AFTER TEN MONTHS of negotiations, Intelligent Giving is finally a registered charity. This has made me feel extremely happy – as I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. Yet on that other post SimonK asked a good question: how did we find the registration experience? There’s an easy answer: difficult.

To give some impression of the work we had to put in to secure registration, we’ve published the text of our correspondence with the Commission. First, we made a collection of the letters we exchanged with the Commission. And second, we’ve uploaded the 27-page dossier we sent to the Commission to back the letters up, earlier this month.

If you’ve got the stamina, you’ll see that this correspondence took a lot of time and energy to write. Consistently, the Commission was punctilious to the point of pedantry in picking apart the answers we gave to their questions. I was seriously impressed by the Commission’s persistence – but I did wonder whether being quite so picky was the best use of everyone’s time.

In fact, as I wrote the dossier I was reminded of my time studying medieval intellectual history. Just as St Anselm apparently proved the existence of God by constructing arguments which made no reference to real, lived experience; so I proved our charitable status by reference only to the Commission’s publications, proceedings at their board-meetings, speeches made by the Chief Executive and aspects of the Freedom of Information Act.

It was like inhabiting a weird, parallel universe. My arguments were so painstaking and intricate I sometimes forgot what they meant. Yet in the end the Scholastics at the Commission were happy – and so, as a result, am I.

I suppose what this illustrates is that registering as a charity is a complex legal procedure. The Commission, for its own sake, had to be satisfied that we would be charitable in every sense. They had to make sure we couldn’t wriggle out of our commitments. But answering its queries put an enormous stress on our already-strained resources.

Yes, in the end the registration experience was useful. It let us see our operations in a new light. But in the process it seriously curtailed our real, charitable work.

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