Posts Tagged: Acevo

My day with the vain, corrupt, and unmerged

There was a sense of excitement as the outspoken Sir Tim Smit, the co-founder and executive vice-chair of the Eden Project took to the stage at the Acevo Annual Conference 2014 yesterday. Smit is never backwards about coming forward (appropriate really, since ‘Tim Smit’ is a palindrome), and started his speech/rant – he admitted that… 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 »

Large charities win contracts, but how does that square with big society rhetoric?

Are small charities better than big ones? Few questions provoke more ire. Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, says it is a “senseless and divisive argument”. But the new government seems to be following the path trodden by Iain Duncan Smith five years ago when he contrasted “bureaucratic and risk-averse” big charities with “the instinctive… Read more »

Six-hour Tory love-in at the Acevo summit

How many ways can you say I love you? That was the dilemma facing members of the shadow Cabinet when they turned out in force yesterday to cosy up to a hundred or so charity delegates at the Conservative Party third sector summit. Chief executives body Acevo is staging summits with the three main political… Read more »

Fire and brimstone missing at Unite’s mass meeting for charity workers

The mass meeting last night of charity sector workers organised by Unite showcased a side of the Labour Party rarely seen these days. Labour MPs initially outnumbered charity workers in committee room 11 of the Palace of Westminster, as delegates battled with hordes of tourists and schoolchildren to get through security. The MPs declared themselves… Read more »