Federated Failure: When the Charity Sector Stops Caring

By Rusell Javilen

Rusell Javilen is an experienced practitioner in youth work, family support, and mental health, working across schools and community settings.

The charity sector loves to talk about making a difference, about partnership, community, and compassion. But when things go wrong, too many organisations retreat into silence, bureaucracy, and self-protection. Behind the warm language of care lies a system that too often avoids accountability. I saw this first-hand while working for a local Mind charity, where poor management and harmful practices went unaddressed, and the national body refused to intervene. My story is not an isolated one, it’s part of a wider pattern of how federated charities can fail both their staff and the communities they claim to serve.

For nearly four years, I led one of their flagship services. I poured myself into the work, supporting people in crisis, holding safeguarding responsibilities, and managing complex cases every day. I believed in the mission. I still do, but behind the public messaging was an internal culture of dysfunction, procedural failure, and disparity in treatment that gradually took its toll.

When I raised concerns, about discriminatory treatment, improper HR conduct, unresolved grievances, and mishandled data, I did so respectfully, through every formal route available. When I left, I found myself locked in a legal battle to defend not only my rights, but the values I thought the organisation stood for.

This isn’t just about me. It’s about the structures that allowed this harm to happen, and about the silence that followed.

What I encountered is symptomatic of a wider issue, one that exists across the UK charity sector, particularly in organisations with a federated model like Mind.

Limited direct accountability breeds wilful incompetence and impunity. Federated networks often illustrate this problem vividly , they are, in many ways, the modern remnants of feudalism. 

Here’s how it works: local branches operate as independent charities, yet they trade on the authority and trust of a shared national brand. They receive guidance, legitimacy, and credibility through that affiliation. To the public, this structure appears as a single, unified organisation: one name, one promise of safety, care, and integrity.

At the centre sits the national body, positioned as a kind of moral overseer draped in benevolence, offering guidance and prestige to its local affiliates. It benefits from the reputation of compassion and credibility, yet when harm arises, it retreats behind the legal fiction of independence. The defence may stand in law, but it fails in ethics. The public’s reasonable expectation of unity collides with an internal system built for disavowal.

The result is a vacuum of responsibility. When safeguarding fails, when governance breaks down, those seeking justice are passed from one office to another until accountability dissolves completely.

When I raised governance concerns, I did not seek interference in a tribunal — only ethical leadership. Instead, I encountered procedural platitudes and deferrals, including the familiar refrain that “the national body is not legally able to intervene while proceedings are ongoing.” This encapsulates the paradox of the federated model: a structure that allows reputation to centralise while responsibility fragments.

This issue goes beyond one employment case. It points to a deeper rot in the sector, a mirror of the very injustices charities claim to fight against.

Too often, when an individual raises concerns or experiences harm, charities respond by zooming out, reframing the issue as something systemic rather than meeting the harm itself. The instinct is to generalise, to turn a person’s experience into a learning point or a policy review instead of acknowledging and repairing what was done to them.

But systems are made of people. Change does not begin in board papers or strategy documents. It begins in how we respond when someone is harmed. When organisations choose distance over care, they turn systemic analysis into a shield, a way to speak of justice without practising it.

Repair starts with the person who was harmed. Listening, taking responsibility, and making amends are not distractions from systemic work; they are the foundation of it. Without personal accountability, systemic change becomes another form of avoidance, a polished narrative that leaves people behind.

Real accountability holds both truths at once, the personal and the structural. If a charity cannot show care for the individuals within its own walls, it cannot claim to care for the communities beyond them.

It’s where safeguarding policy exists, but safeguarding culture doesn’t. Where whistleblowers are discredited. Where equity pledges are PR gloss, not procedural commitments. Where complaints don’t disappear, they simply fall into silence, never meaningfully addressed.

And this isn’t unique to Mind. In recent years, multiple charity workers across the UK have raised the alarm about bullying, racism, and safeguarding breaches within major voluntary organisations, only to face retaliation or institutional denial. Reports from outlets such as Third Sector and Civil Society News have exposed whistleblowers forced out of their jobs, investigations kept internal, and “equity” statements released while harmful cultures persist beneath the surface. These stories paint a picture of a sector in denial: one that celebrates care publicly yet punishes truth-telling privately.

Who is truly watching the charities? Federated models like Mind’s were created to keep services local, responsive, and rooted in community need. But in practice, they now shield national bodies from the consequences of local failings. There are no shared grievance systems, no universal oversight, and no enforceable standards across networks. This governance gap allows even the most serious concerns to fall between the cracks.

And the Charity Commission won’t fix it. Its remit is compliance, not culture, registration, not reform. Time and again, it has shown that it cannot, or will not, intervene in the ethical decay that occurs when charities prioritise reputation over people. So, if accountability isn’t coming from above, it must come from within. We, the people who make up this sector, workers, volunteers, communities, have to build a new standard of care. One where safeguarding and equity aren’t optional values but living commitments.

We need to talk about this.

Because I’m not the only one.

Since speaking out, I’ve been contacted by others with similar stories of staff and volunteers who experienced racism, procedural neglect, safeguarding concerns, and organisational gaslighting. Most of them left quietly, traumatised by the very sector they trusted.

This can’t continue. We need change!

It’s time to break the silence. Not just for me, but for everyone who’s been failed in the spaces where care was supposed to live.

I’m not asking for another inquiry or consultation. I’m asking for courage. For the charity sector to live up to the values it preaches, care, integrity, justice. We can build something better than the systems we’ve inherited. A sector that doesn’t hide behind legal loopholes or PR statements when harm occurs, but meets it with humility, repair, and reform.

Accountability isn’t punishment, it’s love made visible. It’s how we show care for the people who give their energy, their stories, and their trust to this work. If the federated model teaches us anything, it’s that separation weakens us. The future of this sector depends on connection, between national and local, between colleagues, between principle and practice.

We owe it to each other, and to the communities we serve, to make care our governance model.

To those still working in these organisations, still pushing for change from within: thank you. Keep going. We see you.

To those who’ve been harmed, silenced, gaslit, or discarded: you are not alone. Your story matters. I want to hear it. Let’s build a platform where truth is centred and healing is possible.

This is my story. But it is not just mine.

We cannot let the charity sector become a shield for injustice. We must be the ones to tear it down and rebuild it better.

If you’ve been through something similar and want to connect, reach out at ruselljavilen@hotmail.com.

Let’s organise. Let’s amplify. Let’s demand better, together.