Clare Mulvany, from Dublin, is travelling around the globe for 10 months interviewing ‘people who change the world’ as social entrepreneurs. See her blog at Exceptional Lives.

It’s not as though there aren’t probably too many charity networks or support bodies out there already, but on OpenCharityBlog I’ve followed up a comment on The Observer’s pages asking about a network for kitchen table heroines’. Cristina Odone highlights in a short piece today the work done ‘around the kitchen table’ by very small charities.

See OpenCharityBlog for the link and if you want to comment further. Does bring to mind that Bleak House figure neglecting her own offspring in favour of the poor dears in Africa, but I’m sure none of the ventures Cristina mentions falls into that trap!

‘Kitchen table charities’ get a quick explanation in a short comment piece in The Observer: How to be a kitchen table heroine.

Via the Guardian’s Comment is Free pages, one reader says
“If you know of anyone setting up a network for kitchen table heroines then let me know!”

We’d welcome a discussion of that idea here!

I seem to be almost agreeing with the opinion pieces emanating from Luke FitzHerbert at Directory of Social Change these days, unlike when I worked alongside him there.

In this week’s Third Sector, he asks how the sector can justify its tax breaks, when “too often” charities operate like businesses prepared to do anything to earn money and preserve jobs. His jumping off point is a local homecare business run by a cousin.

I could have given him more background on these issues 10 years or so ago, in relation to the mental health/learning disabilities residential care charity I’d worked for immediately before joining DSC. And actually contracting services to charities was quite a big thing back in the early 90s, with DSC even running courses and publishing books on how to manage contract finances. So as so often with sector ‘developments’, nothing really new here
Where Luke is perhaps being a bit naive is in saying that as trustees aren’t paid, they have no personal interest at stake and so can defy commercial pressures if these are at odds with charitable aims. One reason I was so desperate to jump ship from the residential care charity was the push from nearly all the trustees to expand, supposedly to secure the charity’s future but without much regard to the quality of the services it was set up to provide originally. I assumed that this was becuase they derived prestige from being seen in charge of a ’succesful’ charity but I never had the opportunity to find out for sure.

Welcome to my first ever blog posting! With a partner who loves computers almost as much as he loves me, I have been exposed to the techie bloggers for some time now. At the moment I volunteer for a local (Worcester) community centre, but it wasn’t actually that easy to find voluntary work as I work full time at a university. I absolutely love volunteering - for me it is all about gaining a sense of belonging to a community, for which I must thank Bath Place in Leamington. I increasingly think that I could do so much more, and there seems to be a real shift towards generating income, through the creation of a social enterprise, as a means to become more independent. I’d like to know how anyone else out there took the first plunge into this complex world.