Ending homelessness

There they are, the heads of charities, local authority representatives and the odd famous entrepreneur, meeting David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the pair’s first joint public engagement following the formation of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. A full page spread in The Independent shows the redoubtable Camilla Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company to David Cameron’s right. Others in the group intently listening to the Prime Minister include Rob Owen from St Giles Trust and Lord Victor Adebowale from Turning Point. These, we are told, are the community leaders invited in at an early stage to meet the new government, an action intended to illustrate to all the importance of the vision of a ‘Big Society’ driven by community action and social enterprise and the importance of ‘civil society’ organisations, formerly known as the third sector, in helping to achieve this vision. The community. A term used with stupendous frequency, often to add legitimacy to a course of ac...

As a callow young Chief Executive I received some interesting guidance from members of the Worshipful Company of Chief Executives of Homelessness Charities. (No, it doesn’t exist, but perhaps it should). One piece of sage advice sticks in my mind in particular. Thames Reach had placed an advertisement in the Big Issue magazine one Christmas to try and attract donations. The image of a homeless man looking suitably uplifted by our assistance secured a single £15 return from an elderly lady in East Dulwich. A grizzled Chief Executive veteran offered this counsel: ‘Put a dog in the picture’. He went on to explain in his characteristically forthright way that ‘most people don’t like the homeless. They reckon they’ve brought it all on themselves. But they love animals’. At the time I felt vaguely affronted on behalf of the Great British Public. Even though we did have space in some of our hostels for the person and their pet and could therefore justifiably include a cute pooch in the pict...

This article first appeared in New Philanthropy Capital’s Giving Insights newsletter, summer 2009 Chief executives from the charity sector are gathering for the spring conference. They discuss their varying responses to the recession, possibilities of new business, recent pronouncements from key government Ministers - and the abject performance of organisation X. When will it end, they sigh? Surely they can’t go on providing such abysmally poor services and get away with it? The majority view is that it reflects badly on all charities; something must be done. But this is the same conversation that took place at the spring conference the year before. Nothing has been done about organisation X and there are plenty of entirely plausible reasons why the Chief Executives should leave the elephant in the room well alone. After all, surely charities cannot be expected to regulate each other – isn’t that the job of official regulators such as the Charity Commission? Or what about the comm...