Cafod’s bitter medicine

This week, Catholic aid agency Cafod announced it will cut around 50 jobs in an effort to save £3m. The move, part of the charity’s long-term strategic review involving its operations around the world, poses major challenges for the organisation and director Chris Bain

The Pope Paul VI annual lecture is a highlight of Cafod’s calendar. On Friday last week it was delivered in London by Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and an Argentinian close to Pope Francis. His speech was about climate change, an issue on which Cafod is campaigning vigorously.
But prior to Bishop Sánchez’s speech, Cafod’s director, Chris Bain, divulged that the charity intends to reduce its costs by £3 million following a strategic review of its work. It plans to decentralise its structure, recruit more volunteers and give its partners in the developing world a greater say in how aid money is spent. It will also shed 50 jobs.

I asked Bain, who has run the agency since 2003, to explain the proposals.

Elena Curti: With a staff totalling around 444 people, 50 redundancies is a drastic step. Are you absolutely convinced you have got to shed these jobs?

Chris Bain: Yes, that’s about £3m and if our core restricted funds are going to be reduced, we have got to make those changes. Most of our costs are in people so we believe that our income could grow again, but we think it has to be proportional. When your income is more static and your costs rise, you have always got to prioritise the programme. You can’t grow the institution at the cost of the programme, that’s basic stewardship.

EC: So a large part of this is about money?

CB: Money was one of the triggers. But the other part of it is the change that’s taking place in the Church, the sense that increasingly we believe that “subsidiarity” requires us to invite our partners in the southern hemisphere to take the lead, and for us to have much more investment in volunteering and in growing our volunteer base in the dioceses and the Catholic community of England and Wales.
                             
So you have a combination where the trigger was trying to create more financial certainty but the actual decisions were made on what we want to do in the future. Otherwise you are cutting with no basis.

EC: Has Cafod lost its way? Has it lost sight of its roots?

CB: No, I don’t think so. We’ve been fairly successful in all our programming work. We’ve responded to emergencies. We’ve developed some wonderful programmes and partnerships. But every now and then, you have to stop, take stock and think ahead. We are not in a financial crisis now, but we do know that funding sources will be different in a year or two’s time so we are making adjustments now.

Every organisation changes and adapts to its time. Those women [who started Cafod in 1960] had a different way of doing things. We’ve moved into more advocacy work, more education work. We weren’t even an emergency organisation then – that didn’t happen until [the war in] Biafra in 1967 – so Cafod has always evolved. We are going to be much more of a capacity-building agency, supporting programmes and focusing on emergency response. All the signs are that emergency work and crisis work is going to get worse because of climate change, poverty and conflict.

EC: Some people in the Church have said Cafod has got too big and too corporate with your rather grand headquarters. Are there some decisions you wish you hadn’t taken?

CB: Actually, no. I think we took the right decisions at the time. Our building is a sustainable one. In terms of cost, none of it came from supporter funds. All the other decisions we’ve made in terms of increasing our funding have pretty much doubled the programmes we have been supporting over the past 15 years. We have made the right decisions, but you make the right decision for your particular context. All we are doing now is looking ahead and saying: “Things are going to be different. Let’s think ahead and get the buy-in from the Church here, from the Church internationally and our partners”.

EC: You said that Cafod has never been so stretched in terms of all the appeals it is involved in. Is it getting out of hand?

CB: It feels like that sometimes when you come through a process where you have had a major emergency every year while having to stretch to still being very active in the Philippines [in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan].

We’re now acting in the Central African Republic, we’ve still got work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then there is Syria – and that means work in Lebanon and Jordan. We’re supporting our Caritas partners in Iraq and South Sudan is on the verge, potentially, of another significant disaster. We’ve just sent three staff to Sierra Leone to beef up the ebola response, so we do feel stretched.

One of the things we are putting into place in the new framework is a better surge capacity, which means we can do more by taking resources from other parts of the organisation and putting them into emergency situations. It will help us deal with that sort of stretch.

EC: Every charity has to reassure the public that as much of its donations as possible is going direct into aid work. What is the calculation for Cafod?

CB: We spend about 10p in the pound on fund-raising, which is very low compared with other agencies. That’s largely because we’ve got a wonderful support base in the Catholic community. We try to keep our admin costs to a minimum. We always prioritise grants over internal costs, which means that occasionally we have to make adjustments like we’re doing at the moment … We are a lean organisation in the way we deliver our programmes.

EC: You want to empower your partners in the developing world because you feel they are ready for it. Do you have any concerns about corruption?

CB: There will always be oversight, but it could be a co-responsible oversight rather than one in which we lay down spreadsheets and they tick boxes. Obviously it’s a risk base that the larger the grant, the larger the programme and the greater the level of scrutiny required. On the whole, we’re not too worried about the corruption side.

Any form of human activity is open to that. But, in 10 years’ time, we’re going to see the Caritas Kenyas and the Caritas Ethiopias having a personal relationship with the Department for International Development or the EU so they can raise their own funds and have their own sense of monitoring and evaluating. I would regard it as a measure of success at Cafod if our partners were able to access funds directly and we supported them, rather than it always having to come through our books. We may see Cafod diminish in terms of its size because we haven’t got all these funds going through us. But we know that they are going directly to our partners on the ground. That, for me, would be a measure of our success that we’ve strengthened their capacity to do that sort of work.

EC: Climate change is a big focus of your campaigning over this next year. What is your response to the many people who are still not convinced that man-made climate change is the cause of so many of the disasters we are seeing around the world?

CB: There are increasing bodies of evidence,  including from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, that there is a correlation. We are very careful not to say that there is a correlation between a [specific event like a] typhoon and climate change because it is much more complex than that. But weather patterns are changing and a lot of evidence suggests that is because of emissions. We don’t think there is a sense in which we are over-egging it. We genuinely believe that all the positive work that has been done could be blocked by continued climate change where the world gets warmer and warmer.

That’s why we are part of the Climate Coalition and hope that the Church can say something. The Church can say something that others may not because, in the end – as well as being about those global agreements in Paris next year and about different countries having climate-change acts – it is going to be about individual choices. It will be about people changing their lifestyles in the richer part of the world.

The single biggest growing group in the world today is the middle class in the emerging economies, and they are the worst consumers of resources and energy. Unless we can say that we, in the wealthier countries, can change the way we consume, it will be very hard to tackle climate change. That can be done, I think, because a message of responsibility could come from faith leaders more easily than from politicians.