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 went into a burning house to rescue a baby on the fifth floor, failed, and emerged with a cat they happened across in the lobby.
No one has yet publicly admitted that Gift Aid reform has gently expired, suffocated in a smoke of focus groups and empty promises, but there are certainly private mumblings to that effect. No one has started the hearse just yet, but round the back of the church, two extras from Hamlet are quietly preparing a plot.
Of the major sector figures involved in negotiations, only Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, has really admitted that Gift Aid reform is ailing and unlikely to recover, and has left the bedside because he has better things to do.
More evidence that the idea is deceased is likely to come on Thursday, when none of the multifarious grand proposals suggested last year will be included in the final document.
This is not to take anything away from the campaigners, however. They have laboured mightily for little reward. Gift Aid reform has proved an impossible task, and it would have taken a miracle to get much meaningful out of a Treasury with no money, scant resources, and a debt the size of Belgium looming over every decision.
The sector is still, at the very end of the process, not actually sure what it wanted, and has managed only to agree that it wants a database of donors and the right to submit declarations online.
Even then, the extent of enthusiasm for these measures was shown in a CFDG poll, when several charities with multi-million pound incomes admitted they wouldn’t chip in £50 of their own money to make them happen.
If anything, what the process has proved is that Gift Aid is not without its shortcomings, but is still not all that bad. A change in its administration, not an overhaul of the whole structure, is perhaps what was needed from the start.
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 “Tescoisation” of charities, and with the party’s often-stated preference for local, community-based organisations. This government does not much like larger charities that get state funding, many of which are contemplating the future with some trepidation.
Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, responded by arguing in his lecture last week that “big society requires big charity as well as local charity. Properly speaking, big society means new life being breathed into the state-charity partnership.” He urged the government not to forget that the partnership between the state and the third sector is rooted in our history, has enjoyed cross-party consensus and is crucial to the well-being of society.
As we await the public spending review, it’s hard to predict in any detail what’s going to happen. The government is committed, as was Labour, to making it easier for the sector to bid for public contracts on a level playing field. That’s good in its way, if it actually happens, but public contracts are likely to be fewer and smaller, producing a countervailing effect.
The Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, also told Third Sector recently that the government was keen to open up public services to new providers. But he emphasised that it was interested in “community-based solutions.” That doesn’t sound encouraging for the bigger voluntary organisations.
The most that can be said with certainty is that the state is going to shrink, and with it many parts of the sector that depend on the state. And when such large cuts are made so fast, many babies will go out with the bathwater.
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 surpassed its target already for halving the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015, whose income is less than $1 a day. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia it is lagging massively behind.
Many charities have watched development at the current summit with a scrupulous eye. Others have actively engaged with events in New York. In a refreshingly light-hearted approach to what is, unmistakably a depressing subject, Save the Children handed out chocolate bars at the summit with the words “World Leaders, Run don’t walk: stop children dying”. The organisation has provided hundreds of tweets per day on Twitter about the summit, ensuring its coverage and use of the #MDG hashtag has been relentless. With more than 95,000 followers, this is promotion on a global scale.
Amnesty International also produced a startling contrast to the bright lights of capitalism in Times Square with its grimly entitled “maternal death clock“. Situated streets away from the UN summit, the giant digital clock counts the number of times a woman dies giving birth – 1 every 90 seconds – in direct reference to the fifth MDG, which is behind target in every region of the world.
Sarah Brown was a speaker at the summit. In an interview with The Guardian, she highlighted the work of the White Ribbon Alliance in promoting maternal death rate awareness. She said: “When I became global patron of the White Ribbon Alliance nearly three years ago, it was clear that even the most well-informed women in this country weren’t fully aware of the problem. But once they knew, they were quickly outraged – and wanted to help.”
And this is exactly where the work of charities comes in. While the MDG summit may seem remote and inaccessible to many, explaining it and promoting its purpose is vital to securing funds for charity groups and winning hearts. Surely it’s a case of leading by example? If people see that the governments of the developed world are sticking to their word, then the public will follow suit. However, without the lasting support of both, sadly, many of the MDGs look even less achievable than they do now, five years away from the target date.
She said a local community group had called to ask the council’s permission to erect a gazebo at a fundraising event it was holding. She admitted that she had groaned inwardly at the prospect of the health and safety checks she would have to arrange, and the forms she would have to fill out, in order to grant the permission.
But when she contacted another council department to make the arrangements, the response was surprising.
“Just let them get on with it and tell them to use a bit of common sense,” the official said, much to her approval.
Is Wirral a rare exception, or are councils around the country cutting red tape in response to the government’s big society agenda? And do charities welcome this, or are they worried that they’ll be the ones to blame for any accidents or mistakes that result from it?
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 week in a new job), and trying to avoid ‘death by pilgrims’ (the seemingly endless stream of Pope fans that stopped the traffic at Hyde Park Corner on their way to a mass in the park). The pilgrims, complete with yellow ‘pilgrim packs’ on their backs, walked with purpose, and I wondered how the anti-Pope protesters were going to measure up. We would likely lack the religious fervour and all-round excitement that had led some pilgrims to declare His Holiness ‘the true X Factor’.
