Does the third sector have a definable ideology?
Ask 100 people and you’ll get 100 different answers – there is something quicksilver-like and unpindownable about this. There’s a feeling that there should be a civil society ideology – but when you probe further (and I’ve been asking people this), you often get no further than shared values.
These are easier to identify – but they are often so broad as to be almost meaningless.
“Helping people” is one that comes up – laudable, but hardly exclusive to ourselves.
An ideology is a set of ideas that underpin our shared values - to borrow from Marxism, the substructure to the superstructure of our work.
It must strive to pin the third sector’s role in society – we’re called the third sector for a reason, and that is because we exist where the private and public sector can’t, or at least can’t satisfactorily.
So our ideology should reflect that, and inform our ways of working.
We need a better definition of what we are, not least because it acts as an inoculant against anti or at least small-state libertarianism – that queasy ideological zone where bearings are lost, the compass dial spins and the strangest transmogrifications from left to right occur.
Our ideology, one which fully embraces ideas of social progress – what makes society better and fairer? - must make it clear that we are not out to supplant the state, to erode it, but to help it to become better.
Informed by an ideology of social progress, we should be a seed-bed of progressive ideas, better ways of working.
I’ve always thought that the areas where a third sector ideology can best be approached is through community action – grassroots campaigns to enshrine communities as the crucible of democracy, and methods of – dread phrase alert – taking back control of assets and resources which have accrued in injurious, almost always private, hands.
This month’s TFN magazine has community empowerment as its loose theme. We look at various aspects of this – not least the community buyout and ownership movement (pages 18-21), which, despite problems, seems to me to come close to our aspirations of devolving power and decision making.
The pursuit of our goals also raises other issues – how do we react when the impulse for this comes ‘from above’, from the state, such as the Scottish Government’s citizen assemblies?
There has been scepticism in some quarters – and we analyse what’s proposed on pages 22-24.
It seems to me that we should welcome such moves, but be aware of their shortcomings, and not be naïve as to motives.
But there’s a debate here – as there is about every aspect of what we do, and our ideology – or whether we even have one.
I’d like to think that TFN magazine could be a platform for discussing this – feel free to email me at graham.martin@scvo.org.uk if you have any suggestions for this or contributions to make.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
