Have you seen an octopus ceilidh? building a Scottish philanthropy coalition

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the UK governments in Westminster and devolved regions have faced sustained declines in tax revenues and productivity. These pressures, exacerbated by austerity policies, Brexit, Covid, and the cost of living crisis, have led to broad cuts in public goods (Klein Martins, 2025). As the UK is categorised as a ‘liberal’ sector regime, where private donors and philanthropy support a large charitable sector without substantial state support (Salamon et al., 2017), one would expect philanthropy and charities somewhat insulated from state retrenchment and financial problems. That is not the case: mirroring international trends and patterns, the UK is seeing a long-term decline in the number of donors (Charities Aid Foundation, 2023), and operating charities struggle to meet community needs. Understanding this shift is difficult as UK philanthropy suffers from persistent data gaps, foundations are not easily identified, and philanthropists are seen as private and somewhat defensive, leading some to compare UK philanthropy to an octopus: diffuse, opaque, and hard to pin down (Jung, 2016).

This participatory action research project (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020) seeks to address this by co-designing a ‘peak mechanism’ (Phillips & Dougherty, 2024) for philanthropy in Scotland, a ‘transmission belt’-like forum (Albareda, 2018) geared towards matching philanthropic efforts with government priorities and needs. Bringing together academics, philanthropists, philanthropic infrastructure organisations and service providers, fundraisers, third sector representatives, and government, this aims to 1) enhance philanthropic effectiveness, 2) align philanthropic and government efforts for community benefit, and 3) support information exchange between philanthropy and government. Here, we report and critically interrogate the insights and results from the first year of the project, which included about 1000 hours of collective effort from nine academics and thirty-eight philanthropic actors to develop shared goals for such a forum and address design choices.

Drawing on the argument that the relationship between academia, policy, and practice is akin to ‘dancing in the dark’ (Klemperer et al. 2001), we use the analogy of a Scottish communal dance, a ceilidh, where large groups of dancers are fitting themselves into the patterns of the dance, as a way to examine and interrogate this process, and its encounters, steps, interactions, and outcomes.