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Three Scenes From Charity Life

Daily Telegraph, December 2006

Here are three scenes from charity life.

Scene One (an office building in Liverpool)
An elderly man, dressed neatly but rather shabbily, walks into the building and tells the girl at the desk he wants to make a donation to a little charity he read about in the paper. He hands over a brown envelope, refuses to give a name or fill in a Gift Aid form and walks out again. When they open the envelope it contains £1,000 in used notes.

Scene Two (the board room of one of Britain's best-known charities)
The chief executive and his young marketing director discuss their latest fundraising campaign. It will cost many thousands of pounds but they agree they have no choice if they want to maintain their profile.

Scene Three (an office somewhere in Whitehall)
A committee made up of senior civil servants and advisers considers appeals from several of the biggest charities in the country. The charities will not be disappointed. There is a lot of money in the kitty.

These are not imaginary scenarios. My own small charity was the beneficiary of the old man's generosity. I know nothing about him. Maybe he's an international drug dealer in disguise, laundering his ill-gotten gains. More likely, he's a thrifty old gent reaching the end of his days who has all he needs for his modest life and wants to do a little good with the money he has saved. But he hates fuss and needs no thanks.

I am also familiar with Scene Two. I once served on the board of one of our biggest charities and I know how difficult and expensive it can be to keep the cash flowing in.

And I know about Scene Three thanks to some important research by Richard Smith and Philip Whittington published in a pamphlet by the Centre for Policy Studies. What it reveals is that something slightly worrying is happening to the charity industry in this country.

I use the word 'industry' advisedly. Charities employ nearly 600,000 paid workers and another 3m volunteers. The value of that unpaid work has been put at more than £15bn. The charities' income has risen sharply in the past few years and is now more than £26bn. There are 6,000 new charities registered every year.

So what's worrying about that? The statistics surely tell a story of unqualified success, a tribute to the generosity of this great nation. Well, yes and no.

There are certainly generous people. The odds are, dear reader, that you are one of them. The results of fundraising appeals suggests that the readers of this newspaper give more to good causes than any other. But your generosity is dwarfed by one donor in particular, which explains Scene Three. The really big donor is the government.

State funding now accounts for a bigger slice of the total income of British charities than voluntary donations, and by a hefty margin. This raises serious, and in some ways troubling questions. First, though, the positive side.

Charities tend to spend money more efficiently than governments and there is less risk of corruption. If the government gives a million to Save the Children or Christian Aid it's not likely to end up in an African politician's Swiss bank account or paying for a container full of AK 47s and rocket launchers. And the best of the charities know where the greatest need is. They employ some extraordinarily dedicated people who devote their lives to helping others.

But charitable donations are like chopping wood. When you split logs you get the exercise from doing it and the warmth when you burn the wood. And there are multiple benefits from helping charities. Jemima Khan told Easy Living magazine this week that she is filled with guilt over her immense wealth and that's the reason she does charity work.

So the donor benefits; the charity gets the cash and the fabric of society is strengthened as well. Sociologists have proved over and over again what is patently obvious. A community is stronger if its people are involved in helping others.

The danger of government taking over the responsibility for funding charities is that we end up feeling we needn't bother. True, it's still our money that is given (why do we persist in talking about 'government money' when there's no such thing?) but it is no longer our decision. It is made for us.

And most of that money goes to the big charities. The biggest 500 get 35 per cent. of their income from the state compared with 29 per cent. from the general public. They'd be in serious trouble without it. They're spending more and more money on fundraising and marketing, not far short of £500m in the past three years. The CPS research suggests that it is costing them almost £2 for every extra £1 they raise.

The charities argue that it's not that simple and money spent on publicity has long-term benefits too, but it seems the public is not convinced. A MORI poll showed that only 10 per cent. of the people they asked agreed with this statement: "When I give money to charity, I feel confident that most of it will go directly to the cause". That's not because they don't trust charities, an overwhelming majority do, but other surveys suggest they trust small charities more.

Partly that's because most people seem to want their hard-earned donations spent directly to alleviate suffering rather than on campaigns. The RSPCA spent a lot of money campaigning against fox hunting and the NSPCC did the same trying to persuade us to stop hitting our children. There's also some resistance to what the CPS calls the increasingly 'corporate style' of charity. The average top salary at large charities is now £83,000.

You can see why they do it. Competition between the big charities is fiercer than it's ever been and they want the best people. But with all that lobbying and rebranding and marketing going on, someone is bound to get squeezed. That someone is the small charity, and this is where I have to declare my interest.

My charity is called the Kitchen Table Charities Trust (KTCT) and it's just over a year old. It may seem mad to add one more to the 160,000 charities already registered in this country but most of them struggle desperately to stay afloat and what the KTCT does is throw some of them a lifebelt.

They are so small they can scarcely afford the kitchen table at which most of them were born, let alone a team of fundraisers and swanky offices to impress corporate fat cats. But they don't half pack a big punch.

What prompted me to get involved was the death of my father. He left me a small legacy and I wanted it to go to a cause close to his heart. He'd lost his sight when he was a child, never properly recovered it and never had a decent education. He would have loved to think his money had helped some of the world's poorest and disabled children.

