Charity

A UK charity has pledged £29m to train thousands of young people in heritage skills. The cash injection comes from the Hamish Ogston Foundation, which said it was the largest single commitment to the cause ever made.  The funding will pay for up to 2,700 new young people in the UK and across the Commonwealth to

A group of advice charities have launched a summer campaign to highlight a threat posed by “imposter firms” that they say are trying to cash in on their names. StepChange, Citizens Advice and the Money Advice Trust are concerned that rogue companies are running copycat advertisements online that look very similar to their own official

The defunct telephone fundraising agency Listen left legacy debts of more than £3.3m to unsecured creditors, including thousands of pounds to the housing and homelessness charity Shelter, documents show. The details have been revealed in documents submitted to Companies House last week by the firm of liquidators appointed to wind down the business. Listen, which

CAF Bank has defended its financial position after a national newspaper reported it had made “significant paper losses” on investments last year.  The Financial Times reported over the weekend that CAF Bank, which supports more than 14,000 charities, had “amassed significant paper losses on its bond holdings in the wake of rising interest rates”.  It

The Scout Association has earmarked more than £1m from its reserves to cover the costs of evacuating thousands of UK campers from an international gathering in South Korea. Tens of thousands of teenagers at the World Scout Jamboree in the south-western county of Buan have been removed from the campsite because of issues including extreme

The healthcare charity Nuffield Health recorded income of more than £1.2bn in 2022, latest accounts show.  The charity, which runs 37 hospitals and 114 health and fitness centres in the UK, said the increase was down to factors including a growth in hospital activity plus a rise of more than 10 per cent in its

The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into a heart disease charity that has not filed any accounts since 2019.  The regulator said it was also concerned about financial record-keeping and the level of charitable expenditure at the Have a Heart Foundation, which was registered in 2013 to raise awareness of and support patients

A Cumbria-based charity that supports children and young people has appointed Teresa Jennings as its new chief executive. She joins the Brathay Trust after spending eight years at the helm of n-compass, a health and social care charity based in Preston, Lancashire, which grew from 70 employees to 170 and increased its turnover from £2.1m

A 13-year-old fundraiser has raised more than £1,000 for the homelessness charity Emmaus UK after camping in his garden for more than a year. Billy began sleeping in his family’s garden on 17 July 2022 after he was given a teepee for his birthday. He originally aimed to spend 100 nights outdoors and raise £150

The Disasters Emergency Committee’s appeal to support people affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has passed £150m. The DEC said the appeal, which was launched in the wake of the massive earthquakes that struck the region in February, had become the third largest in its 60-year history.  The appeal has raised £151.8m so

Charities have reiterated calls for the UK government to restore overseas aid spending to previous levels after an impact assessment warned the reduction could cost thousands of lives.  An impact assessment produced by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, published today by MPs on the International Development Committee, predicts that almost 200,000 women across Africa

Charities should look to build alliances within and beyond civil society to protect the narrowing “democratic space”, a new report urges. The publication, Defending our Democratic Space, published today by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation and the think tank Civil Exchange, warns of the increased threats to the UK’s democratic space, which it defines as the

Daniel Fluskey, director of policy and communications at the Chartered Institute of Fundraising, is to step down.  Fluskey, who joined the then-Institute of Fundraising as head of policy and research in 2013, is to join the National Aids Trust in October as director of policy, research and influencing.  His time at the membership body has encompassed

The Charity Commission has dropped the use of the phrase “ethical investment” in updated guidance. The regulator has today published updated guidance on charities and investments, known as CC14. The commission had promised to revise the guidance after the High Court’s “Butler-Sloss” ruling last year, which found that trustees can exclude investing in areas that

The British Red Cross has appointed Clive MacTavish as its chief financial officer.  MacTavish, who joined the BRC in January as interim finance chief, was previously CFO at the development finance company British International Investment.  He succeeds Martin Halliwell, who left the BRC in December. The British Red Cross is one of the UK’s biggest

