Trustees DO have a personal stake in their charity
2nd August 2006, 12:23 pm
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.