Charity

A major UK retailer has raised more than £40m for Cancer Research UK as part of a 17-year partnership.  TK Maxx announced yesterday that it had reached the milestone with the UK’s biggest cancer research and awareness charity.  In a statement, the retailer said the money raised would help ensure more children and young people survived

The founder of a children’s cancer charity has been jailed for 20 months after being convicted of defrauding the organisation of more than £200,000. Colin Nesbitt, 60, of Bingley, West Yorkshire, and founder and former director of the now-defunct charity Little Heroes Cancer Trust, stole £87,000 from the charity and transferred a further £181,000 into

The Chartered Institute of Fundraising has appointed Dhivya O’Connor as interim chief executive.  O’Connor, a former chief executive of Children with Cancer UK, will join the CIoF next week for a two-week handover with Peter Lewis before he steps down.  Lewis announced in March that he would step down after almost 10 years leading the

Almost three-quarters of young volunteers have credited the experience with improving their job prospects, research shows.   A new study by the Royal Voluntary Service, conducted in partnership with the University of Kent, set out to explore the potential of volunteering to improve people’s life chances. The report, called Social Mobility: Unleashing the Power of Volunteering, found

The board of St John Ambulance  has allocated an additional half a million pounds to improve the culture of the charity, following multiple allegations of bullying earlier this year.  Martin Houghton-Brown, the charity’s chief executive, said the work remained a “high priority” for the charity and would be supported by external partners. Multiple current and

The Times newspaper has agreed to pay £50,000 plus legal costs to a Muslim charity it falsely accused of colluding with people smugglers.  A High Court statement yesterday said The Times had agreed to make the payment to the humanitarian charity the Al-Khair Foundation after an article about Somali migrants trying to reach Europe was

A man who joined Refugee Action in an entry-level position 19 years ago has been appointed its next chief executive.  Tim Naor Hilton, who has been the charity’s interim chief executive since the departure of Stephen Hale earlier this year, joined Refugee Action as a frontline development worker in Manchester in 2002.  He subsequently became

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has filed a serious incident report with the Charity Commission after sexual harassment allegations were made against the award-winning actor Noel Clarke.  Twenty women spoke to The Guardian newspaper to outline allegations against Clarke, who strongly rejected the claims and said he intended to defend himself against

The Charity Commission was the least likely of any major government department or body to fully respond to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act last year, new figures show.  Statistics published by the Cabinet Office yesterday showed that in 2020, more than 44,000 requests using freedom of information legislation were made across a

Two charities have pulled out of a controversial government scheme being used to obtain data that could lead to the deportation of non-UK rough sleepers. The London-based homelessness charities Camden Routes Off The Streets and the Single Homeless Project pulled out of the Rough Sleeping Support Service after an investigation by the campaign group Liberty.

A fifth of small health charities are at risk of closure once the government’s furlough scheme ends later in the year, according to the Small Charities Coalition. A survey conducted by the membership body showed that only 42 per cent of members polled were able to access the scheme because its complexity meant that many

The social investment body Big Society Capital has promoted Stephen Muers to chief executive.  Muers, who joined BSC as head of strategy and market development in 2016, has been interim chief executive since the departure of Cliff Prior in May last year.  Before joining BSC, Muers was director of criminal justice policy at the Ministry

Tearfund has pledged to no longer use non-disclosure agreements and said it will lift confidentiality clauses from people who had previously signed one with the charity.  The Christian development charity said in a statement there was a wider debate in society, the church and the voluntary sector about the use of confidentiality clauses in settlement

Two Age UK charities in south London have revealed they are in merger talks. In a joint statement, they said the trustees and the chief executives of Age UK Croydon and Age UK Sutton had been mulling over the move for the past year. The charities said the decision to explore the opportunity was not

Charmaine Griffiths, chief executive of the British Heart Foundation, Amar Abbas, chief executive of Youth Action, and Gemma Sherrington, director of fundraising and marketing at Save the Children, will speak at Third Sector’s 2021 Fundraising Conference in May.  The annual conference will be held online this year, as the UK continues to follow the roadmap

