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.

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.

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.

Two stories struck me over the Christmas and New Year break: the first was the news that Save the Children had raised more than £7m in its East Africa Appeal – a record for the charity; the second was the new year message from the Archbishop of Canterbury that we should not give up on young people in Britain, even though some of them had taken part in last summer’s riots.

The archbishop’s message reminded me of figures in last summer’s Charity Market Monitor, which showed a fall of more than 10 per cent in the year 2009-10 in donations to charities supporting young people. “This is a worrying result at a time of rising unemployment, when young people particularly need support and help,” it said.

The story in yesterday’s Guardian, which said the charity Variety Club was receiving less than £4.50 per year from each of the shoe recycling banks emblazoned with its name, will have surprised members of the public – many of whom are already wary about the proportion of their charitable donations that make it to the front line.

Looking into the story a little deeper, the details became slightly blurred: the European Recycling Company, the private firm that runs the collection banks, insisted it was not accurate to use a cash-per-bank figure because the firm agreed a yearly donation with the charity that was not directly linked to its profits or its income from donated stock.

The last time I took a donation to a charity shop, it was a great experience.

I took an unwanted jewellery box, full of costume jewellery, to a Cancer Research UK shop. The volunteer behind the desk could not have been more excited or grateful for my gift. I left with the warm glow you get from doing something good.

One of the main recommendations in yesterday’s Public Administration Select Committee report on the big society was that the government should appoint a big society minister.

The new appointee, the report says, would have “a cross-cutting brief to help other ministers to drive through this agenda”.

Judging by the initial reactions, the voluntary sector is dubious. Umbrella bodies point out that Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, is already more or less doing that job. The addition of a new minister, they say, might create even more confusion about an agenda that is already poorly-understood by charities, civil servants and the public.