Why charities will improve

Geoff Mulgan
  Geoff Mulgan
Founder, Demos think tank; Director, Young Foundation
The silly dog

 

CHARITIES THINK OF THEMSELVES as poor and deprived - and many of them are. But they are also privileged - given special treatment compared to other organizations, including an exceptional position on tax.

With those privileges should come responsibilities. Yet a few years ago charities had few obligations to account for what they did. There was little easily accessible data on what they did and little comparisons or analysis.
“Some homeless charities were contributing to the problem”
At one extreme, that led to the absurdity of institutions serving the very rich having charitable status (private schools and the Royal Opera House (see profile)).

Related articles

But there were also problems at the other end of the spectrum. A good example was the world of homeless charities in London. While some were – and are – excellent, motivated organisations, others kept people in hostels and didn’t deal with fundamental needs. In fact they contributed to the problem.

Significantly, there was nowhere for donors to go to find out such things – whether their donations were making real changes, or just feeding charity in the bad meaning of the word: dealing with symptoms rather than causes.
“There is now more information available about all types of organization”
Fortunately there is now more information available about all types of organization in society – largely owing to the Internet. There is also the beginnings of better analysis so that people can make smarter judgements. On the web I can now find out volumes of data about my local school or police force, along with inspectors’ reports and audits.

Although this scrutiny is sometimes resented by the professionals, and although there are important arguments to be had about distortion-by-statistic, the opening up of previously closed institutions has tended to raise standards and made them better servants of the public. The same will be true in the charity world.


Email this page
Print this page

Reader's comments

Contributing to the problem
Submitted by Brenwin (not verified) on Thu, 22/05/2008 - 4:29pm.

I disagree - there will always be 'bad' charities.

I think you're referring to the classic charity conundrum best described by the idiom 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' - having worked in the sector for 20 years I have seen several examples of well-meaning people producing catastrophies. Done a couple myself.

Charity/community work attracts people who are prepared to take risks and do things differently because they are motivated at a root level by injustice, for example, and sometimes this can have unanticipated and unpleasant consequences, but if they never bothered (or weren't allowed to) would society be any better off? Would we have Shelter?


Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.