Who cares?
This article looks at the recent collapse of The Cares Family charity. It draws on my experience as Chief Executive of Tomorrow’s People which went bust in 2018. I argue that there are valuable lessons to be learned from failures such as these, but there are no mechanisms to encourage the openness and reflection required to understand and learn. Lessons from the failure of charities like The Cares Family and Tomorrow’s People will continue to be lost unless we create these mechanisms.
Introduction
In 2016, shortly after the Brexit referendum, I had breakfast with a friend who had been involved planning the Remain campaign. Attempting to lighten their mood, I jokingly asked how they were going to make amends. They said two things would help, both involving “micro” rather than “macro” actions. First, they would try to be unfailingly nice all the time; this would, they hoped, help to end the acrimony that had developed during the referendum campaign. Second, they were going to support local initiatives that tackled social problems at a grassroots level. They singled out North London Cares as an example of a project they would support.
North London Cares was a young charity at this time. Its founder and chief executive, Alex Smith, was attracting attention for the charity’s simple but effective way of combating loneliness and building social capital in London. It ran social activities that brought together young and old people unlikely to know each other, and targeted those who were isolated. These activities created mutual understanding, fostered empathy, reduced loneliness, and built community.
North London Cares grew, expanding into south London and then to Manchester and Liverpool as well as, most recently, into east London. It became The Cares Family.
The Cares Family has now gone bust; it went into administration on 31st October 2023. This is despite the charity seemingly having a healthy cash balance according to its last filed accounts. The charity’s website has been replaced with a single page announcing its closure and referring people to the administrators. All the website materials — articles, papers, and reports — have been taken down, presumably by the administrator. The administrator will most probably decide these have no residual financial value, and they will simply disappear forever.
I am familiar with this process. I went through the same thing when I was chief executive of the employment charity Tomorrow’s People, which went into administration in 2018.
I do not know exactly what happened at the Cares Family; statements from the board and the chief executive talk about financial difficulties and there have subsequently been reports of problems with funding building up over a longer period.
This article looks at the implications of closing The Cares Family, drawing on my reflections and experiences with Tomorrow’s People. It calls for more discussion about how and why charities fail, arguing that there is too little reflection about this topic and, as a result, valuable lessons are lost. Everyone — charity boards, chief executives, funders, policymakers, and regulators — would gain from a better approach to failure.
The Cares Family history
North London Cares and The Cares Family worked to build inter-generational social capital and tackle loneliness. The objectives remained clear and constant, described in the last annual report as:
- Reduce isolation and loneliness amongst older and younger neighbours alike;
- Improve the confidence, skills, connection, belonging, purpose and power of all participants;
- Reduce the gaps across social, generational, digital, cultural and attitudinal divides.
Founded in 2011, the charity expanded from its initial base in north London. Positive evaluations in 2014 and 2016 fuelled growth (the first of these evaluations was commissioned by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation).
These evaluations have disappeared from The Cares Family website, along with everything else, but the key points are in this article by Nesta about the charity’s ambitions to expand. (Nesta’s article also contains a nice video explaining succinctly the charity’s work.)
The charity caught the attention of policymakers and was chosen as the venue for the UK government to launch its first strategy on loneliness, as the problems of loneliness became increasingly appreciated — both its growing prevalence and the huge costs. Nesta described the charity as having a “systemic impact” helping to shape the government’s strategy, as well as working directly to help thousands of people.
The UK government has been praised for developing a loneliness strategy. One admirer is US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. Murthy has written powerfully about loneliness and made it an important plank of health policy in the United States. A recent report from the Surgeon General highlights that loneliness can be as bad for you as smoking.
North London Cares both anticipated and rode growing interest in the topic; funding and spending more than trebled in the last four years (see the graph below).
The Cares Family was a success story. And now it has gone. Understandably this has shocked and upset many people. The charity’s approach attracted many supporters; it seemed to be a model that could be scaled up further as well as copied by others.
Some of the energy and enthusiasm which The Cares Family sparked remains and people are continuing its work — https://twitter.com/SELFA_Emma/status/1720096474149929336. Such efforts are commendable, but they are small and hard to sustain without an organisation.
A sudden decline?
A character in an Ernest Hemingway story from the 1920s said he went bust “Gradually and then suddenly”. This quote is often presented as a general truth about the way organisations go bankrupt. It is what happened at Tomorrow’s People. I do not know if it is also true of The Cares Family. Reports suggest the seeds of the charity’s decline might have been there for some time. Alternatively, they might have emerged during the recent transition to a new chief executive. Alex Smith wrote movingly about what The Cares Family means to him earlier this year. He seemed unaware of problems; elsewhere, describing the charity as:
“a healthy, happy organisation confident in itself and more secure than ever.”
