The third set of ‘ceased charities’ which Scottish charity regulator OSCR is proposing to remove from the official register has been published, numbering almost 500. Those organisations (listed in a spreadsheet attached to their news item) have until 7th December to make contact.

Third Sector magazine reports that OSCR expects to remove around 5,000 such dormant charities by next April, in time for the rolling review of charities due to start in June 2007.

The School for Social Entrepreneurs in Ireland (in Belfast) has three courses on creating, leading and managing a social enterprise open for applications, in partnership with the Business Institute of University of Ulster.

See CommunityNI for details: http://www.communityni.org/index.cfm/section/news/key/event_new_1106.

Volunteering charity CSV has published (22nd November) ‘New perspectives on volunteering in schools’.

Press release, or go direct to the report (pdf, 209kb).

Three lecturers from Edinburgh University have circulated an open letter protesting about “the systematic reduction of democratic purpose to managerial procedure”, such as lifelong learning being reduced to learning for a living rather than learning for life and “community development … largely reduced to delivering the community to policy”.

A meeting has been arranged at the Scottish Parliament on 30th November, for preliminary discussions on action with others concerned about this.

See Senscot news item at http://www.senscot.net/view_news.php?viewid=5478 for more.

Reports on the role that the third sector can play in the development of sustainable communities in the Thames Gateway were launched last week (20th November) by Ed Miliband, Minister for the Third Sector.

One quote: “The Third Sector is one of the top five employers in the London Thames Gateway, ahead of both manufacturing and construction, and yet the sector has still to reach its full potential.”

Background and links to the reports (pdf format, 550 to 600 kb) are halfway down the page at http://www.thames-gateway.org.uk/home.asp?id=155.

Web site Public TV (http://www.public.tv), which is intended to act as a single point for searching and viewing video clips from across the UK public sector, gets going at the end of November.

To get it off to a good start, videos have been commissioned to provide background information about the public sector, but it won’t launch fully until around February.

(Source: e-Government Bulletin)

English Heritage and the National Trust set up a blog style web site to run alongside their ‘Your Place or Mine?’ conference which brought together representatives of heritage, culture and community organisations earlier this month.

As well as a record of events as they happened, it offered a chance to join in both during and after the event, and they hope it will help to “maintain the momentum”. http://www.yourplaceormine.org.uk

(Source: PublicTechnology.net)

Opportunities for Volunteering, set up back in 1982 by the Department of Health, will give funding of almost seven million pounds this year to over 300 projects in England focused on involving volunteers in the delivery of health and social care services.

A large pdf document (1.5MB) gives a snapshot of what local people can achieve through volunteering.

The lives of people living in rural communities can be transformed if local charities and parish councils work together to serve local needs, according to ‘A Broader Parish, Working Together, Improving Local Communities’ a new report from National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO).

It draws on the experiences of three rural parishes in Devon, and finds that both parish council and voluntary groups take on community leadership roles at different times.

Available online at http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/abroaderparish.

A new ‘Findings’ publication from Joseph Rowntree Foundation, ‘Making user involvement work: supporting service user networking and knowledge’, highlights major barriers and ways service users see of overcoming these.

Read the summary, or download the full report, from http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialcare/1966.asp.

The membership of the new Charities SORP Committee has been formally announced by the Charity Commission and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator. As well as properly including Scotland for the first time, there is a wider sector input such as Debra Allcock Tyler, Chief Executive of Directory of Social Change.

‘The Charities SORP - Accounting and Reporting by Charities’ is a Statement of Recommended Practice providing accounting and reporting recommendations for charities throughout the UK. The committee has already met and decided that there are no major issues or developments that warrant a revision to SORP 2005 at this stage.

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/news/sorpcomm.asp.

Arts Council England, in its 60th year, is running an “Arts debate” - a large-scale programme of research, public consultation and debate to explore what people value about the arts.

It will be developing a series of online debates over the next few months. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/artsdebate/.

(Source: Voluntary Arts England)