This volume explores a range of existential challenges facing civil society organisations in the early twenty-first century, a period that has been dubbed ‘the age of uncertainty’ (Bauman 2007; Gagnon 2018; Obeng-Odoom 2021). Such a focus is grounded in existential humanist studies of social welfare. As originally propounded by Mohan (1979, 1985a, b), these highlight how a concern for the well-being of others underpins associative life and impacts on people in diverse ways, including the way they think about themselves, behave and interact. It links to deeper questions about meaning and the values that shape associative life, welfare, culture and democracy. As Dixon (2010: 180) explains,

In contrast to the North American tradition where ‘welfare’ is often defined narrowly ‘to mean income transfers or direct services which support the poor and give a minimum standard of living’ (Gamble 2016: 3), this volume follows the European approach, defining it as associative action and services designed to improve the general well-being of citizens. In other words, service provision and interventions to promote well-being involving voluntarism and collective action ‘to pool collective risks and to provide investment in the human capital of all citizens’ (Gamble 2016: 3; see also Beveridge 1943; Titmuss 1958; Greve 2013). Beresford (2016: 2) puts it simply: ‘[I]t is essentially concerned with how we take care of each other as human beings.’

To better understand the notion of existential threats facing civil society we need to briefly remind ourselves of the underpinnings of existentialist thought. As Dixon (2010: 178) explains, ‘first-person subjective experiences are dominated by the self’s awareness of individuality, temporality and nothingness, which means people are left only to contemplate the absurdity of living a life without reason or purpose, where self is just a contingent fact engulfed by the infinite’.