In conversation with Grace Crabtree, STIR Editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh discusses Membership Nation, an initiative focused on understanding, defending, and rebuilding collective institutions as a foundation for democratic renewal. Ahead of a national conference next year, Jonny outlines some of the core aims: looking at how civic revival can be funded by members themselves, without an overreliance on philanthropic or public money; exploring what membership structures could look like in practice for different organisations; and uncovering, and renewing, the physical legacy of our “built heritage” – the infrastructure that gave membership bodies the space to meet, organise, and exercise collective power – and asking what these spaces can do for communities in the future.
You wrote an article last year – Membership Nation: Rebuilding Popular Democracy in the 21st Century. What is the core argument?
I think it’s useful to work backwards from the democratic breakdown and economic pessimism of today, and ask whether there’s a relationship between this reality and the slow transition away from popular forms of democracy. In the past, individuals regularly participated in and funded workplace, political, and other civic institutions that enabled large groups of people to collectively pursue their interests and values.
The core argument of Membership Nation is that these collective institutions – trade unions and political parties, but also women’s institutes, working men’s clubs, and other types of membership associations – were responsible for building and maintaining a functioning democracy for a long time. And that now that we are no longer members of these kinds of organisations, we are increasingly disorganised and lack the institutional power needed to create long-term political and economic alternatives.
The original Membership Nation article sets out this argument by looking at the decline of democratic membership organisations as a rarely recognised cause of the current crisis of democracy. It asks why, despite the growth of civic entrepreneurship, policy experimentation, and progressive movements, our society remains so unequal, divided, and powerless. The answer is that we have steadily hollowed out the collective institutions through which people once built social ties, economic solidarity, and political power.
If there is a consensus that there is a ‘crisis of democracy’, Membership Nation argues that we need to start by looking at our institutions as part of our analysis of the problem. Despite the inexorable rise of social movements and progressive think tanks, why is our society increasingly disconnected, unequal, and powerless? Could it be partly because we have replaced democratic – ‘by and for’ organisations – with memberless NGOs that deliver social and economic policy on behalf of selective constituencies?
This is a question I explored in my review of Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void, which looks at the hollowing out of party democracy and the growing separation between citizens and the political institutions that represent them. Mair’s argument is that political parties have moved away from civil society and towards the state, losing much of their popular involvement and control in the process.
That argument is particularly relevant to Membership Nation because the decline of party democracy is part of a wider institutional transformation. The same process has affected trade unions, civic associations, and other organisations that once connected people’s everyday lives to larger political and economic institutions.
Theda Skocpol describes this transformation in the US as a shift from ‘membership to management’. In her work, particularly Diminished Democracy, she shows how a strong associational culture was replaced by a professionalised culture of advocacy. Rather than building organisations with local chapters and branches, elected leadership, and dues-paying members, civic organisers increasingly established centralised, staff-driven NGOs.
I explored this further in my article The Advocacy Implosion? Popular Membership in Civic Life. The point is not that individuals in advocacy organisations are inherently bad, or that professional staff have no role to play in democratic institutions. It is that the displacement of membership organisations by professional advocacy groups has created a serious democratic problem. We have more campaigns, think tanks, and social movements than ever, but fewer organisations through which ordinary people can exercise meaningful control over political and economic decisions.
I now think we’re finally recognising that the expansion of professional advocacy has not produced a corresponding expansion of popular democratic power. We have become very good at developing policy campaigns, but much less capable of building the institutions that allow people to organise, deliberate, and act together over the long term.
The problem is that these organisations are literally ‘bodiless’. They don't have active members who contribute regular dues, participate in governance, and meaningfully control the organisation in the way they did in the past. Instead, they may depend on grants, private donations, or the professional expertise of a relatively small group of staff.
The institutional form is important. A membership organisation with local branches, regional structures, and national representative bodies can connect the everyday concerns of its members to wider political and economic questions. It can also develop the leadership, organisational skills, and democratic culture needed to sustain itself over generations.
Many academics and historians, such as Anton Jäger, have focused on the decline of political parties and trade unions. But there was a much broader civic ecosystem of democratic culture, values, and institutions at the local level. Women's institutes, working men's clubs, mutual societies, and other community associations created the social and organisational foundations for national representative bodies.
