Category Archives: Sector Developments

A couple of international (English speaking) voluntary sector developments:

From The Malta Independent: Enactment of legislation to strengthen the voluntary sector – “The National Council of Women welcomed the Voluntary Organisations Act, passed by the House of Representatives on 24 September.” This item is rather truncated and doesn’t explain much but it appears that a Commissioner will be established and voluntary work supported.

From Scoop, New Zealand: The New Zealand Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations and New Zealand Council of Social Services are delighted to see that the Community & Voluntary Sector portfolio has been promoted to Cabinet level (in the government).

Radio 4′s new series of ‘Analysis’ kicked off yesterday evening with a programme called Changing Charities where Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London asked: “Have we found a third way which offers the best of both public and private? Or just created a threat to charities’ treasured ability to speak truth to power?” Or as it concludes, in the search for the holy grail, will the knight slay charities on the way?

It’s on ‘Listen again’ presumably for the usual week, and the half hour is packed with interviews with prominent sector names, from a variety of perspectives.

Thanks to Karl Wilding for his post to VSSN list.

Ed Miliband, Minister for the Third Sector, this week gave a lecture to NCVO in memory of Nicholas Hinton. He is very keen to hear sector comments.

The lecture, ‘Changing lives, changing society’, explores the appropriate roles of the government and third sector, and argues against an “isolationist” model that sees either sector as able to provide social justice alone. He also argues that one of the greatest ways the sector contributes to society is not just through individual acts, or even changes to individual laws or policies, but by shifting the ethos of the country: when a campaign on one issue wins recognition of a principle, it opens up space for new campaigns and further change.

You can read the talk at the OTS/Cabinet Office web site, under speeches, http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/speeches/.

Post your comments here and we’ll make sure they get passed on.

It’s not as though there aren’t probably too many charity networks or support bodies out there already, but on OpenCharityBlog I’ve followed up a comment on The Observer’s pages asking about a network for kitchen table heroines’. Cristina Odone highlights in a short piece today the work done ‘around the kitchen table’ by very small charities.

See OpenCharityBlog for the link and if you want to comment further. Does bring to mind that Bleak House figure neglecting her own offspring in favour of the poor dears in Africa, but I’m sure none of the ventures Cristina mentions falls into that trap!

I seem to be almost agreeing with the opinion pieces emanating from Luke FitzHerbert at Directory of Social Change these days, unlike when I worked alongside him there.

In this week’s Third Sector, he asks how the sector can justify its tax breaks, when “too often” charities operate like businesses prepared to do anything to earn money and preserve jobs. His jumping off point is a local homecare business run by a cousin.

I could have given him more background on these issues 10 years or so ago, in relation to the mental health/learning disabilities residential care charity I’d worked for immediately before joining DSC. And actually contracting services to charities was quite a big thing back in the early 90s, with DSC even running courses and publishing books on how to manage contract finances. So as so often with sector ‘developments’, nothing really new here
Where Luke is perhaps being a bit naive is in saying that as trustees aren’t paid, they have no personal interest at stake and so can defy commercial pressures if these are at odds with charitable aims. One reason I was so desperate to jump ship from the residential care charity was the push from nearly all the trustees to expand, supposedly to secure the charity’s future but without much regard to the quality of the services it was set up to provide originally. I assumed that this was becuase they derived prestige from being seen in charge of a ‘succesful’ charity but I never had the opportunity to find out for sure.

Here’s the start of an interesting post on YouthNet’s blog (4th May):

“Should the local volunteering infrastructure be funded by national government?

“On a day when turnout in local elections is expected to be below 40%, volunteering provides a good illustration of the tensions between national and local.

“On the one hand, national government wants to utilise volunteering to meet their policy goals on everything from crime reduction to youth inclusion. They’re prepared to put money in, but direct funding of the local volunteering infrastructure (Volunteer Centres) is off-limits. That, through custom rather than any set rules, is funded by local government.”

And the post ends:
“It would take a brave government to reduce funding for things like volunteering in order to force them up the local political agenda. And it’s not something that national volunteering organisations, who themselves benefit from centralisation, are ever likely to advocate.”

For the rest, see YouthNet blog: youth issues, volunteering, charity life and technology.