established communities that they have never served well.

This leads them to ask questions about the changing nature of community, what this means, and how they might respond.

These changes are being driven by big socio-economic trends. Changes in technology and social attitudes are changing how people assemble and organise to achieve their shared objectives.

In our research, as we look at interesting new and emerging communities, we see groupings that are more fluid, more open and less ‘controllable’. They are more likely to be self-organising and temporary.  Where they come from, how they behave and whether they endure is unpredictable.

They may be more informal and more online; they may comprise diverse actors. They can be more formally organised groups, social enterprises and coalitions. They are more participatory and peer-driven, with growing expectations to actively shape and create many aspects of their everyday lives. People in these new communities tend to want tools and support, not direction, from the institutions they engage with. They want to be agents of change, not “recipients” or “beneficiaries”.

This presents new challenges – and opportunities – to established charities and civil society organisations that consider themselves grounded in, or responsive to, their communities. These new communities don’t necessarily ‘need’ established charities - or need them in the same ways as before. The challenge is not that these communities will think about their relationships with charities and campaigns in a different way, it is that they might not think about traditional charities at all.

Established organisations can struggle to engage with new communities

In practice, any new thinking about community has to contend with existing ways of thinking and behaving.

Most charities and civil society organisations already have an implicit internal definition of ‘community’ and are already organised around this definition. This can be an organisational shorthand that suits funders and service delivery, but it doesn’t always reflect the realities of the communities themselves. This shorthand is driven by history, or how funding works, or how the public sector is already organised.

The easiest example to consider is when the established, internal definition of community is about place. What is described as a “community” is actually a “location” - a village, a suburb, a local authority, a ward, a catchment area. Teams are then organised into territories and regions to serve those places. A patient-focussed charity might believe it’s organised around communities, but in practice it makes sense to be organised around NHS structures. That’s almost, but not quite, the same thing.

Based on this assumption, “the future of community” becomes a proxy for making better place-based strategy, where an organisation thinks more holistically about that place, who’s there, what they need and how they might serve them.

That implicit definition is both a strength and a weakness. It’s a strength because you can enrich the current model and serve existing communities better. The definition probably exists for good reasons. It’s a weakness because the communities that fall between the gaps in your current model might still not fit that improved model - however good it becomes. For example, communities that aren’t organised around place - communities of identity, interest or other affiliation - might not be better served by enriching a place-based model.

In this example, this implicit definition of “community” as “place” can miss a bigger picture. As more and more communities no longer fit the existing definition, they are unlikely to be well-served by the existing way of serving communities.

If communities are just groups of people, and they can be organised in lots of different ways, what would it mean to engage with them on their terms, not yours? What if your organisation was set up to serve people however and wherever and whoever they were?

Serving new communities requires deep cultural and strategic change

We have written before about the way that the traditional model of charities is to do things “for” people and “to” people. This culture leaves charities less well-equipped to do things “with” people or enable them to do things by themselves. Worse, if you don’t fit inside the existing model, that charity can’t even do things “for” you. This is true when thinking about communities as well as individuals.

This is really about organisational culture, and best illustrated by the language that is sometimes used around “hard to reach” communities. This always seems to imply that being “hard to reach” is the community’s fault, rather than the organisation’s failure. Fortunately, this language is falling out of use, but the underlying cultural behaviour persists.

From this deep cultural challenge, which might technically be described as “de-centring the organisation” but might be better described “getting over yourself”, we see a number of specific challenges:

• Legitimacy: Charities are grappling with questions regarding their legitimacy and mandate. On what basis do they legitimately claim to represent the communities they supposedly exist to serve? In a world where communities are more diverse and self-organising, how should you engage and behave to claim that right? Should you even claim that right?

• Relevance:  As communities become less predictable and more digitally connected, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. How will charities remain relevant and responsive to the evolving needs of their communities when the communities themselves are changing so much?

• Complexity: If charities remain in the mindset of doing things “for” people, they risk being spread too thin. Rather than being effective for a narrow definition of their community, they might be spread so thinly that they become ineffective for everyone they seek to serve.

• Control: Taking a broader and more inclusive definition of community often means embracing openness, decentralisation, and transparency. This can be hard in cultures that are often top-down, risk-averse and centralised. How can openness thrive in organisations that demonstrate a strong preference for control?

Addressing these questions will challenge the culture, operating model, and delivery approach of every charity that chooses to engage with them. This will be difficult, as the journey to become more open, enabling and empowering will challenge fundamental assumptions about the charity and its place in the world. The prize is much greater impact, even that impact will be harder to attribute directly to your organisation.

We are seeing three potential strategic responses to these challenges. We will explore these in the second article.

For further reading around the topic, we would recommend:

Speculative Communities by Aris Komporozos Athanasiou (2022)

If We Burn by Vincent Bevins (2023)

Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us by Jon Alexander with Ariane Conrad (2022)

Thinking like a platform (SSIR) by By Irina Snissar Lobo & Maria Zapata (2022)

How K-Pop fans become celebrated online vigilantes (MIT Technology Review) by A.W Ohlheiser