Speaking truth to funders: Alternative accountabilities in the voluntary and community sector during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper studies grassroots organizations that provide various forms of support to vulnerable local communities in the United Kingdom in a context of increasing austerity, public sector drawbacks, a lack of funding and extensive monitoring, and evaluative requirements. We focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, which challenged traditional funding relationships. We analyze lived experiences of trust, emotion, and suffering to understand the politics of accountability across the diverse economy. We draw on Gibson-Graham's post-capitalist framework, which insists on the politics of language, the subject, and collective action. In the setting we study, the language of crisis reshaped funding, vulnerable subjectivities emerged to support vulnerable communities, and fragmenting accountabilities were met with attempts to promote collective action and solidarity. We, therefore, contribute to literature in critical accounting and literature focused on the voluntary and community sector by studying a landscape of diverse accountability practices to explore the possibilities that they offer in terms of accounting for non-capitalist organizing.