Charity

DAVOS (January 22, 2020) – SDG500 is a pioneering multimillion-dollar investment platform dedicated to helping achieve the SDGs. The investment platform will use debt and equity to bridge the financing gap between seed and growth stage for hundreds of businesses in emerging and frontier markets. The coalition partners include: United Nations Capital Development Fund, International Trade

The arguments for introducing a second London Marathon are stronger than ever, according to Joe Saxton, co-founder of the charity think tank nfpSynergy. Last year’s marathon raised a record £66.4m for charities. In a blog on the think tank’s website, Saxton argues that adding a second annual marathon would provide a vital new fundraising opportunity.

The Charity Commission has appointed Paul Latham as its next director of communications and policy. Latham, who has been director of communications and strategy at the Competitions and Markets Authority since 2014, will succeed Sarah Atkinson, who became chief executive of the Social Mobility Foundation earlier this month. Latham was previously director of communications at

Staff at Oxfam GB are facing further job cuts as the charity attempts to address a £16m black hole in its accounts, according to a leaked memo to staff. In the memo, featured in The Times newspaper today, Danny Sriskandarajah, chief executive of Oxfam, said core costs would have to be reduced to meet expected

The government has launched a new online portal today to help charities manage safeguarding concerns and allegations. The portal, hosted on the official government website gov.uk, offers step-by-step guidance on what charities should do if they have concerns about safeguarding and helps them identify the right people to contact about their concerns. It will also

Charities will face significant competition from the private sector when trying to attract sufficient staff and volunteers to meet rising demand for their services, and must seriously look at how to attract new talent into the sector, the chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has warned. Karl Wilding yesterday told an event

A small Scottish Christian charity has been left with a bill of more than £100,000 after refusing to back down in an employment tribunal case brought by a former employee that it had no prospect of winning, according to the tribunal judge. Arbroath Town Mission, which ran a building used for church services and youth

The Directory of Social Change has paid tribute to its former long-serving finance director, who has died after a long illness. Satinder Pujji worked for the training and publishing charity between 2002 and 2016, when he was forced to step down by ill health. He died on Sunday at St John’s Wood Hospice in London,

Employees at the accountancy firm KPMG have raised £1m for the children’s charity the NSPCC and are on track to raise another £500,000 by September, the organisations have announced. As part of the partnership, which began in April 2018, the company’s 16,000 employees have taken part in the London Marathon, trekked the Great Wall of

Income at the HIV and sexual health charity the Terrence Higgins Trust increased by more than £10m in 2018/19 after the charity sold its London headquarters, the latest figures show. The charity’s accounts for the year to 31 March 2019, which were filed with Companies House last week, show that its income rose from £13.6m

Charities have “moved forward” in implementing ethical practices in the use of donors’ data over the past few years, according to the Information Commissioner.  Speaking at a conference organised by the law firm Browne Jacobson in central London yesterday, Elizabeth Denham said she believed that in the past few years, charities had moved towards a

A Cardiff-based sight charity has changed its name in an effort to appeal more to people with sight loss across south Wales. Cardiff Institute for the Blind has rebranded to Sight Life after feedback showed that people did not think the old name made it clear that the charity worked across the south Wales region. 

The UK’s replacement for EU funding for communities and charities should be worth £4bn a year if all previous funding commitments are matched and then increased according to inflation and social changes, a new report has said. The report by the Industrial Communities Alliance, which represents 60 local councils across Britain, on the UK Shared

A married couple have been disqualified from acting as trustees for seven years after the Charity Commission found they had spent charitable funds on a holiday, and could not account for more than £300,000 of charitable money. The pair, who were the only trustees of Chichester and District Dog Rescue Society, had also spent £1,456

An Anglican priest who fundraised at a charity event for donations to pay ransoms for hostages held by Islamic State “put the charity at risk”, a Charity Commission report indicates. A commission inquiry report, published today, says a trustee of the Christian aid charity the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, solicited donations

