Where our own field report falls short

With S&L, before the summer we launched our field report on the state of civil society. With this central question: what is occupying civil society? We asked more than 400 organizations, brought together our conclusions, and they were quite stark. Civil society is in a perfect storm.  

Social problems are growing, resources are under pressure and organizations feel they have less policy space. Social inequality, climate and democratic erosion weigh heavily. At the same time, organizations themselves are struggling with financial uncertainty, difficult project funding, administrative burden, staff shortages and a growing sense that policy does not take their expertise seriously enough.  

But the report also shows us movement. Organizations are seeking new income, trying to work more professionally and increasingly seeking collaborations across the boundaries of their sector. Colleague Stijn Demuynck also saw in that movement a number of blind spots within civil society: competition for resources, organizations protecting their own kingdoms and the persistent reflex to solve major problems separately after all. His finding is that civil society is in transition and urgently needs new funding, collaboration and organizational models.  

Analyzing our own analysis 
 

The report was extremely valuable, but still I felt something was missing in our analysis. A smart reader can see that with S&L we describe quite well what happens to individual organizations and what each organization then needs to do to secure its future. Still, we also advise them to look sufficiently at the systemic layer, at everything that is happening outside their organization and how that impacts them. We need to follow that advice more in our own field report. Because it seems just as important to me to look at what is happening to entire sectors, to all of civil society. If you do that, only then can you start investigating what those organizations can do about it together.  

If you don’t do that, the solution is limited to: there is a change, adapt to it. “There is less money, so look for other income.” “The government is becoming stricter, so organize yourself more efficiently.” “The pressure is increasing, so build more resilience.” In itself, all agreed. But the logic is too limited. Before you know it, you have accepted a social frame that you actually do not agree with at all. Then that social frame becomes a fait accompli, even though in reality it is a political choice. And political choices are something you are better off resisting than laws of nature. 

“There is no money” is a political choice  
 

I worked for years as a director in the sector for people with disabilities. Even then, even there, I constantly heard the same little phrase: there is no money. Make do with less. Nothing to be done about it. And meanwhile, people spent years on waiting lists, denied the right care. But during those years I never accepted that frame and actively fought against it. There was never any money, but every policy period a few million were still found after all.  

The pot was, of course, not overflowing and not endless either, but resistance to that political choice, to ‘there is no money’, did pay off. The perfect storm that civil society has to navigate is not a fact, it is a frame. Politicians are only too happy for their decisions to appear neutral, but they never are. It is always about choices. About what a government allocates money to, what it considers important, and which groups are well enough organised to get their interests onto the political agenda.  

Governments can indeed mobilise enormous sums when the political will is there. The real question is which social functions we consider important enough to fund properly? And even more fundamentally: how much funding do we, as a society, want to raise collectively, from whom and for what? In my view, civil society does have something to say about that, and this remained underemphasised in our field report.

Civil society does not defend a subsidy pot  

The public debate about civil society organizations is often conducted as if they mainly defend their own subsidies. Their own survival or funding first. That idea (or accusation disguised as truth) regularly comes flying at civil society in Flanders from right-wing and far-right circles. How much does that organization get? Why does it get that? Isn’t it too big? Doesn’t it have too much influence? What does it do with all that money? 

Natuurpunt is an almost perfect example of this. That organization is regularly presented as a (too?) powerful player that receives (too?) much public funding and manages more and more nature land. But responding to that image only with budget tables and subsidy justifications will not work. Then you have already lost an important part of the discussion in advance, because the frame was wrong. Natuurpunt is not defending a subsidy pot at all. Natuurpunt organizes (or defends) nature.  

And behind that organization are tens of thousands of volunteers. People who manage nature reserves, maintain walking paths, inventory species, organize activities and build local support. If you were to organize all that work entirely professionally, the bill would look completely different. The question should therefore not be how much public funding such an organization receives, but how much impact it has, how much nature, biodiversity, public space, social cohesion, knowledge and citizen involvement it generates. And that conversation will feel very different from the answer to the question ‘How much that organization supposedly gets’.

A slap in the face of the volunteer 
 

Take another area, our education. We constantly read about declining educational quality, teacher shortages and growing inequality among young people. At the same time, there are thousands of volunteers in Flanders who support children and young people at home, help with schoolwork, support them with language, and provide structure to families that need it. Every week, they solve small pieces of a problem that our formal education system itself struggles to get a grip on. But that work barely appears in the bigger story or debate about our education.  