My initial fears were confirmed… we were a motley crew loitering around the Tube station looking decidedly unsure and coy.
But not long after, some people who looked organised arrived – the voluntary groups. Unlike me, who had only remembered to bring my Oyster card, a packet of wine gums and a heart full of injustice, these groups had placards, banners and t-shirts, as well as the spirit needed to lift the mood.
And within 20 minutes, the numbers were swelling all around the grand gates of Hyde Park. The small groups became crowds; the murmurs of misgivings about the Pope became chants on a megaphone; and all of a sudden, we had found our mojo.
When you are in a crowd that grows in size that quickly, it is almost impossible to gauge its size. However, there’s a feeling that sweeps through each individual; the magic of mass protest. It’s as if we were all cells that become connected by neurons of shared belief, transforming us into one powerful, functioning entity.
After a long wait, which only served to psych up the crowd further, we began the well-trodden route towards Trafalgar Square.
The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell had told me in an email before the event that the reasons behind the march were varied: “Pope Benedict XVI says women are unfit to be priests, childless couples should be denied fertility treatment and potentially life-saving embryonic stem cell research ought to be banned.
“The Pope insists that rape victims should be denied an abortion, using condoms to stop the spread of HIV is immoral and gay people are not entitled to equal human rights. On all these issues, Benedict is out of step with the majority of British people, including many Catholics.
“Most shockingly, the Pope is accused of covering up child sex abuse by clergy. In 2001, he wrote to every Catholic bishop in the world, ordering them to report all child sex abuse cases to him in Rome. They did. He therefore cannot claim that he was unaware of sex abuse. Moreover, his letter to the bishops demanded that they observe ‘Papal secrecy.’
“It did not advise them to report abusers to the police. Even today, the Pope refuses to open the Vatican’s sex abuse files and hand them to the relevant police forces worldwide. Many people see his inaction as collusion with sex crimes against children. Such a person should not be feted by our government.”
This strong-worded stance goes some way to explaining the emotions behind the Protest the Pope march. This was not only a march about the child abuse sex scandal in the Catholic church, it was about gay rights, women’s rights, science, contraception, AIDS, the power of the Vatican and the cost to the taxpayer of the state visit to the UK.
I spoke to Katharine Salmon, a member of the Catholic Women’s Ordination group, whose religious faith had come in direct opposition to her conviction that women should have equal rights. Therefore, she was attending this march in order to stand beside those who were protesting for her right to be ordained as a priest in the Catholic church – even though many were atheists. However, she also was set to attend the Papal rallies. She said: “I am Catholic but I am delighted to be here at the march. We are a group that stands for equality, which is what Jesus stood for. We want to see women ordained as priests, the same as men.”
Another protestor told me the very fact that there were so many issues under scrutiny had ensured her attendance at the rally. “The shockwaves of the sex abuse scandal have been felt worldwide,” she said. “But it’s more than that, it’s that his [the Pope’s] views seem so medieval. They aren’t compatible with a modern Britain where we celebrate equality and condemn discrimination.”
Many people in attendance on Saturday were there for one specific cause, whether it be anti-homophobia, women’s rights, abortion, stem-cell research, condom use or anger at the child sex abuse scandal. However, the groups and individuals managed to channel these grievances into only multiplied the outrage and the emotion, unifying the march and increasing its voice.
It is a lesson perhaps to be learnt for small voluntary groups. The hard, often unseen work behind the scenes was given a stage, making it visible and newsworthy at a time when the world was watching the UK to monitor its handling of the Pope’s visit.
Whatever your opinion on the Pope and his visit to the UK, the balance of showcasing these opposing views is vital for a democracy that prides itself on freedom of speech.
On Saturday, many people spoke out but thousands more listened.
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 so by islanders, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, their own lawyers, and one of the charity’s two independent trustees.
Despite the fact that the council regularly does business with the trust, and the trust invests money in council schemes, councillors have denied that there is any inherent conflict of interest, or any risk of charitable money being used to subsidise statutory services.
Instead, they are taking legal advice in a battle to remain in control of the trust.
It’s just the latest example of extraordinary behaviour by councils in relation to charitable resources, which has included selling off charitable land and keeping the money, installing council staff to work rent-free in charitable buildings, and failing to carry out any charitable activity at all for decades at a time.
Councils have been found to be unaware that they were even supposed to be acting as trustees, or that they did not actually own the land they were supposed to hold in trust. They have also shown a stubborn and litigious refusal to give up their authority when their mismanagement is made clear.
Recently, following a case before the charity tribunal, Dartford Council was ordered to recruit independent trustees to sit alongside councillors on the board of a charity it managed. The tribunal said that it hoped a code of conduct drawn up for the council would become a model for others.
It’s a welcome and sensible development, and it would be good to see the Charity Commission backing it and generally taking a stronger line with charities that have councils as sole trustees or trustee bodies dominated by councillors.
This is easier said than done because it involves tangling with entrenched interests with plenty of cash. And if all we get is more guidance from the regulator, councils will just ignore it if they want to.
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 quick and convenient way.