Samaritans has appointed the Alzheimer’s Society’s former leader Jeremy Hughes as its next chief executive. Hughes announced last year that he would step down as chief executive of the dementia care and research charity after 10 years in the role. Samaritans announced today that Hughes would succeed Ruth Sutherland, who said last year that she

Buckingham Palace is unable to clearly say which members of the royal family are patrons of which charity, according to research by the charity consultancy Giving Evidence. The research found that the information held by Buckingham Palace is “inconsistent and incomplete, and very confusing”, and concluded that any figures for the number of charitable patronages

There are “exciting times ahead” for the Institute of Fundraising, its chair Amanda Bringans has said, as the IoF began the search for her successor.  Bringans, who is also the director of fundraising at the British Heart Foundation, will complete her maximum three-year term as chair of the IoF and will step down in July. 

Unicef UK has said it will introduce an equalised parental leave policy for all staff.  Under the charity’s old policy, only gestational parents or one adoptive parent were entitled to 52 weeks’ leave, while new fathers were only able to take two weeks’ leave on full pay.  But the charity said today that under its

The chair of a development trust in Birmingham who is an aide to a Labour Party leadership contender has been suspended from both of her roles after she was accused of posting antisemitic tweets. Salma Hamid, who is the constituency office manager for Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, was the subject of

The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into the charity connected to the Professional Footballers’ Association and will consider whether the organisation’s activities are “exclusively charitable and for the public benefit”. The PFA charity, which is the charitable arm of the trade union for professional footballers, has been the subject of numerous media reports

UK fundraising and how it is perceived is “in the stone age” in comparison with the US, the founder of the Sutton Trust has said. Sir Peter Lampl, who has given £50m to the education and social mobility charity, told The Times newspaper that the wealthiest people in the UK were “terrible” at giving money to

The environmental protest movement Extinction Rebellion has severely criticised the group’s inclusion on a police extremism watch list. Late last week, The Guardian newspaper reported that counter-terrorism police in south-east England had included Extinction Rebellion on a list of extremist ideologies to be reported to the authorities under the Prevent anti-extremism programme. The police had

MANILA (January 13, 2010) – On the afternoon of January 12, 2020, the Taal Volcano located in the province of Batangas in Luzon Island had a steam driven explosion. It has since been in a period of unrest, resulting in 75 volcanic earthquakes with intensities ranging between 2 to 4 within the vicinity of the volcano as

People who volunteer in public sector roles are less satisfied with their work than those who give their time to charities, new research shows. Time Well Spent: Volunteering in the Public Sector, published today by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, shows that almost a quarter of people volunteering in the public sector, such as

Income at the disability car charity Motability has soared to almost six times the previous year’s total after a £400m donation from the charity’s connected company. The accounts for the year to 31 March 2019 show that Motability Operations, which runs a government-backed scheme to provide cars to disabled people, gave the charity £400m, pushing

The social enterprise that runs the National Citizen Service has announced that the retail expert Mark Gifford will succeed Michael Lynas as chief executive. Gifford, who will take up the £150,000-a-year role at the NCS Trust on 2 March, is director for shop and trade at Waitrose & Partners. He is a newcomer to the

More than two-thirds of RSPCA employees have so far refused to sign new staff contracts despite being asked to do so by 20 December, according to the trade union Unite. A Unite document sent to members at the animal welfare charity said only 500 of the charity’s 1,700 staff have signed the contracts, which include

We are deeply concerned that the United Nations Security Council has voted today to scale back humanitarian assistance to millions of acutely vulnerable people in Syria. The UN’s cross-border mechanism enables life-saving assistance to reach over four million people who are in need of humanitarian aid and can only be reached cross-border, rather than from

Two former trustees of an international aid charity have been banned by the Charity Commission for 12 years each after the regulator concluded they had paid themselves £322,500 in unauthorised remuneration. In its inquiry report on the Jole Rider Friends charity, which sent bicycles to Africa, the commission said today that it had contacted the