NSPCC has introduced a policy whereby candidates for jobs at the children’s charity will receive interview questions ahead of time. The initiative, introduced as part of the charity’s equality, diversity and inclusion commitments, is being rolled out after consultation with the NSPCC’s “lived experience groups”, its EDI trustee Sheanna Patelmaster, who is also a strategy

NGOs are a “far cry” from the organic, democratic organisations society needs to make the calls that anti-racist movements must, Amnesty International UK’s racial justice director told an event today. Speaking on a pre-recorded panel entitled ‘Reclaiming Anti-racism’ which was scheduled to be streamed as part of today’s BAME Online conference, Ilyas Nagdee, who is

St John Ambulance continues to experience challenges retaining and recruiting staff and volunteers, two and a half years after facing allegations of bullying. According to its accounts for 2022, published by Companies House this week, more than 4,000 people joined the first aid charity as volunteers in 2022, but a comparable number also decided to

Proposals to abolish inheritance tax must take into account the risk that charities may lose out on legacy fundraising income, the charity legacy consortium Remember a Charity has warned. Earlier this month, The Guardian newspaper reported that Downing Street is holding talks about making the scrapping of inheritance tax part of its manifesto for the

The Charity Commission has closed its regulatory compliance case into a foundation set up by the UK’s second-richest man, saying it is satisfied that the charity’s activities further its purposes. The regulator opened its case in January into the Jim Ratcliffe Foundation, a sport and conservation charity, after allegations – published in The Guardian newspaper –

Stuart Dean is to join Leonard Cheshire as its new chief financial officer, two months after the Charity Commission launched an investigation into the disability charity’s “challenging financial situation”. Dean, who starts at the charity in September, joins from England’s health and social care regulator the Care Quality Commission, where he spent eight years designing

The supermarket chain Morrisons has raised £5m for children’s palliative care charity Together for Short Lives in just over a year. Morrisons and Together for Short Lives began their partnership, which aims to raise funds for children’s hospices, in February 2022. Staff at Morrisons stores across the country raised funds at events such as in-store

Charity donations by UK millionaires in the second quarter of this year were less than one-third of their value during the previous quarter, according to research from The Beacontree Collaborative. A quarterly survey of 300 to 500 high net worth individuals carried out by the market research firm Savanta found that the median level of

The Charity Commission has opened inquiries into two connected charities funding educational institutes in Israel amid “significant concerns” of poor financial management, including the use of pre-signed blank cheques. The regulator said it had opened statutory inquiries into the Telz Talmudical Academy and Talmud Torah Trust and The Gevurath Ari Torah Academy Trust, which each

Augmented reality, artificial intelligence and new communications channels will all shape mass participation fundraising over the next decade, according to a new report from the mass participation events agency Massive. The Ten Years of the Massive Top 25 report, released today, acknowledges that many charities will struggle to match the private sector in leveraging these

The Royal Society for Blind Children has appointed Julie Davis as its next chief executive. Davis will join RSBC, which supports blind and partially sighted children and their families, in October, after more than three years in the top job at the international development charity Hope for Children.  She succeeds Sue Sharp, who announced in

St Mungo’s has agreed to talks today with Unite the Union after the trade union accused the homelessness charity of undermining the strike undertaken by hundreds of its workers by using agency labour. A spokeswoman for St Mungo’s said the meeting would go ahead and that the charity was committed to bringing an end to

The children’s mental health charity Place2Be has expressed concern at not being told by police that one of its employees had been charged with serious sexual offences, resulting in it to continue employing him for more than a year. Morgan Prior was hired by the charity in April 2021, a month after he was charged

The Natural History Museum has rebranded, overhauling its logo, digital platforms and onsite visual identity to better engage audiences.  The charity, which will mark its 150th anniversary in 2031, has also launched a strategy focused on delivering a future in which both people and the planet thrive, and said the rebrand would match its ambitions.

A charity founded by the widow of Roald Dahl has denounced the late children’s author for his “undeniable racism” and issued an apology for antisemitic comments he made. The Buckinghamshire-based Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, which was founded in 2001 by Dahl’s film producer widow Felicity Ann Dahl, acknowledged the author’s antisemitism in a