May 2009 News
Cooperation is better than conflict
Good news! Cooperatives UK has just reported a big rise in the number of registrations of new cooperatives registered this year (as reported in this Third Sector article).
Cooperatives (legally defined by that bastion of cooperation, Wikipedia as ‘a legal entity owned and democratically controlled equally by its members’) are one extreme of membership organisations (at the other end of the continuum would be a traditional company or charity model where membership is only paid lipservice). ...
What is happening to legacies in the downturn?
The latest data from the Legacy Foresight’s Legacy Monitor service (which benchmarks 38 of the UK’s leading charities, who together account for 56% of the legacies market) has shown that in the mid "noughties" the legacy sector enjoyed healthy growth. Between Q1 2004 and Q1 2008, legacy income grow by one third - from £658m to £877m. However, the latest data confirm that the economic crisis is taking its toll. In the 12 months to March 2009, legacy income across the Legacy Monitor Consortium ...
How do leaders view the future?
Like a ship in troubled waters
The 5th Charity Forecast survey results have been released by NCVO. The survey is a ‘confidence/trends’ survey. This survey looks at the opinions of charity leaders - chief executives and trustees - on a variety of topics, particularly looking at finances, staffing, campaigning and other issues in their own organisations and their opinions on wider issues such as the state of the sector and its relationship with government. This particular survey was conducted...
The growth of social lending
Declining trust in banks and the difficulty of obtaining credit in the current recession may prove a catalyst for some already growing trends, the use of mutual finance through credit unions and ‘social lending’.
The credit union movement has seen a significant growth in recent years, the number of members growing from 224,674 in 1997 to 607,400 in 2007, according to The Association for British Credit Unions Limitied (PDF). It is expected that numbers will be boosted further by the current...
