Tampon Tax Charities

[nettie434]

Interview on Woman’s Hour with spokeswoman from Women’s Resource Centre claiming that money from tampon tax is going to big charities like Mind and Crisis rather than specialist women’s charities. About 10 minutes in after interview with Louise Redknapp:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003z82

Going to see if Women’s Resource Centre have list of affiliated charities as that would be useful for those of us who don’t already know of a charity for women we’d like to donate to.

There's a campaign to get this money directed to small local charities, who currently may find it difficult to meet the criteria for application.

www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/women-s-charities-urge-dcms-to-ringfence-tampon-tax-money.html

I did ask Penny Mordaunt about this in the webchat. Its been a main news item after allocation of the tax for several years running - especially that year they gave a chunk to Life. And she is the Minister for Women and Equalities.

She didn't know anything about it, and said she would look into it.

I suspect some of the issue probably is that the big charities have the resources and experience to write shit hot funding proposals that tick all of the boxes. It is hard for smaller charities to compete with this.

Agree that ringfencing for charities that work exclusively with women could be helpful.

MIND have money to deliver peer support to women through grants to other organisations, some of this has gone to women's orgs, but some to larger organisations who want to develop services for women, the list is here www.mind.org.uk/media/34569140/women-side-by-side-projects-for-announcement.pdf?_ga=2.51607273.1559167512.1554890729-1220683149.1512419345

It includes St Mungos who were in the news this weekend for allowing an abuser into their women's project....

There are some small women's organisations on the list though. I know a couple of them local to me that do good work.

I should also say that most of the funding here was for £10k, which is significant to small women's projects but not so much to larger charities.

This has been discussed on other threads but i dont know how to find the comments!

This has the full details of the current campaign which is different to earlier ones www.womensgrid.org.uk/?p=9390

I think the complaints are about the recent allocations which in fact are large grants which inherently exclude many women's groups who get by on low or stop start budgets and so will be financially assessed as not able to "manage" large grants. Only Southall South Sisters got a grant as a women's group.

re supporting women's charites, WRC members are primarily local groups reliant on local government funding as services providers (and come under the pressure of funding to "mission drift" eg no longer being women only).

One way of supporting women's groups without money is to find out is they need a local support group to help make their case to funders by showing they have local support. And / or if you feel able (and training can be given) is to join the management committee.

These are the decision makers, especially policy, and too often are there as it looks good on a professional CV to say you are an MC member and too often dont have any political, least of all feminist, analysis. So securing money at any cost can easily become the over riding narrative.

Agree that ringfencing for charities that work exclusively with women could be helpful.

When George Osborne announced that the tax would be redirected, he did clearly state 'women's charities'. Although he was criticized for that.

And I agree that the money given would benefit smaller charities far more than the larger ones.

The larger amount of money that is given to Community Foundations gets through to grassroots women's groups if they apply to their local CF.