To no longer donate to charities

[Foronenightonly01]

Issues akin to those being reported in the papers of ‘One Young World’ mean that when you give money now, more often than not it seems to go into the pockets of profiteers. I do still help out locally giving my time that I can spare to projects in my area and I’ll give extra in scenarios where I know exactly to whom my cash is going. I’m so saddened that people are being conned to lining the pockets of wealthy greedy pretend do-gooders - more than anything else recently this has made me realise how f@cked our Country is. So bloody sad.

And for those of you complaining about CEOs getting paid a decent wage, do you have this problem with corporate business leaders earning a competitive salary?

Your anger would be better directed towards corporate organisations who pollute and destroy our planet or don't pay tax. Or the current bunch of arseholes running the country, sending thousands into poverty. Not the charities trying to help them!

Honestly give your heads a bloody big wobble!!

Please remember that Volunteers aren't without cost to the charity either though. Taking on volunteers requires essentially the same amount of investment as taking on staff, recruitment, retention, support, supervision, rewards & recognition, policies & procedures etc... again, nothing is going to run on air!

Do you think people who work in a charity should be paid less than their commercial counterpart? - because many of them are.

Charities have regular staff - accountants, IT, receptionists, media teams - why shouldn't these people get paid a competitive wage? They have a professional job that also happens to have a great purpose behind it. Don't penalise them for it!

I stopped giving to national charities years ago.

Now I support the church foodbank/soup kitchen and local animal rescue because I know the people who volunteer there.

I think it’s strange people are surprised that charities do in fact need buildings and staff to be able to run. And people with experience to run them. I have personal experience of the way Cancer Research UK allocates grant money and I can assure you that huge strides have been made in cancer science due to the money people have given.
But yes, they do have buildings and staff and highly paid people at the top. To be a successful charity you need those

You are the one being naive here. Read the reports of this clearly - one woman pocketed £440k and her daughter just shy of £200k.

I'm guessing you think Jack Monroe is a saint, too, and donate to her so she can hang on to her Tracey Emin?

I'm a trustee (unpaid) of a small disability charity. At the moment we run entirely on volunteers. We are looking at hiring a manger for the admin and fundraising as we are struggling to cope with volunteers. We have a lot of volunteers. They are great but every one needs to be trained and DBS checked. A lot only stay a few months because they are doing DofE or go off to University or their work or family circumstances change. We are constantly having to fund raise to run the facility. Our running costs are approximately £100k a year and rising. If we appoint a manager it will be a big proportion of our costs , with salary, NI pension and additional insurance our costs will increase by 50%, so it will be about 1/3 of total cost but the valuable facility may not be able to continue otherwise.
Still think it's unreasonable?

Exactly!

It is clear from some of the posts on the first page of this thread that many of you who have commented have no idea what actually goes on behind the doors of a charity and have made your decision based on Daily Fail type articles, which is really sad to me.

I know a lot of charities who run completely from volunteer work and, yes, sometimes expenses do need to be paid for travel, sometimes rent for the charity office might need to be paid. If they run helplines, there is a cost behind owning a free phone number - did you know this?

Do you think volunteers should financially keep the charity afloat themselves? Who else do you think charities would get money from? Some get no government funding.

Why do you think that everything should be done completely at the expense of a volunteer when you grudge donating a few pound to the service yourself?

Maybe you should donate your time to a charity of your choice instead.

YABU. There are plenty of very genuine charities and it's easy enough to identify the causes that are worth giving to.

I work for a very high profile charity and it is run impeccably. We provide a lot to many, and we can only do so because of the generosity of so many donors. No one is living the high life, the staff are genuine and dedicated. It is sad and frustrating that charities run improperly damage other charities.

Many charities are so badly run from within that they waste so much money. I audited a few many years ago and was shocked at how poorly they were run. I've posted on 2 threads recently where people worked for charities and wanted to leave because working there was so bad.

This.

I was a lobbyist for a charity. Charities are allowed to campaign politically - just not party politically. So it was fine for me to lobby politicians for our goals (our founding goal in fact was to campaign against a particular type of animal cruelty), but it would not have been fine for we as a charity to endorse any party as being better for our cause.

