Charities outraged at cut of Campaigning Research Programme

Following the announcement late last week that the Office of the Third Sector is cancelling the £750,000 funding for a Campaigning Research Programme, we are now hearing about many examples of organisations that will be faced with wider difficulties.

This funding was to be allocated to small organisations as part of research on how they can campaign effectively and how best they can be supported in terms of the skills they need to raise their members’ needs.

This cut comes at a critical time and sends out a signal that the campaigning role of organisations may be at risk.

There are three main issues here:
1. Organisations are put at greater risk, they have already invested considerable time in bidding for the fund, so this will now limit their opportunity to campaign
2. The fund was withdrawn after organisations had been chosen and shortly before they were to receive the money, so it was by then too late to make other plans
3. These are small organisations with limited ways to diversify their funding

Cutting this support puts all the organisations at risk, in particular if the cuts are only announced at the last minute. In fact, it is now emerging that some of these organisations turned down other sources of funding, for example Street Talk said today that they actually turned down up to £5000 from private donor as they were successful on the government scheme!

Finally it is now clear that fewer organisations overall will benefit from the diversion of money to the Hardship Fund. Whereas 32 small organisations would have benefited from the Campaigning Programme, now only 15 larger organisations will benefit from this money within the Hardship Scheme.

So let’s not forget the role that we have in raising the voices of all the communities in this country and continue to push for strong and diverse campaigns-

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