I attended Martin Brookes’ RSA lecture last night, in which he called for someone – I’m not entirely sure who – to look into developing a ranking system for charities according to how much they benefit society. The idea is to inform people’s decisions on their charitable giving. To me it was clearly a very… Read more »
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Ed: isn’t he our man?
Many people in the voluntary sector will feel a small glow of satisfaction at the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader, no matter what they think of his politics, the mode of his election or the fraternal ‘psychodrama’. His first job in government was at the then Office of the Third Sector, a new… Read more »
Gift Aid reform proposals are expected. What will the outcome be?
Later this week, we’ll see the results of the sector’s two year efforts at Gift Aid reform – a set of proposals which will be given careful consideration by Justine Greening, economic secretary to the Treasury. I suspect that when the final document is published, campaigners will feel like a group of fire fighters who… Read more »
Big society means big change ahead
Lord Wei, the government’s big society guru, weighed in recently with a warning that some charities and social enterprises had become too bureaucratic because they received most of their funding from the state. “They have ended up becoming big charity, not big society,” he said. This chimes with Conservative arguments in recent years about the… Read more »
Charities take MDGs from the summit to the streets and the tweets
If it was not for the work of charities and select sections of the media, I worry that the UN Millennium Development Goals summit and its purpose would have passed many people by. There has been some progress on the eight MDGs, but it is, at best, uneven and slow. For example, Eastern Asia has… Read more »
Big society: is the anti-red tape message getting through?
Is the government’s much-vaunted anti-red tape, common-sense message starting to filter through to the world of local authorities? At a big society-themed fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat party conference this weekend, an employee of Wirral Borough Council cited an interesting example of the message reaching the grass roots. She said a local community group… Read more »
Voluntary groups show there’s power in numbers
There was a sense of unity at the Protest the Pope march in London on Saturday, which is no mean feat considering there were around 10,000 individuals, many of them defined by different beliefs, lifestyles, religions and creeds. I arrived by Tube, slightly concerned about getting myself arrested (never a good thing for a first… Read more »
Local authorities still failing to serve effectively as charity trustees
This week has brought another example of just how bad local authorities are at serving as trustees of charities. In Shetland, island councillors have buried their heads firmly in the sand and refused to reform the board of a £200m charitable trust where they make up 21 of 23 trustees, despite being told to do… Read more »
‘Micro-volunteering’ highlights positive impact of technology on voluntary sector
It’s easy to become jaded by the endless stream of technological advances we see practically every day. But one piece of technology I recently became aware of that made me sit up and take notice is an app which allows people to donate just a few valuable minutes of their time to charities in a… Read more »
Volunteers were the heroes of the London tube strike: London Zoo could do better
I was very impressed by the work of volunteers during the tube strike in London yesterday. I set off on my morning commute expecting chaos. But at both Victoria and Earl’s Court stations, there were plenty of cheery, easy-to-find, orange vest-clad Transport for London volunteers advising travellers how to reach their destinations. I didn’t have to wait… Read more »