The government has announced a variety of measures to help boost volunteering and charity in the Giving White Paper, launched by David Cameron at an event in Milton Keynes on Monday, May 23rd.
The document includes pledges of more than £40 million over the next two years.
Measures include creating new ways for people to donate time and money, holding competitions with cash prizes, and creating a new committee to give out awards. A selection of charity organisations will receive funds.
Alison Baum, CEO of Best Beginnings, a small charity dedicated to ending child health inequalities in the UK, told The Epoch Times: “Anything that can be done to make it easier for people to give is a good thing.
“I hope that it will encourage and enable more people to give. It is about thinking differently about how to connect with charities.”
Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), also welcomed the white paper. “It is encouraging that the government has considered a range of innovative and varied approaches to remove barriers to the giving of time and money and targeting under-represented groups,” he said in a statement.
The Institute of Fundraising released a statement saying, “It is imperative that government continues to support, promote and work in partnership with both the voluntary sector and commercial businesses if we are to turn these first changes into a sustainable reality.”
The Institute urged the government to “maintain the pressure on local authorities to ensure that charities and the voluntary sector are not disproportionately affected by cuts”.
The white paper reveals the government has already held talks with ATM companies, including LINK, in order to allow people to donate to charities using cash machines.
It sets out to encourage businesses to make payroll giving available to employees. Ms Baum said: “In the UK, only 3 per cent of people do payroll giving, which is very tax efficient giving. In American, 30 per cent of people do payroll giving. We, as a charity, actively encourage payroll giving.”
The government will also promote “complementary currencies” such as the “Spice” scheme, already in use in Wales, which will receive £400,000 from the government and from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. People can earn Spice “time credits” for working on charity projects, which they can use to access events, training, and leisure services.
Steve Lawless, chief executive of Impetus, a medium-sized local charity in Brighton and Hove that promotes volunteering, criticised what he called “incentivising volunteering”.
“People currently want to volunteer because it increases their sense of social purpose, value and wellbeing, not because they will receive some kind of material reward. The reward is intrinsic to the volunteering itself,” he wrote on his blog.
“Our research for the City Volunteering Strategy demonstrated that plenty of people want to volunteer. However the opportunities are largely determined by organisations capacity to support and manager volunteers. The current spending cuts are significantly reducing this capacity,” he continued. “If you start giving people incentives you start putting a value on the volunteering, which is unlikely to reflect the true value of that volunteering and undermines the sense of social value. This came out quite conclusively in Richard Titmus’ comparison on blood doning in the US and UK. Where a market was introduced the quality of the donation fell.
“The financial support for infrastructure is good but comes just after a number of infrastructure organisations have had their grants cut.”
Ms Baum disagreed with this viewpoint. “Some people need more of a nudge,” she said. “Often what happens with volunteering is that if people have a good volunteering experience they'll end up doing more and more volunteering, and it often leads to many good things. I think that the joys of it often aren’t realised until you get stuck in.”
The “Challenge Prizes” scheme will “reward the best solutions for a series of volunteer challenges” with up to £100,000, states the white paper. Winners will chose which charity or social enterprise receives the prize.
The UK’s leading online charity Youthnet, which is aimed at 16 to 25 year olds, will receive over £1 million over two years. Youthnet runs three online services and aims to “provide emotional support to young people through online advice and guidance, and help them give back by providing a fast, easy route to all types of volunteering”, according to the Youthnet.org website. It will share its data with other organisations through Facebook.
Philanthropy UK, which connects wealthy individuals with charities that need their support, will receive £700,000.
A Social Action Fund will support the training of volunteer managers, including ex-civil servants.
The public service website Direct.gov.uk, which gets 4.5 million visits per week, will feature charity promotions. Charities and voluntary groups will be granted access to government buildings. All ministers have agreed to a one-day volunteering challenge.
