Ignore for a moment what went wrong with Kids Company and look at the thing in the round. That then explains this:
For several years, charities have had to operate in an increasingly hostile climate. They’ve had to cope with severe public spending cuts and falls in individual donations, while demand for services keeps rising. Some have responded by using more assertive fundraising methods, leading to criticism. Others have used dramatic stories to tug at the heartstrings of politicians who control access to public funds.
Government has no place being involved in the charity business.
While travelling this past week, I’ve had to run the gauntlet of people collecting for Children in Need at the various motorway services. I do not give, nor do I offer any reason for not doing so. I just walk past.
Charity has become a business – a business that thrives on money extorted from us by the state. So whether you support it or not, it gets your money. It is for this reason, I no longer donate. They get my money anyway, so I’ll not be giving more. Although, that said, I would never give to Children in Need, no matter what.
If charities want me to donate, they will have to stop taking the Queen’s shilling and rely entirely on donations from the public – all of them. And the definition of charity must be tightened up so that lobbying groups such as ASH, CASH, War on Sugar or whatever it is called, are no longer defined as charities, for they are nothing of the sort. Then, and only then, will I put my hand in my pocket and donate. Falling donations suggest that, perhaps, I am not alone in my thinking. While the incompetent fiscal activities of Mrs Batmanandrobin and her ilk persist, my wallet remains firmly closed to charities. While I am forced to give my money unwillingly to such egregious organisations as CRUK and the NSPCC, I will not give to charities, for these organisations are already benefiting from my enforced generosity despite my reviling them and everything they stand for.
Ultimately, if a charity cannot survive on donation alone, then people do not want its services sufficiently to support it, so it goes. That’s life.
Oh, and I will never give to charities that use chuggers. Ever. Under any circumstances.
It really annoys me when the media refer to these organisations as charities when they are obviously nothing of the sort. One issue that you don’t mention is that, once one of these fake charities has acquired government funding, the last thing in the world that they want to do is to solve the problem that they were set up to solve. Getting their thieving mitts on more tax-payers’ money becomes their chief objective.
There are many decent charities, who are not parasitical, but ensure donations actually reach their intended targets. But they’re mostly small and tightly-focused concerns, which do not outlast their remit, and which do not have highly-paid “executives”. I would never give to the fake ones, like Oxfam, or any other government pressure group funded by government.
I was eating my dinner whilst watching the TV the other day, when an advert came on, with one of those little African babies covered in flies. I felt compelled to pick up the phone and call the number on the screen. I have to get myself one, they work much better than those sticky strips that hang from the ceiling.
Too many large charities just personify the excellent Iron Law of Bureaucracy proposed by the excellent American SciFi author, Jerry Pournelle:-
Iron Law of Bureaucracy
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
In the UK, check your utility bills, check out your supermarket website; in fact, be vigilant, as most companies support a charity and to my knowledge you have no say on which charity is supported. Even the plastic bag charges go to ‘charity’ and therefore cannot be called a tax; yet again, there is no opt out, or choice of charity.