This I did on a full time basis and yes, I was paid (although below the average salary for my profession) and yes, I did work in a building with a computer provided by the charity! And I did get results, too. There are pieces of legislation in operation right now because of the work we did, which improve animal and human welfare. Nobody else was going to campaign for that. No business would have taken it on. Charities campaign to give a voice to those who wouldn’t otherwise have one.

If it makes anyone feel better about my dreadful insistence on actually earning some money, I was paid quite poorly and ended up physically unwell because of it, so… yay? And then I left and now no longer work in the sector, taking a decade or so of experience with me. So… yay, again?

It's fine to select the charities you want to support based on how they use their resources. Or indeed to say you'll only support direct through your time, or say, food to a food bank.
It's not fine to tar the entire sector with the same brush based on poor journalism and a narrow mind set.
There is a huge amount of societal good that comes from our charities.

As stated above, good governance costs money.

Your small, local charities need support more than ever. I bet they bloody wish they could spend every penny on services but the world doesn’t work like that.

I work for a charity that supports people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness. Our premises rent is £3k a month. We have repairs that need about £6k just to keep the building safe.

Should we just give up? I’d get paid a hell of a lot more in the private sector and have free fruit and a nicer laptop.

@PrincessButtercupToo name the charities who pay their board members. Or did you mean executive directors rather than trustee directors?

Trustees are not supposed to take a salary from the charity they volunteer for.

The small charities will not have the high running costs.

I volunteer for an animal charity where over 99% of the money raised goes to the causes. They pay a little bit in bank fees which accounts for the remainder of costs.

If you go onto the Charities Commission website you can download their accounts and view what they spend their money on.

Well robots don’t run them? If they don’t have a building or staff how can they function at all…..

I will stick my head above the parapet. I am chair of a small hospital charity.
We run a hospital coffee shop and use profits to directly help the patients.
All trustees are volunteers and do not receive any expenses.
We try so hard to get as much as we can for as little money. It costs me money in petrol and car parking. I probably work one day a week on admin contacting people and sorting out problems.
Despite our best efforts we will have overheads. We have to pay bank charges and auditing charges for example.
People will often give us eg a six pack of underwear as a donation. This is much appreciated and I know why people do it BUT we have searched round and can usually buy wholesale at half the price in the sizes we need.
We are still very grateful.
We have been going for nearly 160 years and in an ideal world we wouldn't exist. Unfortunately the world is far from ideal.

It's expensive to run a large organisation. Big responsibilities command big wages. Salaries and benefits need to be competitive to attract the best.
It also costs money to influence change. What you might see as a waste, is actually often about getting the attention of the right people. You can't influence government with part time volunteers from a back room office in the arse end of nowhere.

IMO the bigger issue is that a lot of these charities need to exist in the first place. And for that, our government is to blame.

I don’t believe a charity worker should be paid at a lower rate than a peer in the corporate sector. Part of what charities are all about is campaigning for equity which starts with its own people. We are paid fairly, we are provided with good quality equipment and work in a beautiful environment. It helps us to stay motivated, perform well and deliver to a high standard. Our clients are treated with utmost respect and we provide to them what we would wish for ourselves. Our donors enable us to do this and the number of lives we change and the extent to which they change is amazing. My colleagues are very passionate about service and community.

A lot of people I know are leaving the charity sector because they're not paid well enough (charity workers including CEOs are usually paid less than their commercial counterparts - you can't expect a volunteer or minimum wage worker to run a complex operation like The Red Cross, Cancer Research UK etc) and because of burn out - they often work long and hard days.

Also with the current govt, charities are needed more than ever - food banks, homeless shelters, medical research and health/community care services, domestic abuse services are all charities.

Spot on!

I have a friend who worked for a charity - she has worked previously in a high profile job in London and excitedly moved down south to take on the Charity role - she lasted 6 months. She felt the charity take on highly paid senior people (on not much less than a London wage) basically a bunch of people who where useless & would never get an job in professional role elsewhere.

Ive said why she didn’t report the charity, for her she does respect the people at the ground and the work the charity did - but had none for the charity leadership team and she didn’t want the funding to be impacted. She volunteers & finds other ways to support.