Press
This section of the website provides recent news stories which relate to funding, costs and Full Cost Recovery.
8 January 2010
Charitable giving reforms could lead to huge boost in donations, says Centre for Policy Studies report
Reforms to charitable giving could boost donations from the "reasonably well-off" by up to £74bn, according to a new report.
Paul Palmer, professor of voluntary sector management at Cass Business School, suggests two changes that he says could unlock 10 per cent of the £740bn held by the 820,000 Britons with a net wealth of more than £500,000 in assets beyond the family home, such as pension funds.
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25 November 2009
European ‘clawback’ law threatens "massive losses" for UK charities
A proposed European Commission cross-border inheritance law could open up the door to charities losing not only legacy donations, but potentially other charitable gifts made during a deceased donor’s lifetime.
The Ministry of Justice has opened a consultation on the change which would alter the law so that if an individual dies after moving to another country, the law of their adopted country will apply to their estate, potentially introducing the principle of 'clawback' into legal disputes over into wills.
17 September 2009
Financial optimism grows among charity leaders
By Paul Jarvis, Third Sector Online, 16 September 2009
Staff cuts less likely in the months ahead, predict chief executives responding to NCVO's Charity Forecast survey
Charity leaders are slightly more optimistic about the financial situation than they were three months ago, according to the latest Charity Forecast from the NCVO.
In a poll of 139 charity chief executives, senior staff and chairs, carried out in August, the NCVO found that 42 per cent expected their charities' financial situation to worsen in the coming quarter, a fall of five percentage points from the survey carried out in May.
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15 September 2009
David Burrows: Finding out how money is spent should not be such an ordeal
By David Burrows, Third Sector, 14 September 2009
Reseach proves charity donors want clear information, says TDA's head of fundraising
First, some intriguing research. Jakob Nielsen, described recently by the New York Times as the "guru of webpage usability", has been researching donors' experiences of charity websites from a fundraising point of view.
Nielsen recruited a broad panel of donors and asked them to visit the websites of some charities they did not currently support.
He asked them what information they would need to be persuaded to give, and then recorded whether they found it.
The first things prospective donors wanted to know were "what is the charity trying to achieve?" and "how will it spend my donation?" Sadly, only 43 per cent of the sites studied answered the first question on their home pages, and only 4 per cent answered the second question on their home pages.
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Exceptional pressures will alter the face of the voluntary sector, says Recession Watch Panel
By Tristan Donovan, Third Sector, 15 September 2009
Changes to public spending and a struggle for small charities predicted by Third Sector's team of experts
The voluntary sector will look significantly different after the recession because of changing patterns of public spending and commissioning and the rise of social enterprise, according to Third Sector's Recession Watch Panel.
The panel of voluntary sector leaders, which met for the third time last week to discuss the economic downturn, agreed the sector was facing unprecedented pressures.
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06 August 2009
Falling income from grant-makers and corporate donors is 'a time bomb for charities' - David Ainsworth, Third Sector Online, 6 August 2009
Charity Market Monitor report, by Cathy Pharoah, says there are signs grant income will fall sharply
Charities face a time bomb in the shape of sharply falling income from grant-makers and corporate donors, according to a study of the finances of the 300 largest fundraising charities.
Charity Market Monitor, a Caritas Data analysis of information from charities' annual reports, found that the voluntary income of the 300 largest fundraising charities rose by 0.9 per cent in real terms in the year to June 2008.
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15 July 2009
Business should be more like charity, says Stephen Lloyd – Charity Finance
Credit rating agencies and certain parts of auditing businesses should become not-for- profit, according to Stephen Lloyd, senior partner at Bates Wells & Braithwaite.
In a colourful lecture to charity experts yesterday entitled Capitalism in Crisis: Lessons from the Not-for-Profit Sector, Lloyd said the recession had uprooted the prevailing view that the voluntary sector needed to learn from the private sector and possibly even turned the tables.
"In my view the recession was caused largely by a lack of appropriate supervision and accountability of financial institutions," he said.
"This has led me to consider whether we might not learn from charitable and voluntary organisations and their structures and ways of working about how to avoid such disasters in the future."
Citing the basic principle in charity law that trustees should avoid conflicts of interest and not benefit from their trust, Lloyd noted that conflict was inherent in credit rating agencies: "Credit rating agencies are paid by the banks who they are rating, and advise as well as rate," said Lloyd.
"They should stop being allowed to pursue profit and be set up as some form of non-profit-distributing agent with a board of directors vested in ensuring that the agencies give a true, fair and honest rating."
He added that the costs would be met through a levy charged to banks, insurance companies and quoted plcs, cutting the direct financial relationship between agencies and the relevant company.
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08 July 2009
Survival of the fittest – The Guardian
As the recession hits charities hard, do they have enough financial nous to ride out the slump?
Charity finance is under greater pressure than at any time in living memory. Whatever "green shoots of recovery" economists may see, soliciting donations is tougher. There is more competition for - and little availability of - central and local government funding, while the needs that charities were set up to meet grow ever greater.
