Third Sector blog

Last week, my colleague Sophie Hudson wrote a blog about whether giving is rational. I’d like to add my own opinion, which is: sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I can see why economists struggle with this question, because economics is about looking after number one. It defines rational, more or less, as “behaving in a way most likely to allow you to maximise resources”. Read More »

I went to a provocatively-titled Pro Bono Economics lecture this week which asked: “Why do some people give their money away and how can we stop them acting so irrationally?”

During the main part of the lecture the former director of the London School of Economics, Sir Howard Davies, gave the audience an informative and wide-ranging journey through various economists’ theories and reasearch as to why and how people give to charity. Read More »

Yesterday Michael Lloyd, a retired railwayman from Stroud set off to the High Court to challenge a decision by NHS Gloucestershire to outsource community care to a social enterprise.

The basic gist of his argument, and that of Stroud Against the Cuts, the organisation which backed him, seemed to be that the NHS is the only organisation that ought to provide any health services to anyone. Read More »

It was with some trepidation my new husband David approached me recently to tell me he’d decided to cycle to Barcelona…in nine days. But it was OK – he was doing it for charity.

I know him well enough to know that the last bit was not his main motivation. It was the actual crazy, hare-brained challenge of cycling 900-odd miles with three mates in a ridiculously short amount of time that was his real stimulus. Read More »

I heard a variety of tales while researching an article about charity volunteers being put on welfare-to-work schemes. Most were related in blunt terms by exasperated-sounding charity employees, and all had worrying implications.

It seems that in some cases, charity volunteers who are claiming benefits have been told to stop volunteering in order to complete full-time work training schemes, some of which involve unpaid work placements at private sector firms including the retail chain Poundland. Read More »

I have never presumed that the job I write about every day is an easy one to do. But I don’t think that until this year, as I struggle to raise sponsorship for running the London Marathon 2012, I fully appreciated just how hard it must be.

I have sat at many fundraising conferences over the past year and a half listening to someone tell the audience not to be afraid of being blunt about ‘the ask’, and to get to it rather than skirt round the side, hoping someone will suddenly proactively offer to give. Read More »

Last week, this site featured research by Rowena Lewis into the “reinforced glass ceiling” in the voluntary sector, which suggests women are still under-represented at chief executive level – only 46 per cent, out of a workforce of 68 per cent women.

Lewis proposes two main reasons why women are under-represented: the motherhood penalty, and various forms of discrimination. Read More »

Last September, Third Sector reported how Southwark Council had been forced to write off almost £70,000 awarded to a defunct drug and alcohol charity.

I was struck not only by the council’s lax checking procedures but by the fact that the federation had remained on the Charity Commission register until 2010, some eight years after it appeared to have closed. Wondering if this was just a one-off or if the case was indicative of wider problem, I placed a Freedom of Information request with the commission last September to find out just how many registered charities hadn’t filed their required documents for a significant period. (Late filing of accounts can be one of the first indicators that a charity has closed without informing the commission.) Read More »

Two weeks ago, government sources announced, in stories in the Sun and the Daily Mail, the expansion of a scheme that forces unemployed people to do compulsory community work or lose their benefits, if the staff at the Jobcentre decide that they’re not pulling their weight.

The stories quote an unnamed government source, who says that next month, the employment minister Chris Grayling will announce that the scheme will be expanded to 50,000 people, and will cost around £5m. Read More »

As the New Year rolled in, I did my usual routine of trying to come up with some resolutions, only this year I was determined to think of some I might actually keep.

I discarded the usual ‘eat less cake’ and ‘exercise more’ and looked instead towards ‘volunteer’. Read More »