I went to Tanzania; a desperately poor country that's beginning to get its act together, intending to set up a residential school for orphans. God knows there are plenty of them, mostly thanks to AIDS. But it was a silly idea, if only because there were already so many people with vastly more knowledge of what was needed than me and who were already doing remarkable things. What they did not have was enough money. The one thing I reckoned I might be better at than them was raising it.

Willie Fulton is a retired businessman from Merseyside. He and his wife Gail are shining examples of the many British people who have set up and run tiny charities in poor countries. Theirs, the Mango Tree, cares for orphans in Tanzania. They don't plonk them in institutions. They give them the help they need to stay in their villages and go to school, which is better for the community and much better for the children.

It costs a derisory £4 for two uniforms and a few pens and exercise books, without which the child cannot go to primary school. It's almost embarrassing to think you can change a life for the price of a bottle of plonk. The KTCT has helped the Mango Tree and they're now starting up another orphan support programme in Kenya.

I like to think we've made a real difference in just a year. We have funded micro-banks, those wonderful institutions that typically lend widows a few pounds to buy a sewing machine and set up a tiny business.

We've paid for a workshop where men with polio are taught to make children's toys so they no longer need to beg to support their families.

We've helped charities that take orphaned children off the streets of big cities, give them a bed, an education and a bit of love. We've given villages a decent water supply and village schools decent sanitation. I've become a bit of an expert on lavatories that need no water. I recommend (no kidding) the Blair Toilet: guaranteed to leave no nasty smells.

We've paid for a new ward in a charity hospital in Dar es Salaam where no-one is turned away, even if they can't afford the few pounds for an operation to remove their cataracts. I wish my father had been with me when I watched a rickety old bus bringing blind people from their villages to the CCBRT hospital and taking them back a few days later able to see.

What we haven't done is spend any money on administration. The excellent Liverpool Council for Social Services got us registered and keeps our accounts for a modest sum and that's it. No salaries, no offices, no overheads. And no money from the government.

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Breaking The Cycle

Daily Mail, December 2006

You might expect the charity world to be full of charitable people: meek, gentle souls who would never hurt a fly, always anxious to seek consensus rather than stir up controversy. You would be wrong.

Kind and caring they might very well be. Given a choice between my daughter marrying a drugs dealer and a charity worker, or even, God forbid, a journalist; I'd most definitely plump for the charity worker. But meek they are not. They love an argument and in this competitive world there is always something to argue about.

Usually it's money. This is the time of year when we dig deeper into our pockets than at any other. There are plenty of people out there who give only at Christmas and there's not a charity in the country that isn't after your precious donation.

Unsurprisingly, they all think they can spend it to better effect than anyone else. The problem is persuading you. How do you compare the relative merits of a campaigning charity that wants us to stop smacking children with another that wants the government to build affordable housing for poor families? How do you choose between the hospital in a rich country like Britain that needs a new scanner and the leper hospital in a dirt-poor country that doesn't have enough beds?

This is where the marketing departments come in. And this is where the rows start. The big row this Christmas is over cows and goats. You will have seen the adverts. It sometimes seems that half the third world charities in Britain want us to send animals or chickens to poor countries. The other half thinks it's a terrible idea.

Who's right? Before I tell you what I think, let me declare an interest. I do not like cows. And the reason I don't like them is that they don't like me. I learned this the hard way nearly thirty years ago when I bought a dairy farm in west Wales.

The herd came with the farm and I got it cheap. There was a good reason for that. The farmer who sold it to me had bought rejects, the sort of animals that go for a song in the auction ring because no-one else wants to buy them. Sometimes they are (to use a technical expression) clapped out. Their udders sag and they're about ready to end up as the cheapest sort of stewing meat in school dinners. Often it's because they have horrible warts on their teats or they are "kickers".

The effect is the same. One minute you're milking away happily, washing the teats and slipping the milking units on, anticipating breakfast when they're all finished. The next you're lying on your back in a pile of dung wondering whether your arm is broken or just very badly bruised.

The third time it happened to me I lost my nerve. The more that cows sense you are scared of them the twitchier they get, and the more often you end up on your back. So when it came time to sell my wretched herd I did so with a little song in my heart.

I was, admittedly, a bad cowman. Good ones love their cows and the cows love them right back. But even I understood enough about cows to know that they are high maintenance animals. Not, perhaps, on the scale of a Premier League footballer's wife, but you get out what you put in.

If you want a decent yield you have to give them plenty of good, nutritious food and even more water. Cows drink a vast amount, especially when it's hot. And there are two things in short supply in the poor regions of Africa: food and water.

Then we come to goats. I have nothing against them personally. They can't kick like a cow and they're much cleverer. Nor are they particularly fussy about what you feed them. Offer a cow a bale of hay that looks a bit mouldy and she'll turn up her delicate nose like a super-model faced with a deep fried Mars bar. But goats will eat anything. And that is precisely the problem.

On a hill farm in Wales they can be the ideal animal. When cows graze they wrap their thick tongues around the crass and rip it out. They waste as much grass as they eat. Sheep and goats don't do that. They nibble with their sharp little teeth and leave a field looking as though it has just been mowed by the groundsman who cares for centre court at Wimbledon.

