More on UK Charities’ income sources

Saw this article in the financial times today. Its talking about how uk charities are struggling with getting money. I quote:

Fergus Finlay, head in Ireland of Barnardo’s, a children’s charity, has managed for the past two years to meet rising demand for services such as breakfast clubs for poor children, even though this has meant cutting staff salaries and eating into reserves. In common with the leaders of many other nonprofit organisations around the world, however, he anticipates still greater pressures ahead – and scant prospects for individual voluntary support to compensate for cuts in tax-funded public money.

See what I mean? why are charities getting funded by taxes? A fascinating graph gives some fascinating if incomplete information.

Now check out the middle graph and see where the 4th element is. This is Income from other sources, presumably from the government sector. I tried to see the original report, but it carefully avoids specifying where or what this “other sources” is. Now when you see that majority of the funding is actually coming from other sources, one is very surprised that the report does not break out this “other”. One could say that this is from the corporate sector but I rather doubt it.

Here is a partial list of schemes and projects that you can apply to to get government funding. Here is another government site itself which talks about what to do to get funding from the government. They even have a bloody separate domain name. www.governmentfunding.org.uk. This is all taking taxes from you and I, and giving them to charities without asking us and then the charities income is also tax free. And now they are talking about matching voluntary contributions with tax funded funds. What on earth? What on earth is this? This isnt fair and this is economic madness.

A charity funded by the Govt is not a charity #ukpolitics

So there is this charity called as Booktrust Charity. It does good stuff, like giving out books for people to read when they are children. For me as a confirmed bibliophile, I like the idea, get more people to read about it.

But here’s what is confusing me. This is supposed to be a charity? So where is the charitable giving? Relying on the government to fund you means that you arent a charity, you are just another government department. Do you think that the government has some other sources of money other than mandatory extraction of money from your pocket and mine via taxes.

So the government, very rightly, said if you are a charity, then get charitable donations, why are you relying on the govt to fund philanthropic activities?

These charities which are reliant on govt funding screw it up for the other charities like ours. We do not rely on government funding. We rely on our volunteers who go about getting money, running to raise money, etc. etc. So how come they get govt funding while we dont? Because we are based upon the principle that if its charity, then its not going to be based upon forcible extraction of money.

Everybody who is backing this charity to have government funding, you dont want a charity, you want public investment. Bah!, this is intellectual incoherence of the first order.