Giving is indeed a numbers game. But what number?
Shadow charities minister Nick Hurd has been out in the sector discussing the Conservatives’ goal of bringing the level of giving up from 0.7 per cent of personal wealth to 1 per cent. The shift would release a veritable flood of money onto the parched banks of the civil society sector. No details yet on how this might be done, except that it could be a happy side-effect of patching up Broken Britain. (I hear the good minister is eager to hear suggestions from the sector - contact him with your brilliant ideas here).
The proposal is at once so pie-in-the-sky and so damn reasonable that I find myself in an internal dialogue that goes something like: 'Yeah, as if', 'But ummm, why not?'.
One per cent is such an acceptable figure. There would be few people in society that, if pressed for a donation of 1 per cent of their wealth, could refuse. So why do they? Raising the proportion of giving is an interesting idea at a time when more of the population feels poorer than they have for the past 20 years. But perhaps, as society recovers from the last sniffles of affluenza (could it be?) now is the perfect time to be suggesting a concrete figure. A nationwide campaign perhaps; a gigantic, sector-wide, co-ordinated ask for 1 per cent.
The sector is already on a similar track with its demands for a 0.05 per cent 'Robin Hood' tax on all transactions between financial institutions. Why not think laterally and reshape it for private individuals?
Something like the five-a-day fruit and veg campaign, maybe. Every time you eat an orange you mentally tally up a mark on your five- a-day target. Perhaps a concerted effort to get people to give 1 per cent could have people stopping to have a conversation with a chugger, dropping an extra couple of pounds into a collection box or responding to a newspaper insert as part of ‘their 1 per cent’. You will always get people who do things like count potatoes as one of their five, or who dump their broken toaster off at the local charity shop, but on the whole at least it gets people thinking about what they should be doing.
The campaign could even go Stakhanovite (Stakhanov reached national icon status in the Soviet Union after smashing all quota at his coal mines in Ukraine). Put forward Dr Toby Ord, the Oxford University researcher who has pledged to give away anything he earns over £20,000 a year as a shining example - sans the pick axe, perhaps.
There will always be the super-healthy, the super givers who go beyond what they’re required to do - the Dr Ords, the Stakhanovs, the macrobiotic vegetarians. The sector can count on them. But if the sector in the UK is ever going to reach the giving levels of the US, maybe we need more than the crossed-fingers, slowly-slowly approach. Maybe we need a philanthropic five-a-day.
But the question remains, then, is one the magic number?
