A fundraiser who admitted stealing £300,000 of donations made to the Help For Heroes charity has been told to expect a lengthy jail term when he is sentenced on September 15th.

Christopher Copeland, 51, sent teams of volunteers out to supermarkets around Devon in Help For Heroes ex-military vehicles to collect money for the charity, money that he then paid into his own bank accounts. He started the scam in February 2010 and it finished in September 2011 after one of his volunteers became suspicious and called the police. Officials at the charity said they were appalled at Copeland’s calculated and devious dishonesty. Continue reading →

Secret filming at fundraising call centres by the Channel Four Dispatches TV documentary series has revealed some worrying lapses in ethics at two large firms appointed by two large charities. (HOW TO STOP YOUR NUISANCE CALLS, Monday August 8th 2014)

At NTT Fundraising in Bristol, appointed by the Great Ormond Street children’s charity, an undercover reporter was told it was fine to lie about their own personal circumstances in order to build rapport with potential donors called, but to avoid false claims that their own children had cancer, and/or were treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital, “because they could be found out”. The reporter was also told that they would be expected to get 42 new sign-ups from donors per month, and would be paid financial incentives for bettering this number, but was in any case sacked after two days training for failing to ask every potential donor three times for money, and for accepting too many objections for not donating from the people she called. Continue reading →

The number of prosecutions for hunting with dogs is at an all-time high.

Since 2010 the number of people charged under the Hunting Act of 2004 – which came into force in 2005 – has risen rapidly, from 49 in 2010, to 72 in 2011, to 84 in 2012, and to 110 in 2013.

Fox hunting is the main target of the ban introduced by the Labour party and the 2012 figures include successful prosecutions and convictions of members of the 176 year old Heythrop Hunt, as well as the hunt itself, with which Conservative UK Prime Minister David Cameron had ridden six times before the ban. Fines totalled more than £26,000, after the court was shown and accepted filmed evidence of members of the Heythrop encouraging their dogs to illegally kill foxes.

See also BAIT in Charity Matters June/July, and the resulting reader’s letter in this issue.

The main beneficiary of a celebrity endorsement of a charity is the celebrity, rather than the charity.

This is the finding of a poll of more than 1,000 people carried out by professors of sociology at the University of Manchester and the University of Sussex. This indicated that celebrities were ineffective at raising awareness of charitable causes, but that the link with the causes raised valuable awareness of the celebrities, with the appearance of altruism making them more popular with the public.

The National Trust has launched an appeal for £2.6 million to buy a stretch of beach at Bantham, in south Devon.

The beach, which the Trust describe as “magical”, is part of the Bantham Village estate, on the market for the first time at £11.5 million.

Bantham beach is located on the southern side of the river Avon estuary and forms part of the Bigbury Bay section of the South Devon Heritage Coast. It boasts panoramic views over to more beaches at Burgh Island – location of the 1930’s style art-deco Burgh Island Hotel, once a favourite getaway haunt of Agatha Christie and Noel Coward – which is accessible by tractor ferry from Bigbury-on-Sea beach, located on the opposite northern side of the Avon estuary. Just south of Bantham is Thurlestone, a “chocolate-box” village with pink-washed thatched cottages and an extensive sandy beach popular with surfers.

Charities campaigning for the end of the barbaric and ignorant abuses of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Forced Marriage (FM) in the UK have had considerable support from the government and agencies in the last year or so.

In February last year the Metropolitan Police announced that, as well as prosecuting those carrying out FGM in London it would prosecute all those involved in sending girls abroad to be genitally mutilated, including the families and relatives who order it and those who book the flights and other arrangements. Those caught face prison sentences of up to 14 years.

And this month the government announced 7 year jail terms for those arranging forced marriages in the UK, under the 2014 Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act. Continue reading →

Animal welfare charities are concerned about the increased use of live cats, foxes and badgers as “bait” to give pit bulls and other dangerous dogs their first taste of blood when being trained for illegal dog fights.

Also used are other, weaker dogs that are tied to a tree so that they can’t escape, or have their jaws taped shut so that they can’t fight back when thrown into a room with fighting dogs.

The authorities have warned that those looking for bait animals to be killed by their dogs will search the classified ads in newspapers for people offering dogs free, and then turn up with children in tow, to imply that the doomed animals are going to a good home.

Fox hunts use fox cubs as bait to train hound packs to kill, a practice known as cubbing.

New research by the NSPCC indicates that the number of abuses by the late Sir Jimmy Savile was at least 500, with most victims being aged 13-15 and the youngest allegedly two.

The research, commissioned for a recent BBC Panorama programme, Savile: The Abuse of Power, shows that the disc jockey generated 16 complaints to Thames Valley Police over his abuse of the psychologically vulnerable at Broadmoor Hospital, where he had unprecedented access to patients, and where some awe-struck civil servants referred to him as “doctor”.

The late Cardinal Basil Hume, when the Archbishop of Westminster, put doctor Savile up for membership of the historical and exclusive London Athenaeum club, and he was accepted in 1984 when the Cardinal’s spokesman noted: “He is a great admirer of what Jimmy has done for young people”.

The National Trust, the UK’s largest charity, is facing a growing crisis as its army or 70,000 volunteers gets older and weaker, and as visitor numbers increase and opening times extend.

One 65 year-old volunteer pensioner, Miranda Spatchurst, told the Daily Express that the Kent property where she works really needs seven helpers but often only has two or three turn up, “making it very hard to even get a tea break”.

Many of the Trust’s volunteers are in their 80’s and their is a view that the next generation of those in their 60’s who might otherwise provide free labour will need to be working longer before they receive a state pension, and will be more inclined to enjoy their harder-earned retirement, rather than work for free.