As we are putting the final pages of our Impact Report together, I find myself contemplating how to share our total costs for the year just ended.
Therefore, I took great comfort in reading Danny Kruger's recent article where he stated: "We need a bolder charity sector which claims the right to have an opinion and assumes the responsibility that comes with status: the responsibility to operate professionally, to invest in management and in research and development, and to be counted among the institutions of public life".
Yet it seems we do definitely have a challenge, as I still find it quite incredible how many people think that because we are a charity we must be able to do things for free! But somehow I sense that in always trying to evidence our good value in delivering so much with so little we actually perpetuate the problem.
So I feel, I must now thank Kathy Evans for her wise words and a suggestion that "what our sector can do is nothing short of economic magic. If we’re smart we’ll stop selling ourselves by our value for money.... we’re not just a bargain, we are priceless."
Economic Magic does it for me .... !
My challenge for the voluntary sector over the next decade is to find a new relationship with money. I don’t mean that money doesn’t matter, but I believe as a sector we have allowed it to dominate, distort and distract us from our greatest economic role – the creation of value beyond money. Paying a price for something you don’t like much will feel expensive, but the same amount spent on something you treasure will feel like a bargain. Their price is the same but their value is different. Value is a feeling, not a fact. In today’s society, where the price of one designer handbag could pay six months’ rent for a whole family, surely we cannot doubt that the value of money is subjective – a personal judgement for the individual, and a political judgement collectively.