When the grass is gone, or there are only tough old thistles left, the sheep will insist on being moved and if they are left they will starve. Not the goats. They will always find something to eat. If there's no grass they'll eat the thistles and when all the thistles have gone they will start on the hedges. When the leaves have been munched away they will eat the young shoots. And then they will break out of the field and find something else to eat. Anything else.

That is why goats must be either tethered or firmly enclosed. And that, mostly, is not how it works in much of Africa. I have seen goats everywhere - even in trees, right up in the high branches.

Unlike cows and sheep, they are not herd animals. They spread out, like marauding armies in search of anything and everything. If they find some tender young saplings which might one day turn into strong trees performing the vital function of binding the soil and preserving what little rain falls, you can say goodbye to the saplings. The goat is not concerned about the desperately delicate ecology of these African lands. It is concerned only with lunch.

Goats are responsible for massive environmental degradation throughout the more arid regions of Africa. I have seen entire areas that once supported nomads with their wandering herds reduced to not much more than desert. It is a heartbreaking sight.

We have all admired the proud Masai herdsman, standing erect and gazing into the distance while his cows graze around him. He is disappearing. Too many years of drought have left the land parched and the grass that fed the cows withered. Too many goats have completed the destruction.

Yes, they produce milk for their owners. But they're no different from humans. They produce milk only if they have young to suckle and that means more goats. And more. There are simply too many goats roaming the semi-arid regions of Africa.

Now let's be clear about one thing. No British charity would be stupid enough to use your money to send goats or cows to Africa and let them roam wild. All of them insist that they give them only to families or villages where they will be properly tended and that they provide the wherewithal for their owners to care for them. But there is a worrying disparity in some of the figures quoted.

Some charities say that a donation of £70 will buy a cow. Others, like Send a Cow, say it costs more than ten times as much. And of course they're right. It would be madness to hand over a cow to a family that could not afford to house, feed and care for her.

Oxfam "offer" goats for £24 a head and say they are great gifts. They say sixty years of experience has shown them that giving animals to poor families can "provide a precious lifeline to communities striving to work their way out of poverty". Oxfam is a superb charity with a magnificent record of working for the most deprived people in the world. And yet it is at war with other charities over this issue.

The World Land Trust and Animal Aid say it is "madness" to send animals and chickens to areas where they will add to the problems of drought and desertification. You might expect such an attack from Animal Aid whose concern, obviously is for the welfare of animals.

Its director, Andrew Tyler, points out that there are major animal welfare issues involved in sending animals to, for instance, the Horn of Africa. Earlier this year vast numbers of cattle died, either because of drought or because they were washed away in the floods that followed the abnormally dry weather. But he makes a broader point.

If we are concerned about feeding hungry people, encouraging them to have more animals is not the way to help them. Meat is a very expensive way of getting protein. It takes at least eight pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.

So is it vegetarianism we should be encouraging? Well maybe, but I think we should take a different approach. And this is where I must declare my second interest.

A year ago I wrote in these pages about the folly of sending large amounts of aid to African countries whose rulers were so corrupt that the cash ended up in Swiss bank accounts or the tills of fancy Paris couturiers. I described some of the tiny charities I had seen doing wonderful work for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world and said I wanted to set up my own charity to raise money for them. I was totally unprepared for what followed.

More than 2,000 of you wrote to me, almost everyone enclosing a small cheque. That money got my charity, the Kitchen Table Charities Trust (KTCT) off to a flying start and since then, I'm delighted to be able to say, we have built on it. What we have been able to do is make grants, usually not much more than £5,00 a time to these tiny charities.

Many of them have been set up and are run by British people who have given their cash and their time to helping people less fortunate than themselves. I am full of admiration for what they have done and are still doing.

For a charity to qualify for a grant it must meet two basic rules. It must help the very poorest, the people (usually children) at the very bottom of the ladder. And it must spend no money in this country on administration and salaries. One common theme in those 2,000 letters was that Mail readers want to know that virtually every penny of any donations they make is used to alleviate suffering and not pay for expensive advertising campaigns or high salaries.

Your money has done some remarkable things. It has paid for a workshop and training for polio victims who now make toys to sell at a profit rather than have to beg in the streets. It has paid for a ward in a little hospital for blind people to get cataract operations. They send me a list of names of people who were blind and can now see. It's incredibly moving to look down that list. Your money has taken children off the streets of big towns and cities and given them a new life.

But most of it has gone on education: helping orphaned children go to school, equipping little schools with books, building classrooms and toilet blocks. Helping to build and run new schools. This is because I passionately believe that education is what matters in the long run.

If my children were hungry, the first thing I would do is try to raise the money to feed them. But what really matters is that they should be able, in years to come, to feed themselves. And the way to escape the grinding poverty that traps and kills hundreds of millions is to give them the means to earn a decent living in years to come.

That is the only way to break the hideous cycle that shames the entire world. By all means give someone a goat if you're sure that proper arrangements have been made to care for it. It is, of course, your decision. Or you can help educate a child. Then it becomes his decision.

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