Naomi Campbell overturns trustee ban
The supermodel Naomi Campbell was disqualified from trusteeship for five years in September 2024, after a Charity Commission inquiry found the charity she founded spent less than 9 per cent of its total expenditure on charitable grants.
Fashion for Relief, which was set up by Campbell to provide poverty relief and advance health and education through grantmaking, was removed from the charities register and three of its former trustees – including Campbell – were disqualified from trusteeship.
A charity tribunal ruling has agreed with the regulator’s finding that there was serious misconduct and mismanagement in the administration of Fashion for Relief.
“The tribunal has found, however, that its most serious features, including unauthorised payments to Ms Campbell’s co-trustee, Bianka Hellmich, failures in the management of the charity’s finances and the misuse of its funds, resulted from Ms Hellmich’s conduct and were concealed from Ms Campbell,” the judgment says.
“Ms Hellmich deceived Ms Campbell, used forged documents and a false email address purporting to belong to her, and also deceived professional advisers and the commission.
“Ms Campbell was not involved in, and did not know of, that conduct.”
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Community fund calls for increased collaboration between lottery distributors
The National Lottery Community Fund has pushed for increased collaboration between individual lottery funding distributors to create a simplified system for applicants.
It comes in the NLCF’s response to the government’s call for evidence on how the grantmaker’s good cause funding should be spent.
The NLCF said it welcomed the focus of the call for evidence on simplifying access, but said this “cannot stop at the boundaries of individual lottery distributors”.
The funder said: “We hear from applicants and community organisations that accessing funding can be time-consuming, repetitive and difficult to navigate, particularly where they are applying across multiple programmes, funders or National Lottery distributors.”
Community organisations can “often feel that they are on a treadmill as they are passed from one funding stream to another”, the grantmaker said.
“There is a significant opportunity for the Lottery family to work more closely together so that applicants experience a more coherent and easier-to-navigate funding system.”
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Most popular form of charitable giving revealed
Donating goods to charity shops was the most popular form of charity support among a survey sample of more than 2,000 adults in Great Britain, a YouGov poll has found.
The poll, carried out online in August, found that 52 per cent of people said they had donated goods to charity over the past 12 months, such as giving items to charity shops, food banks or toy campaigns.
Buying goods via charity shops was also a popular way of supporting good causes, with 47 per cent of respondents saying they had done so in the past year.
The third most popular way of supporting charities was making a donation, which 43 per cent of respondents said they had done in the past year, followed by sponsoring someone for charity, which 30 per cent said they had done.
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