A council sold acres of land to a neighbourhood centre for one pound. The project, in a deprived area of Leicester, now gets a steady income from the ground rents on houses it…
A council sold acres of land to a neighbourhood centre for one pound. The project, in a deprived area of Leicester, now gets a steady income from the ground rents on houses it…
The relentless rise of high-street charity shops is probably over. Yet charity shops can survive and thrive, if they adapt to new conditions and respond to what customers want. My piece for Third…
Third Sector organisations were left reeling when Northamptonshire County Council’s financial crisis came to a head this year. The sudden loss of grants, with no warning, defied financial logic. It required cuts to…
Social prescribing is regularly described as a win-win. Which it very likely is—for patients and for health services. The trouble is, it’s delivered by the voluntary and community sector. And putting cash-strapped organisations…
I started researching an article on unpopular charities. After a while I decided that there probably weren’t any. Just ones that the public reacted badly to, because they didn’t really know what they…
Anyone interested in the salaries paid in the charity sector has a simple option—look at the job ads. But browsing ads is time-consuming and hard to do systematically. It is easy to miss…
I wrote a story for Third Sector magazine on the surprising rise in the numbers of staff employed by small and medium-sized charities. Editor Andy Hillier suggested I added to the Charity Commission…
Say data breach and many people automatically think massive scale, global and relatively anonymous. Email addresses, usernames, passwords. It ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes breaches are small, local and very personal. This month a…
Last week two news outlets quoted sections of an email by a Conservative MP to his party’s chair. They blanked with asterisks the middle letters of a five-letter word. Here is the extract…
Smooth is a good word—if you want to describe flattening something, getting rid of lumps. It’s not such a good word when it’s used instead of something more accurate. As it increasingly is….