“Charity is a translation of the Greek word agapē, also meaning ‘love’.”
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In late 2019, as the lorry queues backed up the M2 in Kent, we were anticipating a bumpy ride as the UK left the European Union - remember? But all that was eclipsed by the pandemic, as supply shortages were overtaken by the inactivity of lockdown.
The Government’s two great achievements which have steered us through the pandemic have been furlough and vaccines, and as a result we’re much better placed for recovery than many countries which did not apply such foresight.
But that bumpy ride has simply been deferred, and its impact may be felt all the more due not only to the accelerating return to ‘business as usual’, but also to the Russians turning the screws on gas prices.
And it is particularly hitting the poor, who are hit hardest by the triple whammy of price rises for energy, fuel and food. So this week we take a look at the UK charity sector which must take the strain, and we support the Charity Commission's call for generosity and more volunteer trustees.
On Thursday 30 September the Charity Commission held their annual public meeting by webinar, for which over 3,000 people had registered. It's been quite a struggle for charities during the pandemic: in many cases donations have fallen significantly, and many staff have been furloughed.
The size of the sector is substantial. There are 170,000 British charities in total, employing about one million people and with a total annual income of circa £84 billion. They’re governed by a total of 700,000 trustees, and regulated by the Charity Commission, whose role looks both to register, nurture and supervise the sector and to ensure that the best interests of the public are kept central at all times.
Charity formation is built around their chosen purposes, which must be approved by the Charity Commission. In the past year they received 8,300 applications for new charities, of which 60% were accepted.
In these days when opinions are drawn so strongly on matters of culture, it was refreshing to hear that the Commission takes no ‘world view’ or outlook itself: it assesses purposes objectively, then lets individual charities operate independently within their approved guidelines.
Having said that, there is clearly a need to introduce more diversity among trustees who are mainly older, whiter, and 2:1 male : female. There'll be a trustees' week in October, and charities were encouraged to use open recruitment processes and operate a ‘development pipeline’ for trustees where possible.
What is crystal clear, however, is that until the Government tackles ‘levelling up’ on an individual and a substantial level, there'll be a growing need for charities. We've heard much about the ‘heat or eat?’ dilemma over the past fortnight, and energy companies are busy putting that challenge in front of huge numbers of families, with their 50% uplift in prices (even for electricity generated by wind turbines).
So, we’ll end this commentary looking at two charities - one large, one small - which are addressing the challenge head on.
The Trussell Trust is the large one: it supports most of the food banks across the UK - more than 1,200 - under the slogan ‘Stop UK Hunger’, providing emergency food and support to people locked in poverty. Between April 2019 and March 2020, the food banks in its network provided 1.9 million food supplies to people in crisis. However, it also campaigns for the vision of a United Kingdom without the need for food banks.
The small charity is the ‘BA Hope Foundation’, based on the idea of a young man called Billy Abernethy-Hope in 2018, shortly before his untimely death in a motorbike crash at the age of just 20. His plan, for tokens to be given to homeless people for redeeming against food or a hot drink in participating retailers, now has 50 cafés and shops taking part across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham and Oxford, and I anticipate that it will grow fast following an article in Saturday’s Times.
The BA Hope Foundation shows that there are lots of opportunities for innovation and enterprise in the charity sector, fuelled by that basic motivation to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’: a universal human understanding of people of all faiths and none. Indeed, as it says in our quotation above, it’s worth recalling that the word charity is derived from the Greek word for love, unconditional love – and that explains it all.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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