Fund Black-led organisations to levels representing the need of our service users | Common Call
According to the most recent Pay and Equalities report released by ACEVO, Black African, Black Caribbean, and Black British people make up 0.3% of the CEOs leading the Charity sector. Though the charity sector is improving in its representation of the "hardest to reach communities", people of Global Majority backgrounds still make up only 7% of the CEOs compared to our 13% representation in the population. The lack of representation is starker in the Black community, where we are not half represented but a 10th, dwindling from 3% to 0.3%.
In 2020, Big Society Capital, the UK's most prominent social investor, released figures that express the six-fold growth of the social investment sector, from £830 million to £5.1 billion in 8 years. Has that growth been reflected in disbursement to communities most in need of direct support? Or is it growth that exclusively benefits the 0.4% of the sector with the connections, awareness, resources and opportunity to build a £1M+ organisation? Why do we say we champion lived experience in leadership but as a sector systemically gatekeeper resources from the people most likely to identify as such?
“We need organisations that understand us, support us and will invest in creating interventions that are specific to our culture and community reality.”
97% of Black-led organisations in the UK identify as lived experience led organisations. They are also primarily making less than £50K a year and are sacrificing their income to keep their non-profits afloat. Thousands of Black impact leaders donate approximately £20K annually to run local charities and social enterprises. In the case of our founder, Bayo Adelaja, she contributed an average of £18K annually on a £32K salary while working at the London School of Economics. Disappointed by the lack of culturally relevant and inclusive, Black lived experience leaders set out to target critical issues in their local areas. Unfortunately, these Black philanthropists will be relied upon even more in the wake of the Levelling Up agenda.
Bayo started Common Call because she saw a funding crisis coming at the outset of the pandemic. The impact of COVID-19 on the Black community was profound and wide-ranging.
Black people were most likely to become ill.
Black people were most likely to be laid off.
Black people were most likely to be put on Furlough, and so on;
What would happen to the hundreds of thousands of Black people across the country that rely on the donations of the 0.3% Black charity leaders to bridge the social care gaps that immigration stipulations (no recourse to public funds) and years of austerity have taken away from our communities? Black people are most likely to be long-term unemployed, living with searing debt and most likely to be experiencing a common mental health disorder. We need organisations that understand us, support us and will invest in creating interventions that are specific to our culture and community reality. That does not happen from the top; it happens from the grassroots.
We need strong, stable, locally influential Black-led organisations across the country. Through the activity and influence of these organisations, we will be able to address the inequality and injustice that leads to situations that we dread to see on the news - a recent horrific example being Child Q.
We have recently set out to support the social investment community to understand the Black community more effectively through our "Change the Face of Social Investment" campaign. We intend to validate the existence of a pipeline of Black-led organisations seeking social investment opportunities at the sub-£100k mark. At Common Call, we have taken on grant funding, and we are working to become a stable funder that Black-led organisations across the country can rely on the existence, gain support from and learn from over the years.
If you would like to support this work, please share this page with your community of social impact organisations.