Problems were seemingly not apparent either to the new chief executive, Nicola Upton, who took over earlier in 2023. In the wake of news about the bankruptcy, Upton wrote on LinkedIn:
“When I joined The Cares Family in August this year as CEO, this wasn’t what I anticipated my role would become. Sadly, insurmountable issues have come to light and I’ve spent much of my time working closely with the Board to seek any viable alternative to closure, and sadly, there is not.”
This is horribly familiar to me. When I took over as chief executive of Tomorrow’s People in 2015, the charity appeared in good health. The outgoing — much praised — chief executive told me she was handing over three prizes — the charity’s retail shops, a model of working in schools financed by a social impact bond, and a pioneering way of working with unemployed young people that had been developed in Norfolk. The outgoing chief executive had built an organisation with a good reputation and track record. The charity needed to create new funding models but it seemed in a good position to do so. The legacy and the opportunity were precisely what attracted me to the charity.
It turned out that none of the three “prizes” was viable financially and could be sustained. Eventually, we ran out of time and money to build an alternative. We got very close but that was not good enough.
A few months into my time at Tomorrow’s People, a trustee unexpectedly spoke in an audit meeting about “a turnaround situation such as this”, saying the charity’s true problems had slowly come to light since I joined. Perhaps some version of this story is true of The Cares Family.
The end of The Cares Family is a tragic loss. It is a bad ending — an organisation doing good work with a vital future is no more. Thousands of people who benefited from its work are abandoned— the remaining staff have been made redundant and there is seemingly no plan to continue the work.
Bad endings
Recent years have seen interest in the idea of “good endings” in the voluntary and community sector, with funders supporting work about how to help projects and organisations end well (see Stewarding Loss).
But many endings are bad. They are messy, and usually have conflicting narratives and perspectives. A number of elements can conspire to cause a bad ending, with no single person or group responsible. This was the case with Tomorrow’s People and may also be true of The Cares Family.
In my opinion, Tomorrow’s People did not renew and reinvigorate itself soon enough; the board did not heed longstanding warning signs; funders, though sometimes thoughtful and generous, did not invest in the long-term; and, as a new chief executive, I did not introduce changes swiftly enough. All of these mistakes might have been unavoidable at the time, but each contains lessons for others.
From my experience with Tomorrow’s People, there is little appetite to learn the lessons when things go wrong and a charity goes into administration. Trustees want to escape without censure, believing they tried their best; staff want to move on and find new jobs, hoping no stigma will attach to them; and funders can be frustrated but ultimately are essentially unaffected.
Not learning
The process of administration itself militates against learning lessons. Administrators prohibit trustees and staff from answering questions in a formal capacity. A number of questions were put to me about Tomorrow’s People by disgruntled former staff. These were considered and reasonable. The administrators told me not to reply. I was advised to withhold my personal email address from staff (advice I ignored). Having gone into administration in March 2018, Tomorrow’s People was not finally wound down until August 2019. It is hard to sustain people’s interest and attention for that length of time.
The Charity Commission is the regulator of charities in England and Wales and has the stated aim of wanting to help charity thrive. But it does not appear to do much to understand, capture, and share lessons from charity failures. The Commission has been quoted about The Cares Family as follows: “We are engaging with the trustees at Cares Family and are assessing information to inform our next steps.”
This is vague and I suspect it does not mean anything much at all. Staff and trustees of Tomorrow’s People had a meeting with the Charity Commission in March 2018, discussing events that led to administration. That meeting could well be described as the Charity Commission “engaging” with trustees of the charity.
Before the meeting with the Charity Commission, senior trustees and staff from Tomorrow’s People discussed and agreed that they wanted to show that no-one was to blame. We wanted the story to be about falling donations and an unfortunate sequence of events triggered by delays in decisions about funding, most particularly from the Cabinet Office. There was considerable truth in this, but it was not the whole story. There is no doubt that staff and trustees of Tomorrow’s People made mistakes covering a long period which led to the organisation hitting difficulties. But we felt the need to present a particular narrative to the Charity Commission; there was no incentive to be fully open.