The Extraordinaries http://app.beextra.org/ is a micro-volunteering network website where not-for-profit organisations can register and post challenges they need help with.
Individual volunteers can also register with the site and they then receive an app which allows them to browse the challenges on their phone and volunteer to help out with the projects which match their skills.
A quick internet search has yielded results of other apps out there doing similar things, such as iVolunteer.
However, the uniqueness of the Extraordinaries is that people can volunteer just a few minutes of their time to give their expertise towards a challenge a charity is facing. It’s know as ‘micro-volunteering’.
One charity was recently trying to find an inexpensive way of digging a well in Kenya, and through the network was connected with a US-managed but Kenyan-based well digging company within a week.
The creator of the App, Jacob Colker, recently won a Rolex Award for Enterprise, which provides support for innovators ages 16-30, for the project.
It seems to be well-deserved recognition, as the app really highlights the hugely positive impact that technology can have on the sector during a difficult economic time.
It may be harder to secure monetary donations from people, but securing donations in the form of time are still more than possible, if you do it in an innovative way.
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 long to speak to one, and neither did the other commuters, none of whom seemed stressed. Perhaps the strike triggered good old-fashioned British stoicism. But the volunteers definitely played their part in keeping what could have been a reputational disaster for TFL under control.
But volunteers don’t always work wonders for the reputations of companies and charities. A few weeks ago, I went to the London Zoo’s Zoo Lates event, at which hundreds of people spent the evening drinking Pimm’s, eating burgers and wandering around the animal enclosures – a brilliant fundraising event for the zoo.
As my friend and I strolled through the monkey enclosure, we noticed an over-zealous volunteer marshalling the crowds.
“Stand back from that tree!” she shouted at one couple. “It’s the monkey’s space!” Another group of visitors was told off for spending too long looking at some baby monkeys.
The response was interesting. “Ignore her,” one visitor said. “She’s only a volunteer and she’s getting hung up on her own power.”
The zoo volunteer was obviously not working the wonders for the zoo’s reputation that the Tube volunteers were working for TFL’s. My instinctive reaction was that it came down to volunteer management – shouldn’t organisations vet their volunteers properly before they let them speak directly to the public on their behalf?
But perhaps that would undermine the point of volunteering. Volunteers aren’t one-size-fits-all and they can’t be vetted and controlled in the way paid staff can. They enjoy making their own mark, and if they weren’t enjoying it they wouldn’t do it.
So perhaps charities – and other organisations that use volunteers – need to accept that alongside a reputational bonus, hiring volunteers involves a big reputational risk.
What do the following have in common: a senior member of staff at a leading children’s charity, charity accounting systems and a website for disabled people?
The answer is that all three were described as “innovative” in the last three weeks. The word has become a charity cliché, according to the US’s Chronicle of Philanthropy. I would add the sector’s other favourite adjectives: “groundbreaking”, “transformative” and “impactful”.
Innovative things are ahead of their time, which makes it impossible for so many contemporary projects to be judged innovative. Projects have to prove themselves and be judged from a distance before they earn the right to describe themselves in that way. Groundbreaking and transformative have the same problem, and impactful isn’t a word.
Invented nouns such as “outcomes” and “deliverables” might sound important, but they run the risk of throwing up smokescreens to sector outsiders, leaving them with the suspicion that charities have something to hide.
It’s understandable that charities want their projects, schemes and campaigns to stand out and to impress donors and decision makers. But problems arise when the words they choose are overused. They echo around the page or the screen, develop a hollow ring and become meaningless. Then you’ve really lost people’s attention.
Better to describe things as they are and avoid value judgements. If charitable services change people’s lives for the better, why not say so and offer evidence? If it’s convincing enough, no one will disagree. Your organisation could be a beacon of clarity in a fog of jargon.
And as CoP points out, if the sector feels everything it does must sound “groundbreaking”, it runs the risk of undermining its difficult, unglamorous day-to-day work.
Thirty teams of chuggers are to be headed by team leaders wearing purple armbands with the words “team leader” written on them. The PFRA hopes the scheme will improve teams’ relationships with council officials, town centre managers and the public.
Will it work? It’s not as if a whole new management structure is being trialled. Chugging teams have had leaders, who act as contacts for officials, for many years so it seems likely that the public will benefit most from the scheme.
Something more obvious than an armband may have been appropriate – perhaps the words “team leader” emblazoned on a bib or t-shirt. I am not convinced that passers-by will understand that they should approach the armband wearer with complaints they may have.
But it is a trial. Maybe some members of the public will notice the armband and feel reassured that there is someone in charge. The scheme is unlikely to revolutionise chugging, but at least an effort is being made to make small improvements.
Chugging is not going to disappear – nor should it. So if changes can be made to improve its image and in turn raise more money, I would welcome them.
Amnesty International 
Within minutes, congregations (excuse the pun) of voluntary groups, along with members of the public, had gathered. I saw the 
This strong-worded stance goes some way to explaining the emotions behind the Protest the Pope march. This was not only a march about the child abuse sex scandal in the Catholic church, it was about gay rights, women’s rights, science, contraception, AIDS, the power of the Vatican and the cost to the taxpayer of the state visit to the UK.