The Charity Today report provides an overview of the charity sector, how it operates, how it’s changing and what’s going on with charity today.
There are over 160,000 registered charities in England and Wales and many, many more informal charitable groups. The overall income of the charitable sector is around £43.8bn, 2.9bn hours are given by volunteers and over £9.6bn was donated by the British public in 2015.
Key issues discussed in the report include the sustainability challenge, that at a time when the need and demand for voluntary organisations and volunteering is increasing, the sector is under unrelenting pressure to increase service delivery without a proportionate increase in financing and with a reduction in income from statutory grants and contracts.
The report also examines the rise of social enterprise and the digital challenge. ‘The sector has to face up to whether or not charities and volunteering as we currently know them are relevant to a generation that has been brought up in a digital age and look to different forms and mechanisms for social action (such as online platforms, petition sites, crowdfunding)’.