As I said in my opening remarks to this year’s annual conference, NPC Ignites always aims to help the sector keep pace with the latest developments and to anticipate new trends. This year specifically, we helped charities to make sense of changes caused by the pandemic and to think about what challenges they might face over the next few years.

In our Chief Executive’s speech at the conference, Dan spoke about how even the good work we have seen from charities so far is incremental in the face of the huge challenges that we now face. We need to respond with creativity and collaboration if we really want to make a difference to people’s lives.

Dan also spoke about NPC’s Rethink, Rebuild initiative—our new strand of work on convening and collating insights and expertise from across civil society, to support the charity sector’s adaptation and increase its resilience. Our guest speakers gave us plenty of food for thought for this project and some new lines of enquiry to explore too. Their experiences shone a light on pockets of good practice and difficult issues that need resolving across all areas of society and our sector. They shared with us the injustices being faced in parts of our society, including by Black and minority ethnic people; how charities are struggling to tackle rising need; and the difficulties of adapting to our uncertain future.

Below, I set out in greater detail what we learnt from our guest speakers and their thoughts on where we need to rethink. These thoughts have also enabled us to consider how the sector can rebuild, to a position of greater strength.

  • Rethink strategy
  • Rethink grant-making
  • Rethink data
  • Rethink collaboration
  • Rethink policy

Read the full article about rethinking and rebuilding the sector by Angela Kail at NPC.