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

Keeping up with carrot events

Diary was vaguely surprised to receive this tweet, from @CommunityOrganisers, the body which – and this may surprise you – organises the community organisers movement.



Diary has little knowledge about this group but guesses that since they organise the organisers, they’re probably super-organised.

Diary is keen to press on to the deep-rooted question of what kind of vegetable you would be. But first, let’s try to dig deeper into the question of why the community organisers want to know.

Given that community organisers are strongly in favour of things like harvesting home-grown legumes, this question could be about power to the pea-pull. It could be about new community groups sprouting up everywhere. Or it could be about following models successfully introduced by the more instinctively inclusive nations of Scandinavia. The Swedes, for example.

In short, after consideration, Diary has a growing understanding of why this issue is important. It’s one that goes right to the marrow of the movement.

But what kind of vegetable would this august column be?
The answer, after consideration, is simple. A bunch of rhubarb.

The naked pub lunch

Naked charity calendars. Once there was only one, and it was sweet and nice and good idea. Now they’re coming out of the woodwork. They’re like zombies. They multiply rapidly and appear in unexpected places and attempt to eat your mind.

Take this quote from Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories, who Diary’s rather fond of. She seems quite a likeable soul, but she’s beating a lonely furrow. After last night’s election it’s a valid question which party is bigger – the Scottish Conservatives, or Diary’s last birthday party.

Anyway, during the ill-fated election campaign, Davidson tried her hand at pulling pints in a pub in Arbroath, and had this to tweet about it:

“Another student job, pulling pints, hasn't stayed with me quite as much. Apologies to punters in Arbroath who got an ice-cream Fosters. Nice.

“The bar owner gave me a charity naked lady calendar of his wife & female regulars. I wasn't sure just how enthusiastic to be. Difficult.”

Which charity the naked landlady was raising money for is sadly unreported. That’s the trouble with only having 140 characters.

It seems fair to say they liked you, Richard

Well done to Richard Hawkes, who yesterday was subject to a great number of glowing encomiums and hagiographies and other things that mean “people saying nice stuff about you” in dead languages.

Hawkes, who is leaving Scope at the end of the month after five years as chief executive, spent his afternoon retweeting no less than 38 of the great and the good who’d posted messages about him to say what a good job he was doing.

Which makes you wonder why he’s leaving, really?

Not many, then

And on a final note, it appears that there aren’t a lot of affordable homes on the streets of London. In fact, just 43, according to housing charity Shelter. And that includes houseboats.

Still, it's more than the number of LibDem MPs, and you couldn't have said that yesterday.