The Charity Board Courage Gap
New research, live threats, and what charity boards aren’t facing up to
New research published this week by Natasha Adams and Jim Coe, ‘Towards Meaningful Action’, asked how NGOs are responding to the rise of far-right authoritarianism in the UK.
Three quarters of the organisations surveyed reported serious negative effects on their missions and communities. Trustees of a third of boards surveyed said their boards are not taking the threat seriously enough. In the largest organisations, this rises to more than half. From my experience, I’d put the figure higher.
The authors were asked repeatedly for things organisations should do. The honest answer is that there is no single response equal to the complexity of what we are facing. That is not a reason for inaction. What is needed is clearer thinking.
The free speech confusion
One of the most common things I hear from charity boards is a version of this: “It’s a democracy. People should be able to speak freely.”
They are not wrong that democracy matters but they are wrong about what free speech means in the context of their governance responsibilities.
Free speech and hate speech are not the same thing and equality law does not treat them as such. The Equality Act 2010 is still in force in the UK. Whatever is happening in America, where diversity, equity and inclusion have been made politically toxic and in some contexts legally constrained, is not the legal or cultural framework here. Boards have statutory duties.
Additionally, any impulse to invite all parties to avoid taking sides and stay out of what some are calling culture wars, is not neutrality. It is a position. And it carries risk.
Choosing not to act is itself a governance decision, with reputational, financial, and motivational consequences.
In the United States, Diane Yentel, President and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, the largest network of nonprofit organisations in North America, wrote this post about the House Judiciary Committee holding a hearing targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is a textbook example of the weaponisation of government process to intimidate civil society.
The UK is not America, but it is rarely more than a few years behind. I know this from direct experience. As a former Director of a UK non-departmental public body, I undertook policy visits to the United States. Watching what happens there is useful preparation for what arrives here.
That lag has shortened considerably, accelerated by AI, social media, and the organised spread of bad-faith arguments that cross borders faster than policy responses can. Boards that are waiting for the UK to feel different enough from the US to justify a different response are already behind.
As identified in ‘Meeting the Moment’, traditional approaches such as campaigning and advocacy focused on incremental policy progress on single issues were always slow. Now they are even less effective.
What happens when you choose comfort over conflict?
The research describes cultures of timidity inside organisations. Leaders afraid of becoming targets and boards that are unwilling to draw red lines in advance. This means that when a real-time threat occurs, they must navigate both the threat and their own confusion simultaneously.
Please don’t underestimate this problem. As research shows, organisations in the United States were far more likely to capitulate under pressure when clear positions had not been pre-established. The absence of a framework makes your organisation vulnerable.
Diane Yentel’s post is a live example of lawfare, the use of legal mechanisms not to seek justice but to silence, drain resources, and intimidate. Organisations working on migration, trans rights, climate, and human rights in the UK are increasingly aware of this threat.
The problem is that defending against a legal challenge, even a spurious one, costs money that most not-for-profit organisations don’t have. Pro bono legal support exists but it is limited, inconsistently distributed, and rarely available at the speed a real-time threat demands.
Boards that haven’t thought about this in advance, that have no legal relationships in place and no sense of where to turn, are more exposed than they realise. This is another argument for sector-wide coalition and resourcing: the organisations most likely to be targeted are often the smallest and least resourced, and they should not be navigating this alone.
American social critic bell hooks wrote about the exhaustion that comes from treating education as the primary strategy for change. When organisations rely on training events to discharge their responsibilities, they mistake awareness for accountability. I do not offer standalone unconscious bias training for precisely this reason.
A half-day session on implicit bias without structural change doesn’t transform your organisation. It simply gives your board a way to feel they have done something without doing anything that matters.
The limits of education as strategy are evident in the gap between what organisations say they believe and how their boards behave. I’ve experienced the sharp end of this personally.
Naming patterns and structures clearly is not pettiness. Pettiness is what happens when organisations collapse into point-scoring, personal attacks, and the performance of virtue without substance. It is also closer to dehumanisation than most boards want to acknowledge, because both involve reducing people to a position rather than engaging with their humanity or their rights.
The research found some organisations reporting that their own communities and supporters have been radicalised by far-right analysis. This means the internal work and the external threat are not separate problems requiring separate responses. A board that has not drawn clear red lines externally is unlikely to hold them internally either.
