BROWSING LINKEDIN IS ONE WAY to stalk the lives of half-remembered university acquaintances. There’s the expected glut of management consultants, a mandatory career path for the well-heeled humanities grad. But, for every short-lived stab at a PR-traineeship or hard-won project manager title, there will be a graduate employed in the charity sector.
Not everyone is motivated by money — I certainly wasn’t. For do-gooding types who preferred to spend their final year at rallies rather than “women-in-business” conferences, the charity sector might seem a rational choice. After all, jobs in the sector are quite different from the old stereotype of grannies working in charity shops on behalf of starving donkeys.
The modern charity sinecure is unabashedly radical, and increasingly commands an immense amount of power and capital. Is it any wonder that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation sucks up top talent just as enthusiastically as McKinsey?
Many of us have an old-fashioned way of thinking about charity. Pop your spare change in the little box and directly contribute to child welfare, or donkey rehabilitation, or mental health awareness. But as expected from any industry where money flows plentifully, the British charity sector is enormous.
There are over 165,000 voluntary organisations, employing 950,000 workers (nearly two thirds as many as the NHS) and with a spend of £56.9 billion last year. This “third sector” is only moving upwards, having grown 27 per cent over the past decade. Eighty per cent of charities are classified as small, with a combined annual income of less than £100,000. Most are almost entirely unknown to the public.
THE BELIEF THAT “ACTIVISM DOESN’T PAY” no longer rings true. Take the medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, whose London museum recently shut its “Medicine Man” exhibition based upon the collection of its founder, for fear that it represented “a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”.
Decisions of this kind are
