Grant Seeking

Over 12000 grant awards and almost £85m awarded since 1985 to charities working in Scotland and overseas. The reason for their extraordinary decision not to accept any new funding applications?

Simple. Lloyds Banking Group - now partly owned and funded by the bank of you and me - wants to sweep away everything that makes the Lloyds TSB Foundation for Scotland unique. Oh, and haven't actually got round to giving them any money this year.

I have just had a trial of “Phi”, a new product from Factary (www.factary.com). It is a database of donors and supporters (trustees, patrons, etc) which currently contains over 100,000 records.

j4b (www.j4bcommunity.co.uk) is offering registered users Full and Free access to its community funding database until 30 September 2009.

NCVO is inviting users of its Funding Central service to share their thoughts on how they would like to see the site develop.

The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) has announced details of its annual open meeting.

I wish that the Charity Commission would take more care when they do get charity accounts online.

Last week’s Third Sector magazine mentioned the relaunch of the online charity community section of the website of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW). Phew!

A recent article in Third Sector magazine revealed that many Scottish charities were unaware of their duty to provide a copy of their annual accounts to members of the public.

During 2009, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) will be reviewing the information supplied to it by charities and how the OSCR uses this information.

Third Sector has just reported that a new model is being introduced in Jersey, which will allow philanthropists to establish private foundations, without Charity Commission regulation.