You set yourself up as a wellbeing practitioner and offer your services for free in places like women's shelters, toddler groups, community centres etc. where you run well being groups, arts and crafts etc, 2-6 times per month for free or a reasonable fee, which last 1 hour to 2 hours max each time.
Because you're offering it for free, you then apply to various different charitable grant organisations and say you're helping people with xyz and you're helping this number of people. You also add your blog visitors to the number of people you're declaring as being helped and then the grants awarded to you are thousands and thousands which you then just use to pay yourself an extortionate hourly wage for running a group.
I've just found out about something doing this at a monthly group I attend, where she charges us, and am astonished, and am now wondering how common this is. Me and my friend have looked through some of the 'charity's' online information available and have already found a 9k grant for a course which was run a total of 18 weeks, and the women had to pay to attend anyway. There's no other costs associated with running the charity, as it's just one woman, a small number attend, and the arts and crafts are not an expensive type- just notebooks and tote bags and a few other bits. For 9k. That's just one grant, as plenty more are listed as sponsors on the website. AIBU for being shocked and wondering if this is classed as legitimate and okay to do? This person only runs groups during term time too and does a max of one a week, occasionally two, and has a different grant for each of them.