Comment w/c 30th May 2022

“Volunteering is at the very core of being a human. No one has made it through life without someone else’s help.”

 Heather French Henry

Among the series of global and domestic challenges confronting us, it's difficult to spot some of the accompanying collateral damage. Government, businesses and charities must keep abreast of changes and respond without delay, or get caught up in the maelstrom.

It's therefore particularly sad to see the demise of Raleigh International, which has arranged for 55,000 young people to join expeditions to ‘third world’ countries over the past 44 years. Not only have they helped many communities in Nepal, Tanzania, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but they have also helped open the eyes of young adults to the wider world.

So in this commentary we look at Raleigh as an example of an organisation that failed to adjust to the challenge of the pandemic, and that had allowed itself to become too reliant on Government over recent years. At a time when global convergence and inter-generational rebalancing are urgently required, we hope a solution will be found by the Raleigh administrators to recover and rebuild their activities.

The series of shocks confronting Government, business and charity leaders since March 2020 has been massive: global travel clampdown, lockdowns at home, soaring energy prices followed by Putin's war, public debt out of control and the massive cost of living challenge. And that's in addition to the changes which we already knew about, such as climate change and Brexit.

The Government responded well during the pandemic with the furlough scheme, and Rishi Sunak’s emergency assistance last week may stave off the worst for many people during this coming winter. But the overseas aid budget was an area of Government spending which took a large hit, and Raleigh international had allowed itself to become too dependent on that support — what businesses call ‘concentration risk’. As the figures below show, the expedition schedule was severely cut back during 2020 and 2021 but they clearly failed to re-align their strategy to these challenges:

Source: Charity Commission

Their announcement of impending liquidation was sudden and severe. Staff and volunteers found themselves out on a limb, and those who had already booked expeditions at £3,000 per young person will struggle to get their money back.

But why, with an alumni of 55,000 built up since 1978 (including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Tim Peake, Kate Silverton and Simon Chinn), has this revered charity allowed itself to be driven into the wall? Surely many of those people, who must now include large numbers of successful business entrepreneurs and executives, would have contributed generously to a lifeboat fund for Raleigh if they'd known of its financial challenges in time?

We will urgently need organisations like Raleigh over the years ahead. This style of charity is the antidote to isolationism, helping the next generation to understand the need to inter-connect with the wider world.

Modern society is becoming more and more compartmentalised as technology seals us increasingly into our little boxes. To really understand the diversity and range of challenges that people have to contend with across the world, we need to provide travel experience and global community action for young adults.

I write with some experience, with a 19-year-old grandson who has just returned from the last Raleigh expedition to Nepal. His working experience involved helping villagers to improve their water supply and sanitation in the foothills of the Himalaya, and it’s interesting to hear how that has become all the more important as their own younger people have been drawn into employment opportunities in the Gulf states.

This is what Felix has to say: “Raleigh will definitely be missed, but this can be seen as a wake-up call to the highly inadequate way we approach Aid in the UK. Volunteer organisations are very inefficient towards the goal of developing nations like Nepal, having to spend huge amounts on travel, accommodation, equipment, training etc.., on very unskilled and inexperienced workers. Disadvantaged nations can be helped to develop by foreign debt relief, controlling tax evasion by multi-national corporations, and embracing disadvantaged nations’ right to take control and ownership of their own development and industry, among other approaches. Pouring money into volunteer organisations dependent on gap years of upper-middle class teenagers has practically negligible effect. The individual communities we visited benefited and were extremely welcoming and grateful, but Nepal as a whole barely noticed”.

Our proposals for a more egalitarian form of capitalism embrace this same passion for global convergence, both through inter-generational rebalancing and our ‘Stock for Data’ plan. We need to set in place the academic rigour behind these proposals, and that's where our focus must be over the coming years.

But I hope a determined group of philanthropists will step in to rescue the Raleigh International vision, supported by many of those who have benefited from the programmes over past decades.

And it will remain a salutary lesson to charity trustees not to tie yourselves too close to the changes and chances of Government policy, but rather to encourage Government to be a catalyst as we proposed on 16^th May: too many eggs in one basket is never a good idea.

Gavin Oldham OBE

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