Social Enterprise Governance - Case 9.3 - Rights Now

Social Enterprise: Case Studies in Governance and HRM

Case 9.3 – Rights Now! Rights Now! was registered as a charity in 1998, and also incorporated under the Companies Act. The organisation exists to fight for the rights of people with learning disabilities, including those who have a sensory impairment. It generates approximately one third of its annual income through sales of its goods/products. Rights Now! aims to increase the proportion of income it generates in a bid to reduce grant-dependency. Recruitment, Selection, Induction & Development Rights Now! is governed by eleven trustees, who meet every six weeks. The organisation’s constitution stipulates that 75% of the trustee board must be made up of people with a disability, or representatives of organisations campaigning for disabled people. Other board members are recruited for their particular area of specialism (e.g. finance, HR). New board members are recruited using existing or new networks of relevant organisations, and the individuals involved in them. Rights Now! aims to attract people with learning disabilities who are national figureheads. Potential trustees are not encouraged to put forward a formal application to the board until they have observed some meetings, met staff and discussed their potential role and involvement. New board members are inducted by spending time in the organisation’s offices, meeting the project workers and volunteers and learning about the organisation’s activities are delivered. Rights Now! has a strong focus on board renewal and stipulated, via a formal policy, long trustees can serve before retiring from ‘office’ (at least for a specified period of time). Staff and trustees in the organisation viewed change within the trustee board as a positive process and essential to effective governance: The trustee board appeared much more interested in the actual practice of the organisation, and peoples' experiences of it, than formal policies and procedures to control behaviour. They were particularly focused on fostering a collaborative environment between staff and trustees: I think if people feel trusted they will feel supported. If I was around every week, you know, nitpicking and counting paper clips then they’d begin to feel nervous and vulnerable. Chair, Rights Now!

Rights Now! operates with a team of 20 paid staff, mostly on short-term contracts, plus 10 volunteers. The moral and social value of empowerment underpins its external work, and is also embedded throughout the organisation's culture: all activities at Rights Now! are led by people with learning disabilities, who are paid an equal salary to their non-disabled co-workers. The research process revealed that, when asked about the ‘founding’ story of the organisation, most interviewees within Rights Now! could give a brief, but mainly partial, outline of how and why the organisation came about. A passion about and commitment to the organisation’s field of work appeared to be the common thread uniting paid employees, rather than a strong rooting in the organisation’s history. This is highlighted in the following statement from an employee: I was first attracted to work for [the organisation] because it is a 'political' organisation and I believe in what they’re doing. I like the way it works 'cause it works differently from other organisations - it's empowering to people.

In addition to formal appraisals, Rights Now! had a strong focus on open, informal methods of learning, development and communication, which employees appeared to value, perhaps more than the formal mechanisms:

Rory Ridley-Duff and Tracey Chadwick-Coule, 2010 Creative Commons 3.0, Attribution No Derivatives

Social Enterprise: Case Studies in Governance and HRM That’s one of the things I like… that we work in an environment that’s open. I feel that if I’m struggling with something I can go and say I’m struggling, I don’t have to keep it covered up and pretend that I’m ok. Everybody learns from each other. The principle of being open and sharing and making things accessible goes through the whole organisation. Paid staff member, Rights Now!

Dispute Resolution Rights Now! has undergone a significant period of change, initiated by a crisis, which almost brought about the demise of the organisation. The Chair of Rights Now! openly stated that the near collapse of the organisation was due to "The wrong people doing the job" and a lack of "supervision" on the part of the trustee board. The current chief officer (CO) of Rights Now! explicitly associated the crisis with the nature of the relationship between the staff and trustees of the organisation, and the role the then chief officer had played in shaping it: … There are interesting points about the power of a director, how you make sure that the board knows really what's going on… because any director could argue anything to the board. Part of the job of a director is to get a strong board but if you've got a director who's not very good and they don't have a board that's at all active then they have more and more power… that was one of the problems. She didn't let the workers have any contact with the board, ever, and then presented the board with anything. But I think good things have come out of it... I realise how important it is that staff, volunteers and the board have really strong communication to each other. It's how you make sure that if a director leaves the organisation, the workers and the volunteers, are strong enough that if someone comes in with a really bad attitude… people will do something about it.

The trustee board of Rights Now!, perhaps in response to the crisis, introduced staff/board lunches prior to board meetings to provide an informal opportunity to share experiences of the organisation. There was a consensus amongst the board and staff within the organisation that these gatherings were of great value: I think that relationship makes the board less detached from the workers on the ground, because they’re not sat up in this hierarchy. I don’t feel like its all going on and I’m not contributing … and decisions are just being made. I feel that if it came to it, I could walk in there [the board meeting] and say “this isn’t ok”, not that I’ve ever needed to, but I wouldn’t feel frightened to do that or intimidated. Paid staff member, Rights Now!

Rights Now! had no formal policy regarding conflict resolution. However, organisational members viewed conflict between various organisational stakeholders as normal and to be expected. Power is thus a central concept within the organisation, as it is used to explain relationships between people within organisations and organisational structures. The desire, in this organisation, was to create an internal environment where people were free to challenge, and it appeared that this was central to the organisation's culture. The following scenario was recounted by the chief officer reflecting on an employee challenging their authority: In the last team meeting, [one of the project workers] who's a person with learning disabilities brought up about volunteers not being paid enough money for lunch and I made a joke about it and then we sort of brushed over it... and then spent quite a long time talking about how we were going to keep the cameras safe. He got really cross… he felt in that instance the things that affect people with learning disabilities were taken much less seriously than… where you keep the cameras and setting up a system. I got a bit defensive because I had made a joke about it. But it was a constructive thing. Based on findings from: Coule, T. M. (2008) Sustainability in Voluntary Organisations: Exploring the dynamics of organisational strategy, PhD Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University.

Rory Ridley-Duff and Tracey Chadwick-Coule, 2010 Creative Commons 3.0, Attribution No Derivatives