Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.

Clash of the charity titans

This week saw a gargantuan intellectual struggle over the nature of charity and the responsibilities of the state – a hard-fought contest between a pair of intellectual heavyweights. And in the Daily Mail, no less.

It was the battle that none of us has been waiting for, although once it turned up Diary was pretty pleased to see it.

Yep, it’s Dr Karl Wilding of the NCVO, thoughtful advocate of systemic change towards a voluntary model, versus Russell Brand, anarcho-cynicalist multimillionaire advocate of a revolution to pull down the rich.

It was a juxtaposition of opposites. One, after all, is masculine, hirsute and irresistible to women, and the other is Russell Brand.

Anyway, Brand laid into charity for being “part of the problem” during his show at London's Proud Archivist on Sunday – or at least, the Mail reported he did, which to be fair to Brand isn’t necessarily the same thing.

The paper reported that the comedian and self-styled revolutionary said charity was “ultimately taking responsibility away from the centralised powers of created government, corporations and alleviating that stress and tensions by placing the burden once more on ordinary people.”

Whether we really want responsibility for solving problems to lie with government is an open question in Diary’s mind, since it’s fair to say that government is worse at organising almost anything compared to almost anybody. (Except for when it involves hitting people, bizarrely – the army, after all, is crackingly well organised, and the police are at least better organised than G4S).

Anyway, that’s a bit of an excursion outside the limits of this debate. Safe to say that Wilding came out swinging, saying, in what can only be a considerable understatement, that “it's not clear what Mr Brand's proposed solution is”.

“Mr Brand has, in his own particular way, highlighted an age-old philosophical debate about where the boundaries of the state's responsibility should lie, which has never had a clear answer,” he said.

The victor? Answers on a postcard please.

And now for something, er, completely different

Well done to the coalition government for introducing the Access Foundation, a new project to grow the social investment market, which will be capitalised with around £105m of cash, mostly coming from repayments from the Futurebuilders fund.

Diary rather likes Access itself – it’s a good idea, basically, and it’s aimed at helping the right people. But its journey into existence is instructive, to say the least.

It starts when the Tories promised to close Futurebuilders – a Labour idea – when they came into power, with no less a light than David Cameron saying in the run up to the last election that it was badly run and inefficient.

The Futurebuilders fund used mostly government money to offer a series of grants and loans to encourage charities and social enterprises to grow and win more contracts.

Since it was closed in 2010, it’s been accruing repayments which for five years have mostly been sitting in an escrow account gathering a small amount of interest and a lot of dust.

It is that money which is being used to capitalise the Access Foundation. Unlike the Futurebuilders fund, this is a wholly original idea from a Tory minister.

It will use mostly government money to offer a series of grants and loans to encourage charities and social enterprises to grow and win more contracts.

A bit like… wait for it… the Futurebuilders fund.

But fear not. This new fund has radically different leadership with a totally different set of priorities. The chief executive will be Seb Elsworth, who is currently deputy chief executive of the Social Investment Business which is responsible for administering… wait for it… the Futurebuilders fund.

No. Just no.

It seems likes the Belgians haven’t quite caught onto the idea of sensitivity around racial stereotypes. At least their foreign minister, Didier Reynders, hasn’t.

Reynders went collecting for children’s charities the other day on the street, together with a group called, basically, The Blacks.

Reynders blacked up his face and put on a white top hat, in a kind of behaviour last considered appropriate in most of Western Europe some time half a century ago.

Outside Belgium he seems to have managed to offend pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white bigot. Inside the country, though, it was greeted with complete unconcern, with rival political parties describing The Blacks as “innocuous folklore”.

Fortunately, Belgium doesn’t have a history of viciously oppressing African people and the covering it up in a casual fashion, so it’s unlikely to cause international offence.

Oh wait. What’s that? The systematic rape of the Belgian Congo? The single greatest example of colonial mismanagement ever perpetrated? Oh yeah, that’s right.

Well done Didier. Keep up the good work.