We see the same thing happening in sports, youth work and leisure. Volunteers train children, organize camps, lead youth movements, keep sports clubs going, supervise holiday activities and help provide before- and after-school care. They give children places where they can move, make friends, develop and feel they belong somewhere. All of it is incredibly valuable. 

But that work does not happen automatically or just by itself. Behind almost every strong volunteer operation there is a professional framework that focuses on recruiting, training and strengthening volunteers. With S&L, we support many of those volunteer strategies. We know the challenges and see all the time and effort that goes into them. 

Now imagine that this voluntary commitment disappears tomorrow, because the professional framework supposedly did not deliver enough and has to manage with fewer resources. Then someone has to take over all that voluntary work. The government, paid professionals, commercial providers or families themselves. What happens then? Families with money buy good childcare, sports camps, tutoring and leisure activities. Families with less money are left out.  

When that professional framework disappears, those volunteers and their positive impact disappear too. Ignoring them in the evaluation is therefore wrong. Today, civil society prevents much of that inequality. In my view, that could be said a bit more loudly, because at the moment volunteers are sometimes the biggest victims of the framing that civil society organizations are mainly concerned with their own subsidies. Their social contribution simply disappears from view.  

What do those right-wing politicians actually say to someone who gives football training to twenty children every Wednesday evening when you describe his organization as a subsidy guzzler? What do you say to someone who helps young people with their homework? To someone who manages nature on Saturdays? That they are a cost. A burden. While they are precisely the ones producing social value for free.  

Those who accept the frame lose  
 

What our field report brings forward too little is that, in addition to the individual challenge facing organizations, a collective narrative struggle must also be waged. Civil society defends and strengthens social security, culture, nature, well-being, education, youth work, rights and public space. It organizes people around societal needs. It brings together citizens who individually have little political power. It fills gaps left by government and the market and sometimes even prevents those gaps from becoming even larger.  

That is why it is dangerous when we as S&L and the civil society organizations we work with go along with the frame of scarcity. As if too little money is not a choice. If someone says there is no money and we respond that we will still try to achieve the same impact with fewer resources, then we have already largely given away the political discussion.  

If someone says the subsidies are too high and we only explain why our organization nevertheless needs them, then the focus remains on our budget, not on our impact. The right questions go much further than the importance and mission of one organization, and are about society as a whole: 

• What do we lose when youth work is weakened?   
• Who takes care of vulnerable young people when voluntary networks thin out?   
• What happens to social security when the organizations that defend it withdraw into service provision?

We too sometimes think too small  
 

S&L helps individual organizations become stronger. We work on strategy, financing, organizational development, leadership and impact. That is, and remains, valuable. But some problems are too big for one organization or even for one sector.  

A youth organization can run perfectly and still lose, especially when leisure time is becoming increasingly privatized. A welfare organization may improve its financing model, but at the same time our social rights may continue to be dismantled. A nature organization can work more efficiently, but at the same time lose political ground when the social narrative about nature shifts.  

If that is the case, then you really need to organize at a higher level, and I see a task there for the leaders of the larger civil society organizations in Flanders. Mutual health funds, trade unions, large welfare organizations, nature organizations, socio-cultural movements, educational organizations, youth work and sport. Organizations with members, users, volunteers, employees, infrastructure and public trust.  

Incidentally, I do not think we immediately need a new structure for that. We have enough logos, steering groups and consultation platforms. But we do need to talk more. Informally at first. Simply conversations between people who speak to each other too little. Preferably also between organizations that rarely describe themselves as activist, the large moderate service-providing organizations that cannot easily be dismissed as a small radical minority.  
 

Start the conversation and together ask one bigger question: what kind of society do we want to defend over the next ten years, and what collective influence do we need to build for that? And never forget the golden rule: you have more influence than you think. 

From those first conversations, a different story about our civil society can then emerge. A story in which organizations defend one another when one of them is attacked. In which social value is central, not subsidies, and in which the discussion about public resources is once again about political choices. That was the blind spot in our field report. We wrote only about a sector under pressure, and did not speak enough about the hundreds of thousands of people who are already organized today, who are already telling a very different story from the framing of scarcity as a law of nature.