The consequences are concrete. Staff discrimination and harassment claims, grievances rooted in a culture that has tolerated or ignored hostility, can fracture organisations from the inside.
The legal exposure extends further than most boards realise. The Equality Act 2010 protects against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and discrimination by association. In some cases, you do not have to be the target to be protected or to have a claim. Boards that believe this is someone else’s problem to manage have misunderstood both the law and their own liability.
What clarity actually looks like
Fairness, Respect, Equality, Dignity and Autonomy, five human rights principles known as FREDA, offer a grounding framework for governance decisions when the political weather is changing fast. I don’t use them as a checklist, but as a set of questions to hold simultaneously: Is this decision fair to those most affected? Does it respect the humanity of the people involved? Does it advance or undermine equity? Does it protect or erode dignity? Does it preserve the autonomy of the people your organisation exists to serve?
Boards that can answer those questions with evidence are better placed to act quickly and consistently.
In my earlier piece on boards’ duty of care, I wrote that a risk register is only useful if it reflects the environment your organisation currently operates within. Staff and trustee safety in the face of racism and religious hate is not a one-off risk. It belongs on the register with an owner, a likelihood and impact rating, and mitigation actions attached to it. It should be shared at every board meeting as a live document rather than something pulled out only when an incident occurs. If your register does not currently include this, it is inadequate.
The research also raises the question of where accountability flows. Not upward to power holders, but downward to communities. Organisations with strong accountability mechanisms to the people they serve are less likely to be swayed by political leadership that shifts with each electoral cycle. Ministers change and civil servants brief the next minister from the same briefing packs.
The values your governance structure is built on need to be more durable than any particular political moment.
Size is not a proxy for organisational readiness either. In many cases, they’re doing less. As the report says “…larger organisations are not doing more in response than smaller ones.”
The report attributes this to greater internal complexity, higher levels of internal disagreement, and strategic confusion. It’s not about how large the organisation is, but how clearly it knows where its red lines are, who the real power holders are, and whether its strategic capacity is strong enough to act when the moment requires it.
On courage
I’ve been building toward this article for some time. My Substack piece on boards’ duty of care was cited in the research this week, in the section on safety and security. The Guidance for Boards section notes that there are currently no existing resources addressing the governance gap.
I am developing one but this work is both professional and personal for me. I am a British Indian woman working in the charitable sector. The climate I am helping boards navigate is one I am living inside. It takes a toll, both mental and visceral.
That is precisely why any work I do on this must be properly funded: I will not produce it at cost to myself, and the sector should not expect me to. If your organisation wants to commission or sponsor this resource, get in touch.
bell hooks understood the cost of doing this work without adequate conditions for it to be sustained. I have learned the hard way to be selective.
I work with organisations that are genuinely up for the challenge, not ones looking for reassurance that they are already doing enough, that want a training session to say “Yes, we’ve had the training”. I work with organisations where the board is ready to examine its own courage, name its red lines, and build the structural capacity to act on them.
If that is where your organisation is and your board is ready to engage with the courage this moment demands, I want to hear from you.
I’m leading a webinar on 10-11:30 am on 17 June entitled ‘Leading through Times of Backlash.’ Join me.
About Anj Handa
Anj Handa is a specialist in equality, governance and systems change, working with civil society organisations, women’s sector bodies and boards navigating structural change. Inspiring Women Changemakers: www.inspiringwomenchangemakers.co.uk
Sources and References
Natasha Adams and Jim Coe, Towards Meaningful Action: NGOs and Far-Right Authoritarianism (2026): https://thinkingdoingchanging.com/2026/05/18/towards-meaningful-action-ngos-far-right-authoritarianism/
bell hooks and the exhaustion of critical pedagogy, BCU CSpace Blog: https://www.bcu.ac.uk/research/education-and-social-work/cspace-blog/bell-hooks-and-the-exhaustion-of-critical-pedagogy
Anj Handa, Your Board Has a Duty of Care (Power and Practice, Substack): https://anjhanda.substack.com/p/your-board-has-a-duty-of-care-16
Natasha Adams and Jim Coe, ‘Meeting the Moment’:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uxgvUB-VgRShhWVEtY_HMSAYwfAPDrov/view
Diane Yentel, National Council of Non-Profits on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/posts/diane-yentel-8221466_statement-from-national-council-of-nonprofits-activity-7462837669958594561-hbbW
Equality Act 2010, discrimination by association section: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/7