Without those local roots, it becomes very difficult for high-profile national organisations to survive and find members. And without national organisations, local groups often lack the leverage to influence wider political and economic decisions.
So Membership Nation is about thinking broadly about how people participate in civic life. It often starts nearer home, with places people care about, and through different types of clubs, societies, and associations. But it also asks how these organisations can connect to larger structures of representation and power.
Ultimately, the argument is that we need to rebuild the cultural and economic case for membership. Why should people invest their time, money, and energy in collective institutions at the local, regional, and national level? And what would it mean to rebuild Britain as a Membership Nation?
This isn't about restoring an uncritical continuity with the past. Reflective of their time, many of these historical organisations were exclusionary, and their democratic cultures were often limited by class, gender, and race. But we can learn from the institutional forms that enabled large numbers of people to participate in public life, while building organisations that are more inclusive and democratic today.
The challenge is to move beyond a model of civil society where people are primarily treated as ‘clients’, donors, or consultees, and towards organisations where they are ultimately members of their collective institutions.
For me, that is the central question of Membership Nation: how do we rebuild the democratic institutions that allow people to organise themselves, pursue their interests, and exercise power together?
Do you think there is an increasing self-consciousness about the lack of accountability in memberless NGOs? Are you seeing any signs that private NGOs are interested in creating membership structures that make their ‘community’ a formal part of their organisation?
I think more and more people are aware of the distance between those involved in policy, politics, and the people those organisations are supposed to represent. That’s an important development, but I’m not sure it has yet translated into a serious reconsideration of organisational form.
One of the arguments running through Membership Nation is that we need to look at the institutions that connect large groups of people to the collective power needed to achieve their social, economic, and political goals. The problem with memberless NGOs is not simply that they are insufficiently participatory. It is that they often lack the structures through which people can exercise ongoing control over the organisation and its priorities.
In my review of Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void, I looked at how political parties have become increasingly disconnected from the people they are supposed to represent. A similar problem exists in civil society, where organisations can become professionalised and increasingly distant from the communities whose interests they claim to advance.
So far, I think the response has mostly been to develop new forms of participation. Organisations engage people with lived experience in research, policy development, or advocacy. In some ways, that has been a positive development. More people affected by an issue have been able to contribute to changing the system.
But participation is not the same as membership. A person might be invited to a workshop, consulted on a report, or asked to share their experience without having any formal say over the organisation’s strategy, leadership, or use of resources. The organisation remains ultimately accountable to its funders, trustees, or government.
That is the limitation of many participatory models. They can bring people closer to organisations without changing the underlying power relationship. Over the last decade, more organisations have experimented with these approaches, and I think there is now a growing recognition that they are not enough on their own.
The question is whether that self-consciousness will lead to a more fundamental change: organisations creating formal membership structures in which people are not just participants, but members with rights, responsibilities, and a meaningful role in governance.
I think there is some interest in that direction. Over the next five or ten years, we may see organisations that have built relationships with communities through participation trying to turn those relationships into something more permanent. That could mean democratising their organisation, creating membership structures, and developing elected committees and roles.
But that is a much bigger change than introducing another participation initiative. It requires organisations to think differently about their purpose, their leadership, and who they are accountable to.
In The Advocacy Implosion? Popular Membership in Civic Life, I explored the wider shift from membership organisations towards professionalised advocacy. Theda Skocpol’s work is useful here because it shows how the NGO became an attractive organisational form to a new generation of graduates in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It promised a way to influence politics through professional expertise and advocacy, without the effort and complexity of building organisations with members.
That was an attractive proposition. But it also meant that many organisations were designed around the needs of staff and funders rather than the long-term development of a membership.
The challenge now is whether organisations are prepared to reverse that process. Moving from a small staff team that runs participation initiatives to an organisation with members, elections, committees, and a different relationship with its community is a substantial organisational and cultural change.
I think that’s an area we want to explore over the next couple of years: working with organisations to scope out what membership structures could look like in practice. It won't be the same model for every organisation. The most important thing is that people have a formal role in the organisation, rather than being brought in occasionally to provide input.
There is also a question of confidence. Do organisations believe that membership is a serious way of building political power, or do they still see it as an unnecessary complication? I think the depth of the current economic and political crisis may create more interest in that question.