Charities can take nothing for granted - least of all their own finances, with a number nursing losses after investing in now bust Icelandic banks.
So what is the way forward for charities, their financial arrangements, and trustees? Should they take risks and, if so, what is acceptable?
These were the key themes of Banking for Charities, a Guardian roundtable discussion with representatives of a number of charities and in association with CAF Bank.
It concentrated primarily on banking, but also questioned whether trustees had sufficient skills to weather the impact of the financial crisis and what the longer-term outlook was.
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07 July 2009
Youth leadership scheme launches £1m third sector fund - Children & Young People Now
A consortium of youth organisations has launched a £1m fund to boost youth leadership opportunities as it unveiled details of leadership body The Youth of Today.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown attended the body's launch in Wolverhampton today.
The £1m Leadership Fund will be managed by the Young Foundation, part of the consortium which is led by the National Youth Agency. The fund will invest in third sector organisations delivering leadership programmes for 13- to 19-year-olds across England over a two-year period.
The British Youth Council and UK Youth Parliament are enabling 480 young people to shadow ministers for a day, while a local leaders programme will enable 600 young people to engage with local councillors.
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11th May 2009
Equality and Human Rights Commission announces £10 million funding programme for voluntary and community sector- eGov Monitor
The Commission today announced a new £10.2 million Strategic Funding Programme, providing three-year project-based funding of up to £450,000 for community and voluntary sector organisations.
A first priority area will fund organisations providing guidance, advice and advocacy services in areas including education, health and employment, as well as building capacity where there are gaps in local provision, for example for women who have experienced violence. A second priority area will support increased co-operation between groups - including ethnic or religious communities - in areas where there are known tensions.
A third priority area is support for legal advice and awareness of legal rights. This will operate as a separate Programme which is expected to launch in June.
The Commission is particularly keen to fund activity that directly serves and involves individuals and local communities, that meets an unmet need, and that has the potential to inspire and inform longer-term activity that helps promote the Commission's objectives.
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6th May 2009
Small bodies deserve a fair chance- The Guardian
The economic downturn has resulted in an immediate and growing problem for small charities. In harder times, competition in the third sector for public sector contracts is increasing - and small charities are feeling the effect as bigger charities go after work they would not have done before. Fiona Halton, CEO of Pilotlight, which provides business skills to small charities says "our small charities talk about more competition for bids and about councils that increasingly prefer to deal with a handful of bigger contractors, rather than a lot of smaller contractors."
"However much a small charity may be needed and however effective and efficiently it is run, funds from government are being denied. In many cases money is available, but bigger organisations that are well-equipped to bid for funds effectively discriminate against smaller ones."
Futurebuilders, the organisation charged with developing the third sector's capacity to deliver public services, has identified that, in the next 12 months, more than £23bn-worth of public service contracts will be up for tender in the areas of health and social care, education and training and welfare reform.However, many small charities doubt they can claim their share as application processes are judged as long, complicated and labour intensive.
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Don't replace the Big Lottery Fund, ACEVO taskforce tells Tories– Third Sector
The Conservatives should drop plans to replace the Big Lottery Fund with a new Voluntary Action Lottery Fund, according to the ACEVO taskforce that is examining the party's voluntary sector policy.
The Tories made the suggestion in their green paper on the voluntary sector, Voluntary Action in the 21st Century, published last year.
But the taskforce, chaired by Harriett Baldwin, deputy chair of Futurebuilders and Tory candidate for West Worcestershire, said an increase in the proportion of lottery money going to the sector could be achieved more quickly by preserving the BLF and raising the proportion of grants it gave to the voluntary sector to 100 per cent.
The taskforce report also warns the Tories to ensure their proposed administrative savings at the BLF do not affect the fund's "greatly valued" support of small organisations through the application process.
The report endorses many of the Tory paper's principles, but says it should have included pledges on VAT reform. It says a social investment bank should be set up with alternative funding if unclaimed assets are not available in the short term.
Shadow charities minister Nick Hurd said the report was a "very welcome contribution".
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Voluntary sector cannot shy away from redundancies– The Herald
Charities and social businesses will have to bite the bullet and make redundancies if they are to avoid falling victim to the recession, a leading entrepreneur will warn this week.
Liam Black, former CEO of Jamie Oliver's 15 restaurant, has been invited to Scotland by the Big Lottery Fund for a seminar titled Leadership in Tough times, which is being held on Friday.
Black warns that the voluntary sector cannot shy away from difficult decisions, such as cutbacks and redundancies. "It is hard to make people redundant, but it is not a moral failure if you have to restructure," he says. "You can't say, we're in the voluntary sector, we're not like those nasty people in the private sector - we couldn't let people go. Well guess what - you're going to have to."
Director of the Big Lottery Fund in Scotland, Dharmendra Kanani asked Black to spearhead an event to various representatives and community groups in Scotland.
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