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Sector's benevolent fund calls for support as applications double

Governance | Niki May Young | 22 Feb 2012

Applications to the Charity Employees Benevolent Fund have more than doubled on last year's figures and enquiries have increased tenfold, said its general manager Hilary Greengrass.

The Fund launched in 2009 to provide support to current or former charity employees facing financial hardship. The last six months have seen enquiries and applications rocket, said Greengrass, but support levels from the charity sector have not increased to reflect this.

Making a plea for support from sector leaders, Greengrass advised that she expects applications to reach 200 by the end of the month, placing the blame on the "long tail" effects of the recession: 

“The charity sector got hit by the recession later than others, as I understand it. Then will all the public funding cuts that happened in 2011, by the time you’ve got six to nine months into the year, it has started to have some impact and people have been laid off or had their paid hours reduced.

"For instance someone who had been working 20 hours per week may have had their hours cut to 12. On 20 they can just manage but on 12 they can’t, we see that quite a lot.”

Two key areas of growth in applications

This is the reason, said Greengrass, why one of the two areas where the Fund has seen a significant increase in applications is to pay bankruptcy fees.

The other area is for educational grants to pay for course fees or for equipment. Some are from young people, she said, but many are for people seeking to re-train.

Greengrass said that there also remains a lack of understanding by beneficiaries of where best to seek support.

“We’re getting more than double the number of applications and ten times the number of queries, people may inevitably wonder why isn’t one leading into the other," she said, advising that enquiries ahead of applications often occur from those who have spent the bulk of their career in another sector.

“For example we’ve had a few where they’ve either been in the civil service or they’ve been carers. If they spent ten years as carers but one or two of those happen to be for a charity, then they’re best served by going first to the Care Professionals Benevolent Fund. That doesn’t stop them coming to us as well, they could come to us and say I’ve been to the CPBF and this is what they gave me, and what can you do in addition – it’s just getting it the right way around, for their benefit.”

Setting up a benevolent fund mid-recession

Greengrass points to the difficulty of timing as a challenge in garnering support for the sector's benevolent fund. 

“We got quite a lot of support from the sector pre-launch, but they were one-off grants, seed funds. What we haven’t managed to secure is a decent number of very small or a small number of larger regular donations, and that’s what we’ve really been focussing on from last year," she said.

"Of course, it’s a timing issue, it’s an irony that the point at which a benevolent fund is most needed is the point where people are least inclined, because there are less funds available to actually support it. Most benevolent funds have been going for many years and they’ve got legacies and endowments so they can ride out this period. Actually setting up a benevolent fund is quite a difficult thing, it needs to get embedded in the sector, and become known and a fundamental part of the sector.”

NSPCC leads the way in support

The fund hasn't been entirely without its supporters, however, Greengrass highlighted new support offered by the NSPCC earlier this year, which saw the charity pledge £1 per employee per year for the next three years, and called for more to follow suit.

“In a mature responsible sector, the large players take responsibility for the whole," she said. "It kicked off with NSPCC in December and I had a meeting with (chief executive) Andrew Flanagan and he just got it.

"What we said to him is that we wanted him to trailblaze it and we were hoping to get others to join in on the same model, because nobody had applied that model before and it made a lot of sense to him and we thought, it’s probably going to make a lot of sense to other people to then – that remains to be seen.”

Umbrella body NCVO and think tank New Philanthropy Capital have also pledged per capita support, the latter offering a £3 per employee annual donation.

Directory: National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) | National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) | New Philanthropy Capital
Who's Who: Hilary Greengrass