Another area of interest is how we produce social and political leaders. There is a lot of funding for social leadership, but we need to ask where people actually learn to lead democratic organisations. Historically, people of very modest means could join a local association, take on responsibilities, become involved in committees, and eventually move into positions of leadership in larger organisations. That process created a pipeline of people with experience of running democratic institutions.
Today, many of those opportunities have disappeared. We have a much narrower group of people moving into powerful positions in political parties, trade unions, and other national organisations, and the route is now overwhelmingly through elite universities.
I think Membership Nation is partly about rebuilding that pipeline. We should be thinking about programmes that support people to develop out of grassroots collective institutions, where they have experience of running democratic organisations, and apply that experience to other institutions, like local councils or parliament.
Take Britain’s working men’s and social clubs. Through our national initiative – 21st Century Social Clubs – we are working to support an estimated 1,800 clubs that are run democratically by hundreds or thousands of people in their communities. Those are institutions where people have real experience of managing buildings and land, organising members, making decisions, and dealing with the practical challenges of running a collective organisation.
That experience is valuable. We should be looking at how people can take it into other institutions, whether that’s trade unions, political parties, councils, or national membership bodies. Equally, we need more training for people to take on leadership roles in membership organisations. There is a gap between the experience people get in private institutions and their ability or interest in moving into democratic membership organisations.
For me, a sign of real change would be more people in the community power movement, or organisations trying to rebuild civil society, seeing elected leadership in a national membership organisation as a serious option. Rather than setting up another think tank, they might decide to work their way into an organisation that represents hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people.
That would be a significant cultural shift. It would suggest that people are beginning to see membership organisations not as an old-fashioned form of civil society, but as a serious way of building power.
And that, ultimately, is what I think rebuilding our Membership Nation means: not just creating more organisations that speak on behalf of people, but rebuilding institutions in which people can organise, participate, and develop the leadership needed to represent themselves.
What other plans do you have in store for Membership Nation?
One of the things we’re really focused on is the potential to rebuild the economic relationship between members and their organisations. Membership Nation is, in part, an attempt to understand why that relationship was so important historically, and what it might look like today.
Though we live in a different culture, the basic idea that people can regularly financially contribute to organisations they care about, develop a meaningful stake in them, and collectively pursue their values and interests still seems very important.
That raises a practical question: where is the money for civic revival going to come from?
If you work backwards from the current state of civil society, there is clearly an overreliance on external funding. Philanthropic resources are limited, selective, and often come with conditions. Public funding is also variable and politically contingent. Neither is a particularly reliable foundation for building independent organisations over the long term.
That’s not to say philanthropy and public funding have no role to play. But if we want a civil society that can influence politics without being directly shaped by the priorities of governments or philanthropic donors, we need to think much more seriously about how organisations can raise money from their own members.
Historically, that worked for a very long time. People contributed from their wages and savings to organisations that they cared about, and those contributions helped create a sense of ownership and belonging. Regular membership income also gave organisations a degree of independence and allowed them to plan for the future.
This is one of the areas we’re particularly interested in – the potential scale of public giving. We know that people give money to charitable causes, but a lot of that giving is sporadic or one-off. The question is whether some of that could be converted into regular contributions to membership organisations, where people have a formal relationship with the organisation and a meaningful say in how it operates.
That’s quite different from the current model of giving. A one-off donation might support a campaign or a particular project, but regular membership income can give an organisation a much clearer idea of its resources and allow it to plan over the medium and long term.
So over the next year, we’re planning to analyse the potential scale of people giving small amounts of money from their wages to membership organisations. What would happen if a much larger proportion of the money people already give to good causes was channelled through organisations they were actually members of?
Could that provide the basis for stronger, more independent organisations? Could it allow them to work more closely with their members, develop their own leadership, and pursue their political and social goals with less dependence on government or philanthropic priorities? I think that’s a really interesting question, because it’s not just about finding more money for civil society. It’s about changing the relationship between people and the organisations they support.
There is also a note of optimism here. I think people don’t quite realise how many membership organisations there still are, and how much they contribute to civic life every day. There are already millions of people participating in clubs, societies, associations, and other democratic institutions. The challenge is to understand the potential of those organisations, and to think about how we can support them to become stronger, more independent, and more connected to the people they represent.