I do not think we ever heard from the Charity Commission again. Their interest is simply ensuring the administration process is completed and that creditors, including staff, are paid the maximum amount possible out of the charity’s remaining assets. Company law takes precedence over charity law in the process of administration, so there is no attempt to retain for posterity knowledge created through the charity’s operations; hence shutting down the website and deleting all reports and content. There is no financial value in an evaluation showing how a charity works, why it is effective, and what might be learned by others from this. The potential social value of the organisation’s work is of no interest to the administrators.
Trustees of Tomorrow’s People did not gather to try to learn lessons (as far as I am aware). Staff moved on with their lives, looking for jobs. And no-one in the charity press tried to understand and write up what had happened (I was only ever contacted to check facts for news stories). The sector’s membership bodies also did not enquire what had happened; which was all the more surprising as the charity was relatively large — the last full accounts show it spent £7 million in 2016/17; the former chief executive was a reasonably prominent Conservative peer; and the charity’s work was measurably effective and valuable.
Failing
I spoke to only three funders about the demise of Tomorrow’s People. The head of one said this:
“I don’t see this as a failure. Running a charity in this funding environment is really hard. I am pleased that we supported Tomorrow’s People to help so many young people get on their feet and make progress in work. That is a success, not a failure.”
This foundation is a thoughtful and considerate funder of charities. Nevertheless, I disagreed that one should avoid the word “failure”. Running a charity is hard — the funding market is dysfunctional, the pool of labour talent is small, there are many challenges, and the rewards are slim. But Tomorrow’s People had ambitious plans and these came to an abrupt halt. By any measure that is a failure.
The same is surely true of The Cares Family. It had appointed a new Chief Executive and wanted to continue tackling loneliness.
It is important to note that, as was the case with Tomorrow’s People, the demise of The Cares Family is unrelated to the effectiveness of its work. It was doing good work in an important field.
Opening up
Alex Smith has recently commented about The Cares Family on LinkedIn. He points out that many organisations are working on loneliness and talks about the issue and its importance.
His comments are laudable and the ideas important. But good ideas need organisations to house and put them into practice. For now, the noble aspirations articulated by Smith the work of The Cares Family has ceased. And there is no plan to fill the gap.
Smith does not touch on how The Cares Family went from being “more secure than ever” to entering administration within a short period. His perspective on this would be interesting, but it is unreasonable to expect him to open up. Our sector does not encourage openness and acknowledgement of responsibility. As noted above, the process of administration makes it hard to be open. (Indeed, this is the first time I have written anything about the demise of Tomorrow’s People, other than to write about innovations to its delivery model while I was at the charity.)
Forgive and remember
Unless we are open about failures, we cannot hope to learn from them. A famous sociology study on medical practices that looks at the work of surgeons in a Chicago hospital is titled “Forgive and remember”. It is a classic study of how surgeons approach their work. The idea of forgiving mistakes but remembering them so as to do better in the future is appealing.
Medical practice has long taken this seriously, institutionalising it through “morbidity and mortality meetings”. These are designed as a “safe space” to improve practice. There is no such thing in the charity sector. Networks of senior charity staff and trustees may informally play this role to an extent, but the conversations take place privately behind closed doors. The culture of our sector, and the systems and processes within it which help create this, prevent lessons from being learned.
A lament and an agenda
The closure of the Cares Family means London, Manchester, and Liverpool have lost an innovative and effective charity. Efforts to combat loneliness and social isolation in those cities will suffer and thousands of people who would otherwise be helped will now not be. Health inequalities will be worse, and the practice of social prescribing which is supposed to be a priority for the NHS (as well as regional authorities such as the Mayor of London and the GLA) will weaken.
The Cares Family is not the only charity to go bust in recent years; and there are reports that many are at risk of insolvency. The Cares Family is perhaps the most striking and shocking recent example — a prominent and well-regarded organisation doing important work which seemed to be in good health.
As well as lament this loss, we should want to learn lessons. To start, a sector-wide response should explore these topics:
- The design of systems to ensure the work and knowledge created by a charity is not lost when it closes. There should be greater emphasis on the legacy of the organisation’s work; which might require putting charitable value on a par with company law.
- The creation of safe spaces where people can share and learn lessons after a charity closes, guided by the mantra of “forgive and remember”.
- The development of funding structures that prevent organisations like The Cares Family from going bust in the first place. Options might include insurance funds or money that organisations can access at moments of transition and potential problems, such as when longstanding chief executives step down.
These topics will be the subject of subsequent articles.
Martin Brookes
martindbrookes@gmail.com
4 December 2023
