Red Cross chief attacks corporate attitudes to funding charity infrastructure

Sir Nicholas Young, chief executive of the British Red Cross, has hit out at the collective refusal of corporate donors to fund charities’ overheads.

In an interview with civilsociety.co.uk after he had been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Leadership Award at the Charity Awards, Sir Nicholas voiced his frustration at the prevailing attitudes of business leaders who don’t seem to realise that charities need all the same infrastructure as private sector organisations.

He explained that in recent years the British Red Cross had put a lot of effort into building the capacity of Red Cross societies in developing countries.

“There are 186 Red Cross or Red Crescent Societies around the world,” he said, “and a Red Cross society in sub-Saharan Africa has almost nothing compared to what we have here. Yet the scale of disasters and health and social care issues that they face are absolutely enormous.

“The history of big aid agencies like the Red Cross has tended to be that we parachute aid in and hope some of its sticks and increasingly I think we have to put a lot more effort into building sustainable local capacity so they can do much more for themselves.

“We have a number of great partnerships with small African national societies where we’ve been doing this for the last few years and we’re really beginning to see the results now.

Won't fund overheads

“But what is incredibly frustrating is how difficult it is to raise money for that work. I can go to a dozen captains of industry and ask for money for Aids programmes or disaster response or whatever, and I’ll get wonderfully generous support. But if I go to them and say ‘that national society in, say, Liberia really needs the money for a great fundraising director or finance director or computer system’ they’ll look at me as if I’m absolutely mad. They’ll say ‘We can’t possibly fund that, that’s overheads!’. And even when I say ‘Yes but they can’t do anything without those things’, they’ll still say ‘no no sorry, we’ll do the Aids programme, thanks’.”

Sir Nick said he tries to make them think about how their own business would function without a sales director or a finance director, but the corporate chiefs seem to think that’s different. “Of course it’s not different – these societies are businesses, they need to be able to run and manage themselves and then they could look after themselves much more. I find it very frustrating.”

(Source: civilsociety.co.uk)