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Thursday Oct 04, 2007
Is the voluntary sector up for the fight?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with three other Foundations, have come under criticism from a range of charities recently, by funding MTV's ThinkMTV.com.
According to The New York Times, several charities had applied to some of the funders to support their own social networking sites – and been turned down.
Whilst I completely agree that the infrastructure of the voluntary sector desperately needs investment, I don't see that funding a commercial organisation is necessarily a problem.
As I've mentioned before, the lines between charities, social enterprises and businesses are blurring at an ever-increasing rate – and it's no longer a case of "charity good, business bad". MTV's reach into the youth audience is unparalleled by the non-profit sector – if they can use this to inspire young people to affect social change, why shouldn't they have the support of charitable foundations?
The bad news for fundraisers is that increasingly we will compete with commercial organisations like MTV for resources and funding – in addition to the increasing number of other charities out there doing great work.
How will we differentiate ourselves? I'm not sure that talking about our values, or the "ethos of the voluntary sector" is enough any more. We need proven expertise and excellence to rival the skills of the commercial sector.
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 9:14 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Nowdays you could argue that the international NGOs have more in common with global companies than they do with local charities.
Posted by Dom Waghorn on October 10, 2007 at 02:49 PM GMT+00:00 #