mercurykev wrote:...I saw it time and time again, where large, national charities had contracts to deliver services that had very little to do with their core groups.
Could I ask whether those were what I might call "membership charities" such as the ones I mentioned previously? I am thinking of the kind of organisation that makes fundamental use of a strong membership base to guide and deliver its activities. This seems to me to be different from the charity that we all think of when that word is used, in which members are sought mostly as financial contributors. "Membership charities", in the sense that I am using the term, tend not to rattle collecting tins.
Even in a "membership charity", many members are not that active, but there is still a strong membership ethos that makes diverting from the core purpose more difficult. I'd expect this to be true of the CTC. Whilst some here have made vague references to government contracts that suggest that they believe that it is not, I still have no idea what they are talking about.
irc wrote:So is the CTC to be a club working mainly for it's members or part of the voluntary sector?
Surely that's the point of the debate?
glueman wrote:This thread has set me thinking what a perfect Cyclists' Touring Club might look like...
No-one looking after the subs then?
bikepacker wrote:How will being a charity benefit {my friend} as a long serving CTC member?
On my current understanding, this is fundamentally the wrong question to ask. As I suggested in my first post, charities are about benefitting everyone else. If you want the CTC to focus solely on benefits to you, you might vote against. If you want it to have a campaigning, cycling promotion and social role as well, you might vote for. Either position is defensible, but criticising the option least likely to deliver what you want for failing to do so does not seem the obvious way forward.
meic wrote:An example of the Charity Commision being used to stifle the RSPCA.
Again, IANAL, but I can see how this would come about. Charities must promote the public interest. Therefore, a court is asked to say whether challenging vivisection is in the public interest (and therefore legal for a charity). On the basis that the current consensus, as represented by UK law, is that vivisection is legal because the human good outweighs the animal harm, the court says no. The court is not being asked to make a moral judgement on vivisection. It is being asked to assess whether the
current law embodies the view that vivisection is to the public good, to which the answer appears to be yes.
The real question, though, is how this applies to the CTC. The point of this debate is that becoming a charity has advantages and disadvantages. Some contributors have complained bitterly that the disadvantages are not being explained. In this case, the doubters have established that some activities might no longer be possible, but failed entirely to state what those might be, which is exactly the complaint made about HQ.