The existential crisis posed by the coronavirus pandemic has been felt by everyone working in the sector – and it’s not just those who are paid to work for charities that are feeling the strain. A recent survey by the Association of Chairs found that 62 per cent of chairs reported that they were spending

The Chartered Institute of Fundraising said it has postponed its annual convention as it prioritises issues surrounding harassment in the sector. The CIoF said in a statment it had pushed back the conference from its usual slot at the beginning of July to 27-29 September. Setting out its reasons for delaying the convention, which will

The government should form closer working relationships with voluntary and community sector organisations in preparation for future crises, a new report urges.  The Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership, which was set up in 2018 to provide co-ordination among local and national organisations in the wake of crises, says in a new report today that

A charity devoted to the author Jane Austen has dismissed reports of an interrogation of her alleged links to the slave trade as a “misrepresentation”. Reports in several newspapers this week alleged that Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire would re-evaluate her colonial roots, due to her father’s plantation, in the wake of the Black Lives

Funders should recognise that putting black and minoritised people in certain posts does not necessarily make them anti-racist, according to new research. A study by The Ubele Initiative looks at the extent to which newfound awareness catalysed by the Black Lives Matter movement and the disproportionate impacts of Covid-19 on minoritised communities led to enduring

Charities risk missing out on a share of trillions of pounds of inherited wealth from a “lost generation” of affluent millennial givers unless the sector finds targeted ways to connect with them, new research warns.   A new report by the think tank the Beacon Collaborative shows charities have  preconceptions about the giving habits of the

The charity leaders body Acevo has called for the culture secretary to publicly affirm charities’ right to campaign amid concern that a “vocal minority” of MPs is persistently trying to stifle them. In a letter to Oliver Dowden, Vicky Browning, chief executive of Acevo, says she is becoming increasingly concerned that some MPs are repeatedly

“Substantial gaps” in data are having major implications for how effectively the voluntary sector is able to function, according to a new paper.  What’s missing? Evaluating social sector data gaps,  has been published by the research charity Pro Bono Economics as part of the ongoing Law Family Commission on Civil Society, a two-year initiative launched

The union Unite is calling for all senior leaders at Amnesty International UK to step down after reports of racism at the human rights organisation.  The union said it would put forward a motion calling for all the AIUK senior management team and its chair to resign after accounts from former staff members about their

Dozens of foundations that control hundreds of million of pounds in funding have signed a commitment to do more to tackle the cause and impacts of climate change. The Funder Commitment on Climate Change was launched in November 2019 and has been overseen by the Association of Charitable Foundations since June last year.  The latest

A group of more than 60 charity leaders has put out a statement backing charities’ right to campaign after a group of backbench Conservative MPs called for the government to stop the “worthless work” of organisations “promulgating weird, woke ideas”.  In a parliamentary debate yesterday, following the highly disputed report by the Commission on Race

The Charity Commission has registered a controversial gay, lesbian and bisexual campaign group as a charity despite receiving more than 100 formal objections and uncovering “inflammatory and offensive” social media activity by the organisation. The regulator said yesterday it had registered the LGB Alliance, which was set up in 2019 by a group of activists

Former Amnesty International UK staff have called on its leadership to resign after a report found incidents of overt racism at its international secretariat, including senior staff using the P-word and the N-word. Former AIUK staff spoke to Third Sector after it emerged that an internal review – commissioned following the Black Lives Matter protests

Total pre-pandemic income at children’s charity Barnardo’s fell by about £9m last year, driven in part by a reduction in donations and legacies. The charity’s accounts up to 31 March 2020, filed with Companies House last week, show total income was down to £296.5m, compared with £306m in the previous year.  Total spending was £219.3m, slightly

The Fundraising Regulator and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising have published guidance covering in-person events and cash collections as coronavirus restrictions continue to be eased across the UK.  The two bodies said the two pieces of guidance, one covering events and community fundraising activities and the other focusing on cash collections, were aimed at helping charities