There has been a lot of buzz on Twitter this past week about a website which offers the chance to donate small amounts of change to the charities of your choice. Ploink!, which launched last year, is free to join and lets you donate as little or as much as you like to up to… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Uncategorized
Why aren’t there more social entrepreneurs?
At a social investment conference last week, a number of lenders and intermediaries stood up to say there aren’t enough good businesses in the sector to accommodate all the people wanting to lend them money. They accepted there were good reasons for this: most social businesses are relatively new, and will take longer to grow… Read more »
Cameron needs to start getting the party’s rank and file excited about the big society
The big society was the big theme of the fringe events at the Conservative Party conference this year. All kinds of groups managed to shoehorn the phrase into their events: health charities, think tanks, social enterprise groups, local government bodies, housing firms and welfare-to-work providers all used the magic words. So did Starbucks, by hosting… Read more »
Could lifetime legacies fit the bill if Gift Aid reform fails to satisfy?
In the very near future, a group of third sector bodies will put forward a series of recommendations to the Treasury for Gift Aid reform. Sadly, these look likely to be relatively modest, compared with what sector figures once hoped to achieve. And as a result, some sector figures are looking around for other models… Read more »
Ranking charities – interesting, but unrealistic.
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 »
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 »