Diwali and Christmas are seasons of goodwill when you are always in the mood to give to society. Of course, many charities know this and our letterboxes get filled with appeals for charitable giving.
Of course, giving is not just in form of donations but can also be seva to help others or provide food for the needy. We witnessed a lot of this during these lockdowns when temples, gurudwaras and community organizations stepped up their services to help the needy. You would never think that established charities like Akshaya Patra will have a role to play in UK being a developed rich society with social care supported by the government. Yet they recently tied up with the GMSP Foundation by the Sachdev family to set up a state-of-the-art food production kitchen to provide nutritious meals free to UK’s poor.
In the Bhagwat Gita there are teachings of how we should give. The satvic way of giving is to give without any expectation of any kind even if it is a reward of recognition or ego boosting. There is a saying that when you give with your right hand, your left hand should not know. Or many will know the concept of ‘gupt dan’ which is still practiced in gurudwaras with golaks and Mandirs with petties, where one drops their donation in the collection box to be mixed with other donations.
However, the concept of giving is evolving. Wealthy families are setting up their charitable foundations to organize and plan their giving with better governance, monitoring and ensuring higher impact. Of course, such foundations are charities in themselves and enjoy all the tax privileges that UK charities are entitled to. I am a trustee of two such charities. The Puri Foundation set up by Nat Puri which supports education programs is Nepal where there are now 2500 single teacher schools operating in rural parts. These schools cost as little as £350 pa to educate 35 children in remote villages. Jaspar Foundation set up by Raj and Chanda Pankhania and their family aims to give for humanitarian needs in India, Africa, and UK. It is slowly rolling out a program of giving but played a good role to support local Harrow charities and hospices.
When many of us give our donations, we really do not do much homework. We never check if the charity is worth it. Are they going to properly utilise our donations to meet the required cause or will the funds be used in their administration costs or inefficient management? There are a lot of charities out there including temples that are not so well governed, have high costs to donations ratio and do not properly account to the donors. So, our giving is really wasted and not made the desired impact.
It is for this reason, I founded Charity Clarity (www.charityclarity.org.uk) with the help of Pratik Dattani to help donors to choose the charities that score well in governance, cost management and better accountability. Today Charity Clarity has close to 500 charities on its database. Charity Clarity also has an informative charity newsletter to help donors and charities with ideas on cost savings and how best to give. This database has over 17,000 readers! Charity Clarity is also continuing to provide score rates to charities but also helps many with improving their standards as well as save costs. For Foundations and Family offices, Charity Clarity is actively providing consultancy for better governance, monitoring and impact analysis as these entities do not have such in house skills. We have a rule to give the services free to any charities who do not have the resources. Importantly, all donors have free access to Charity Clarity databases. Please look at the website.
