Now consider The Big Issue Foundation. When the original founders of The Big Issue Company found that it was possible to make profits from selling the magazine (apart from the money to the vendors), they set up a charity to use those profits in order to help those vendors who have problems with poor health, homelessness and lack of education. The money is spent on supporting them in their early difficult days towards a better life. A charity is a not-for-profit organisation which tries to help a particular group of people by raising funds and spending the money according to its declared aims. Charity law ensures that charities are run by a board of Trustees who do not get paid for their work as trustees, and who include a treasurer who has to submit proper accounts once a year. A charity has to show that it is acting for public benefit; details of how exactly it is benefiting the public have to go into the annual report. (Obviously the trustees cannot be allowed to spend the money on their own entertainment; and equally obviously, you cannot set up a charity to benefit a private individual and his particular life-style.)
A charity, if it raises enough money can employ people. The Big Issue Foundation employs social workers and medical specialists to help and give treatment to the vendors. The Foundation also uses many volunteers, people who give their time freely by (for example) working in the Big Issue offices, organising fund-raising events, or giving talks to their local community about the work of the foundation. Some volunteers, particularly those with experience, spend time with the homeless vendors, encourage them to keep healthy and help them to find proper employment.
How is this of public benefit? Not only is it of obvious benefit to the homeless vendors, but also keeping people off the streets is good for them, good for public order and health. By encouraging volunteering, the charity is drawing on the skills and goodwill of many members of the public.
The Big Issue Foundation is a large charity which began as a small charity to help a few homeless people in London. At the other end of the scale are tiny charities set up for a very specific purpose. For example, the village of Whistlehampton has a long-standing committee, elected by the villagers to help improve the village amenities. A field was set aside for football and other games several years ago, but small children have no proper playground. The local authority in the nearby (own has no money for play equipment, so the villagers decide to provide their own. The committee investigates what can be made, drawing on the skills of the inhabitants, and what must be bought. A slide, two swings, and a set of rope ladders are built by three of the fathers and a farmer's son. The villagers donate enough money for a well-constructed metal climbing frame one year and a little self-pushing roundabout the next year. Volunteers fence off the area and set a simple gate in the fence so that dogs and their filth are kept out of the playground. They paint everything in bright colours. All this construction takes place at odd summer weekends over a period of two years. Why then do they need to have a charity to look after the playground? It's simple: money was donated and spent, but playgrounds do not last for ever. The equipment has to be checked, repainted, repaired, and eventually replaced. When it needs to be replaced, if they have a 'Whistlehampton Playground Charity' they can easily appeal to the local authority and to any local charitable funds for more money because they are clearly efficient and organised. Occasional donations, perhaps from a rich person who happens to visit the village, or from profits after a village fete can be put straight into the account in the bank. This charity spends between £80 and £130 a year. The Big Issue Foundation spends nearly a million.
Charities are not only about helping people in need. Many charities are also hugely important because of the volunteers who give their time, skills, advice and energy to help solve a problem, or because they bring together the people in a community. Sometimes Russians ask me 'Who starts a charity? And why should anyone do so?' Here is the history of an imaginary charity which is based quite closely on a real charity.
Two school teachers, Beatrice and Sheila, were sitting at a kitchen table, discussing seven-year-old boys. In Britain, children start full-time school when they are five or nearly five, and immediately they begin to study reading. By the time they are seven most girls are capable of reading by themselves; some are fluent, others stumble and hesitate - but they are basically self-propelled. This is important because in their schooling from now on, they will need to read in order to understand some of the lessons. As Beatrice and Sheila knew from their own professional experience, about a fifth of seven-year-old boys are not really advanced enough to be able to read by themselves. What they see on the page is confusing, they stop improving week by week, and it seems to them as if the goal of free reading is disappearing out of sight. If that happens, the lessons which they are expected to do when they are eight and nine and ten will become more and more incomprehensible. They will slip behind their classmates, feeling resentful and humiliated. If only these boys - and a few girls - were given very carefully planned extra help, they could climb this long slow boring hill of letters that refuse to turn into words, and discover how to run down the other side with words leaping up and making sense at every step.
In other words, the switch from incomprehension to understanding can be very quick; but Beatrice and Sheila knew of the evidence that if the switch does not happen during the year a child is seven, it may be too late. (Of course the situation is different with children who only begin to learn when they are seven, but the problem of those who get stuck at a critical point is similar.)
The two teachers were intrigued by experiments carried out in another country to help such children. Beatrice had observed the methods and was trying to adapt some materials she had brought back with her. They worked out an experimental reading course and then asked a local head-teacher to let them it try out with three seven-year-olds to whom they could give lessons (tutorials) on a one-to-one basis. The first attempts were startlingly successful. Unfortunately the Local Authority did not have enough money to pay these or other teachers to become reading tutors for seven-year-olds. They were not against the idea, but specially trained teachers cost money; materials cost money; the training costs money; even organising the children costs time and effort for busy staff.
So the two teachers went back to their kitchen table, brought out paper and pencil and began to calculate. This was a sophisticated, concentrated programme for 'reading tutors'. Suppose you could persuade suitable people to take a two day course with several hours of follow-up homework and observation of tutorials with the children, how much would this cost? And when these trained tutors started working - part-time, pupil by pupil - how much would you have to pay them? And how could you persuade head-teachers - or the parents of the non-readers - to arrange for Johnny to leave his ordinary lessons and be given such concentrated one-to-one teaching. So how much would it cost to teach a child to read at the time that the other children were ready? How could you measure the value in that child's life?