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Two stories I have worked on this year have generated considerable feeling.
One is the merger of Age Concern and Help the Aged into Age UK and its subsequent attempts to persuade local Age Concerns to become ‘brand partners’.
The other is the decision by the Alzheimer’s Society to merge local branches into a new regional structure.
In both cases the changes have been perceived by opponents as attempts by big, bureaucratic London-based charities to impose their will on local charities.
Whether or not this is true, certainly there has been increasing pressure on large charities to bend to the government’s way of working if they want to retain their influence and funding. For many, this has meant becoming more business-like and centralising their structures.
But now the coalition government is talking about a smaller state and a big society.
Small community groups may have displaced large, heavily state-funded charities in ministers’ affections but the large scale radical reforms the government is introducing, such as the Work Programme, are only fuelling the pressure on charities to get bigger and more professional.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
The government talks local but acts national. How do charities make sense of this?
Was the Charity Commission right not to publicise the findings of its investigation into the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative?
The long-awaited verdicts from the Charity Commission on the last two of the charities it investigated over political activity during the pre-election period are out.
Both the employment charity Tomorrow’s People, which was probed over the appearance of its chief executive in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, which was investigated over claims it emailed supporters asking them to vote for the Labour Party, received “advice and guidance” from the commission about political campaigning, but neither received any further sanctions.
On the face of it, the cases seem quite similar. So why did the commission write a full report and press release on the Tomorrow’s People case, but nothing about the Tony Blair one?
We would never have known about the latter had the complainant, Conservative MP Greg Hands, not leaked the commission’s letter about the case to the Sunday Times.
The commission says it chose to publicise the Tomorrow’s People case because many other charities might find themselves in a similar position and it would be useful for them to understand the rules.
The Tony Blair case, it claims, is so unlikely to be replicated elsewhere that it was not worth publicising.
Granted, very few charities have been set up by former Prime Ministers. But the Blair case was, at its heart, about the sharing of data between affiliated organisations: something that seems likely to affect far more charities than requests to appear in political party election manifestos.
It would be interesting to hear charities’ views on which of the cases they found more relevant.
We need to clearly define the meaning of social enterprise
On Friday, I read a short piece by Laurence Demarco, founder of Senscot, the network for social entrepreneurs in Scotland. Demarco – a popular figure in Scottish social enterprise who should probably be better known south of the border – is worried that the government seems determined to widen the definition of social enterprise to include anything it wants.
He is also concerned that a lot of profit-making businesses want to call themselves social enterprises because it sounds good and it helps them win business from local authorities. In the most worrying recent example, Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, decided to invent his own definition of social enterprise that includes government-owned organisations such as NHS foundation trusts.
Demarco’s problem with this is that this leaves the social enterprise sector open to public corporations, private enterprise, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Already, lots of people are calling themselves social enterprises even though they aren’t. Others are dithering about whether they are social enterprises or not.
As support grows for social enterprises, it becomes more and more useful to become one. And it becomes more important that the term is more clearly defined. Fortunately, there is already a reasonably clear definition of what social enterprise is: you can’t distribute the majority of your profit, and you must do something socially beneficial.
Any business that doesn’t meet that definition shouldn’t call itself a social enterprise.
Not that it’s a bad thing to distribute your profit. There are plenty of socially-focused businesses out there that do, and in many cases, this is a more sensible model. It’s one which can attract growth capital more easily – and obviously a bigger business can do more good. Also, if an entrepreneur has to risk his own capital to get a business up and running, he should be entitled to a reward when it works.
But they aren’t social enterprises. They should just be called something else. “Social business” is the term Demarco favours, and one already in use. Let’s use it.
The clothes collection scammers have a new tactic
They have strange, fragmented names, such as Hope For Ever or Light And Love. They often claim to be raising cash for orphans in Eastern Europe. The bags and leaflets have weird fluorescent lettering and cheap print that rubs off on your fingers. And there’s always a charity number that can be duly checked and usually found to be fake.
Clothes collection scams are usually so obvious they are laughable.
Which is why a new batch of leaflets falling through letterboxes across the country from a company called Clothman Ltd are cause for concern. No evasive language here: the company brazenly claims to be collecting on behalf of Breakthrough Breastcancer.
A copy dropped through my letterbox the other day. The print quality was so tacky it was obviously fake, and I was about to bin it. Then I saw the Breakthrough name and pink ribbon logo.
A little Googling soon revealed Clothman Ltd to be a scam emerging this year, with leaflets falsely claiming to be collecting for the much-trusted Breakthrough and Northamptonshire Air Ambulance charities appearing in Essex, Manchester and parts of London.
This carrot and stick approach to jobseeker volunteering is confusing for everyone
One of the more surprising details to emerge from the story by Third Sector about Calder UK, the firm that has agreed to pay volunteer centres for using their services as part of its welfare-to-work programme, was its method of finding volunteer placements for jobseekers.
The Department for Work and Pensions had made it compulsory for jobseekers taking part in the programme to carry out four weeks of unpaid ‘voluntary’ work, which could be at a business or a charity.
In order to set up the voluntary work, staff at Calder UK had given jobseekers the address of the nearest volunteer centre, without first checking with the centres that they would be able to find placements for them and without agreeing to pay them for doing so. The staff had then told the jobseekers to go to the centre and find themselves a placement.
According to some volunteer centre staff, Calder UK staff had told the would-be volunteers that the firm would “stick them in a charity shop” for four weeks if they failed to find a placement.
If I were unemployed, I would be very confused about volunteering. First there’s the carrot: once people have been unemployed for six months, they are given the chance to improve their skills by doing a spot of volunteering. As far as I’m aware, there’s no coercion involved.
But then there’s the stick: once they’ve been unemployed for 18 months, many are placed on intensive welfare-to-work schemes under the Flexible New Deal. On these, voluntary work is compulsory and some have been told they will lose their entitlement to Jobseeker’s Allowance if they refuse to take part.
The coalition government’s Work Programme may replace both of these Labour schemes. With a bit of luck, any new system will encourage those out of work to volunteer, but will stress that, by its nature, the work is voluntary.
