dale lane

I read something which surprised me in the Guardian today:

Some of the biggest and most famous charity brands are now all but dependent on the state. These include Barnardo’s (78% of annual income), NCH (88%) and Leonard Cheshire (88%) … the National Family and Parenting Institute (97% state funded) … Even conservative estimates show that the sector now derives 38% of its funding from statutory sources, compared with 35% from individuals, which means that the state is now the biggest “donor” to charities.

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See this post from last October for background. To sum up, it talks about the future of Millennium Volunteers, a government programme which we deliver in Solent Youth Action. In particular, wondering about the future of the scheme.

I heard an update about this today in a statement issued from the Cabinet Office:

As an Millennium Volunteers (MV) delivery partner you are aware that the management of the MV programme is transferring from DfES to the Cabinet Office from 1st April 2007 … The funding for this period is secure and the MV programme will be funded in its current form until 30th September 2007.

The Cabinet Office wishes v to take on management of the programme from 1st April 2007 as recommended by the Russell Commission. We wanted to update you on the discussions that are currently taking place regarding this suggestion.

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I’ve been having a look through some results of the Hampshire LPSA survey conducted at the end of last year. LPSA stands for ‘Local Public Service Agreement‘, and are voluntary agreements negotiated between a local authority – in this case, Hampshire County Council, and the Government. The idea is to improve local public services by focusing on targeted outcomes from Government.

In order to measure progress on the targets in these agreements, Hampshire County Council gets MORI to conduct surveys and research. A lot of this is public information, available on the web, which makes it very useful to charities like us, who can’t afford to carry out such large scale research.

It means that not only do we get the raw statistics, but also the benefit of statistical analysis included with the published figures. Reports often also include comparisons with surveys conducted by MORI for other authorities in recent years, “intended to act as a context in which to place findings for Hampshire and to aid in the interpretation of results”. This makes them a valuable resource when developing and evaluating the projects we provide for our local community.

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I spent about three hours this morning doing the first half of my MiDAS refresher training. Today was theory – next week will be the practical.

I occasionally drive the minibuses for some of the youth activities that we run in SYA (although this has become increasingly less frequent as we have grown… which is a shame, really).

I wont reproduce the training here, but I will pick out some of the bits that I found interesting…

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In April 2007, changes made in the Employment Rights Act 1996 start taking effect, which improve the entitlements for employees who become pregnant. I’ve been reading a bit about what these entitlements will become.

I started by reading up on what expectant mothers are entitled to…

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From Intelligent Giving:

ADMIN COSTS ARE DEAD. With the new accounting system enforced by the Charity Commission (“SORP 2005”), which nearly all charities are now observing, it is now impossible to work them out – and we will have to drop them from our site in the New Year.

The change represents an over-reaction (presumably an uncontested one) by the voluntary sector’s lobbyists. Clearly the public wasn’t consulted about the new SORP; but the public wants at least *some* clue of how much is spent on support costs. Now it won’t have anything to go on at all.

It’s a pyrrhic victory and a big shame: it won’t increase the public’s confidence in charities; it will just make people more suspicious.

I haven’t really got anything to add to this – I’m still in holiday-mode so haven’t looked into this any further. I’ll try and find out more in the New Year, but thought it was interesting enough to post now.

I’ve mentioned before that the Millennium Volunteers’ Award of Excellence (currently the main accredited award we give to young people in Solent Youth Action) might not be around forever, and that one of the focus’ of the new V charity is formal recognition for volunteering. As such, it is useful to know what alternative programmes are around.

Which ones will the young people that we work with get the most of? Which one has the highest profile and, which are likely to be around the longest?

With this in mind, I’ve been reading about the Youth Achievement Awards run by UK Youth – a national youth work charity.

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