The Trust Trap
How Good Charities Lose Their Way — and How We Can Save Them
A book about charity governance, accountability, organisational memory and the dangers of assuming that good intentions are enough.
Drawing on more than two decades of experience across the third sector, the book examines how governance can fail, how warning signs become normalised and how institutions can lose sight of the people and purposes they were created to serve.
Why I wrote this book
My third-sector career brought me into contact with charities from several different directions: management, fundraising, service development, volunteers, trustees, partnerships and organisational change. I saw organisations at their most effective, but I also saw how easily trust could substitute for scrutiny and how difficult institutions sometimes found it to learn from uncomfortable evidence.
I wanted to turn that experience into a broader argument about systems rather than a memoir about individual organisations. The central question is what happens when a charity’s good purpose becomes a reason not to ask hard questions about governance, accountability and culture.
The problem of institutional memory
One of the recurring concerns in the book is what organisations fail to record. Volunteers leave, complaints disappear into informal conversations, warnings are treated as isolated incidents and knowledge vanishes when staff change. A charity can therefore repeat the same mistakes while believing each failure is new. Organisational memory is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it is part of accountability.
Approach and evidence
The book combines professional experience with analysis of governance, leadership and institutional culture. It is not a legal manual and does not claim that every charity encounters the same problems. Its purpose is to identify patterns that can make otherwise worthwhile organisations vulnerable to complacency, silence and weak oversight.
How it fits into my wider work
This is a secondary strand of my publishing rather than part of my historical corpus, but there is a connection. Much of my historical work is concerned with institutions and authority: how legitimacy is created, how organisations remember, and what happens when formal structures fail to reflect lived reality. The Trust Trap asks those questions in the contemporary third sector.
Publication details
- Author: Antony David Davies
- Published: July 2025
- Formats: Kindle and paperback
See also Third Sector & Governance.