For me, Membership Nation is about building the cultural and economic case for that kind of civic revival. We need to make the argument that membership is not just a way of funding organisations. It is a way of building institutions that people can own, participate in, and use to exercise power together. And if we can combine that cultural argument with practical research into the scale of public giving, the possibilities for new membership models, and the kinds of support organisations need to develop, then I think we can start to build a much more independent and democratic civil society.
You’re planning a conference for next year that will focus on uncovering and preserving the assets of membership organisations. What is this history, and what is its current legacy?
Part of our research around Membership Nation has been trying to understand how national membership organisations were actually built: why they chose particular structures, what political and economic environment they emerged from, and how they brought together large numbers of people and local organisations to create national bodies that could serve the interests of their members.
One of the things that has become increasingly clear is that this history is connected to the acquisition of land and buildings for their members. Membership organisations didn’t just create institutions in an abstract or ethereal sense. They acquired land, built buildings, converted existing spaces, and created a physical infrastructure for people to meet, organise, socialise, and exercise collective power.
The Youth Hostels Association is a good example. It was founded in 1930 and brought together people who believed that ordinary people should have greater access to the countryside. It developed a national network of affordable hostels, so that people from industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester could access the countryside at weekends.
That’s one example, but there are many others. The National Clarion Cycling Clubs had their own clubhouses. Women’s Institutes often used village halls, but also established more permanent buildings of their own. Working men’s clubs repurposed existing buildings or constructed purpose-built clubhouses for their members. There are also the halls and buildings associated with organisations such as the Scouts, the Royal British Legion, miners’ welfare organisations, and party political clubs.
So for roughly 150 years, there was a really important relationship between membership and physical space. But I think we’ve lost sight of how significant that physical legacy is.
Just as the membership organisations themselves have declined, there has been a parallel decline in the visibility and security of the assets they created. But there is still an enormous amount of land and property owned by membership organisations around the country. In many cases, these buildings represent generations of savings, subscriptions, volunteering and collective effort.
That raises another really important question today: what happens to that community wealth when the organisations that created it are under pressure? This is particularly important because the economics have changed dramatically. Land and buildings are enormously expensive, and many traditional membership organisations are dealing with ageing memberships, rising maintenance costs, and changing patterns of participation. A building that was once easily supported by hundreds of members can become a significant financial liability when the membership declines.
There is a danger that we see a new wave of asset disposal, where national membership organisations sell local branches and buildings simply because they can no longer afford to maintain them. Once those assets are sold into the private market, the social use can disappear permanently.
That’s why next year’s Membership Nation conference at Redhills in Durham is going to focus on how to make sure our built heritage has a future. We want to start by understanding the scale of what actually exists: what kinds of assets membership organisations own, how they were acquired or built, what they are being used for today, and what condition and potential they have.
There are some interesting possibilities around repurposing. A building might have a declining traditional membership but still be capable of supporting new forms of membership, new community uses, or a different generation of members. There are also opportunities to think about community ownership and different forms of shared ownership that preserve the social purpose of a building even when the original organisation can no longer run it.
So one of the themes of the conference will be what happens when a membership organisation wants or needs to dispose of an asset. Could local members raise the money to buy the freehold? Could a local community portfolio organisation take ownership? Could an organisation restructure its use of the building rather than selling it?
I think we need to get ahead of that process rather than simply responding to individual sales as they happen – given that distressed organisations often have little other choice than selling them on the open market. We need to work together to design a strategic programme that can increase pre-market engagement and give members and communities the time to save it or buy it.
There is also a more positive question about what new membership spaces could look like. We shouldn't assume that the answer is simply to preserve every existing clubhouse exactly as it is. Demographic and cultural change creates opportunities as well as challenges. We might need new kinds of spaces, temporary or low-cost membership spaces, shared clubhouses, or buildings that can support several different organisations. The important thing is to preserve the principle that membership needs physical infrastructure.
So the conference is partly about uncovering this history, but it's also about asking what responsibility we have to the future. How do we stop that wealth being gradually privatised or lost, and instead make sure that it remains available to the communities and forms of membership that will come after us?
That feels like an essential part of rebuilding a Membership Nation: not just rebuilding the organisations, but protecting and renewing the physical infrastructure that gives people a sense of belonging and identity in the first place.
∞
Jonny is a director and co-owner of Stir to Action and was involved in launching 21st Century Social Clubs, where his role focuses on unlocking funding, transforming policy, and designing support programmes for the sector.
