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Charities Assembly

For the benefit of School Assembly, here is some of the information the Charities Committee have discovered about charities and how they work. Also covered is some of the work the Committee has done and the problems that have occurred in deciding what to raise, how to raise it, for whom and why, and what they learnt in the process!

Facts about charities

• Charities come in many shapes, sizes and forms
• There are over 200,000 charities in the UK
• Clifton College is a charity!
• Charities are non-profit organizations but not all non-profit organizations are charities
• Some charities are just a tax saving strategy for an organisation or an individual
• The charity sector is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world
• Up to 50% of graduates work for charities
• Charities often provide services, help, advice, or research in areas some people believe should be provided by the Government e.g. Help the Aged
• Anyone can set up a charity for pretty well anything. Weird examples they discovered: the truth society, teacher support, the vegetarian society, the circus.
• Charities have to be registered, and are monitored by the government but...
• Some charities commit fraud and requests for charity are scams!
• Some charities are every expensive to run with up to 50% of the money being collected spent on administration and overheads
• Since 1601 there has a been a law defining types of charity, these are:
• relief of poverty
• advancement of education
• advancement of religion
• and others beneficial to the community

It will therefore be of no surprise to you that Cliftonians, when research was conducted in the Houses, stated that the themes they wanted the charities committee to be guided by were:

As a community with some wisdom we seem to have identified the same areas of concern as the 400 year old piece of legislation. The three outside speakers during this charity week cover these three areas too:

• Col. Bashford Snell from the Scientific Exploration Society provide education for children in Bolivia www.ses-explore.org
• Opportunity International addresses breaking the cycle of poverty www.opportunity.org;
• Caring @ Christmas www.caringatchristmas.org.uk provides for people in Bristol, especially the homeless.

At Clifton we receive over 10 requests per week to help with one charity or another and this means that we read everything carefully and then apply the agreed criteria, which included a presentation from Dom McInerney who wanted the school to raise money for child soldiers – a matter ET addressed in an excellent Chapel week on child soldiers some weeks ago. The Committee agreed to that and there will be a Home Clothes day next term to support this.

Making such decisions is not always so easy and a two page letter from an orphaned 18 year old Ugandan girl who needed £1500 for university education caused us great heart ache. We debated her case for a long time and after speaking to the Bishop of Bristol, who suggested unsolicited letters were likely to be a scam, and after wondering how she had an e-mail address and therefore access to computers and the internet it was decided to turn her down but we did write to her and suggest charities from whom she might be able to get some help. The group did find it difficult to turn this request down and wondered whether they were doing the right thing.

A second personal letter raised similar dilemmas, this time from an orphanage in Kenya which had run out of money for the vast number of pupils. This charity is run by monks and there was a UK contact so Jon Gillon phoned the man, there and then, to ask some questions. Each child needs £300 per term. The committee decided that this money would reach its destination and it would all go to the intended purpose, with no middle men or marketing to be paid for. Therefore the next own clothes day, in the last week of term, will be to help with the education of an orphaned boy in Kenya – again in line with the Clifton criteria for supporting charities. We will keep you informed of the progress of the boy, which we hope to continue to support through his secondary education. Perhaps one day someone from Clifton will go and meet him.

Personal contacts are important, but a few years ago an OH girl working in Nepal asked Clifton to raise money for a family so the children could go to school. The money was sent – and the father ran off with it! This is what can happen when communities ask for handouts. This doesn't mean that no-one can be trusted, it just means that as fundraising is hard work, we must try to ensure it is effective and gets to the people it is intended for.

The committee is very critical and has a sharp eye when considering the weekly letters. Reasons for some Charities to be declined is that the charity is too big and the sum we could raise would be insignificant, e.g. Cancer Research or Oxfam. Some ideas are too whacky – selling red socks to everyone for Sport Relief – which we didn't think, on balance, Cliftonians would like!

The committee is also very critical about any charity which offers incentives, competitions, awards or visits overseas, as they feel the money should be focused on the purpose of the charity and not on marketing gimmicks.

Some ideas are just a little too odd to support, for whilst Saturday 1st December is World Aids Day we felt World Toilet Day was a rather harder concept to "sell" although it was for a good charity – Water Aid.

It is not just this group of people who are doing charity work, it is happening throughout the College. For example, the Pre supports the Elderly in Bristol and Butcombe supports Breast Cancer. The music department raised nearly £150 for Hope's Place during the Autumn Concert and every Starred Chapel Service raises considerable sums for particular charities.

We did debate at length whether supporting charities in this way was the right approach, whether to just raise money for charity as one big project and then allocate funds at a later date – a model the Dragon School Oxford adopts. However, the committee felt Cliftonians wanted to know who and what they are raising money for.

What have we done? Well quite a lot so far, and with even more planned:

And we have planned some other possibilities for 2008: another Home Clothes day in January, Carnations in February, Fashion show in May , 5-a-side football in March, Leavers Ball possibly in June and we have the MH U6 organising their own cycle event in the summer.

We have identified these charities for major fundraising in 2008:

as well as continuing to support the Kenyan boy in the orphanage. And we are seeking another local charity that wants our support.

It is not all plain-sailing and there are many problems in raising money:

• Finding dates in the diary/calendar is a nightmare and requires permission from lots of people
• Busy Cliftonians struggle to find time to do things outside of the charity meeting each week
• Raising money means spending money too
• People are ill or forget they were going to sell bacon rolls or buy the doughnuts or deliver the fliers or write letters to some of the charities
• Getting money out of people for own clothes day is very hard work
• Agreeing themes for own clothes day – staff and pupils have very different ideas and pupils have very opposing ideas too about what is fun and suitable!
• Not every House has shown the same enthusiasm for some of the projects
• Not everyone on the committee has worked as hard as one another

All of these things have been little hurdles and good learning experiences.

The £ 10,000 which has been raised since January, working for this group has brought the people involved lots of new experiences:

10 December 2007

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