Scotland’s charity regulator OSCR has begun its review of the charitable status of 23,500 charities on its register. The National Trust for Scotland, Scottish Youth Hostel Association and a community sports club are included in the first 30 charities in the Rolling Review. As well as 11 independent schools (including Gordonstoun), the focus is on residential care providers, museums and charities with individual membership structures.

The full Rolling Review is estimated to take seven to ten years to complete, with this first priority phase (Phase 1a) to be completed in May 2008.

OSCR news item, with complete list of the 30.

A new feature article from Idealware, ‘Behind Closed Web Sites’, takes a look at three nonprofit intranets - web sites set up for internal use. Apart from saying that these are ’staff only’ when in our view there should be some access for trustees too, it gives a helpful practical view of how intranets are used.
http://www.idealware.org/articles/nonprofit_intranets.php.

‘Creating High-Impact Nonprofits’ is an article in the current issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

The introduction reads “Conventional wisdom says that scaling social innovation starts with strengthening internal management capabilities. This study of 12 high-impact nonprofits, however, shows that real social change happens when organizations go outside their own walls and find creative ways to enlist the help of others.”

More at http://www.ssireview.org/site/printer/creating_high_impact_nonprofits/.

(Via Klass Notes)

The Big Lottery Fund has a short guide giving an outline of what they would expect to see in a Business Plan, if requested.

Not a bad summary, starting with “A business plan puts down on paper what your organisation will do to turn its vision into reality”.

(Source: Skye and Lochalsh Community Toolkit)

OpenSourceCommunity, created by a partnership of 5 grassroots organisations in Hull, makes a variety of their own ‘real life’ sample documents available. These vary from funding bids, including business plans, to policies, job descriptions and forms.

Others are able access these or add their own once they have registered on the site. At http://www.opensourcecommunity.net.

WCVA, the Welsh umbrella body, has launched the Sustainable Funding Cymru web site to provides practical information to voluntary and community organisations in Wales on how to develop a sustainable funding approach.

It covers income diversification, funding sources and more - http://www.sustainablefundingcymru.org.uk.

The Boost Initiative wants to unlock dormant and inactive charitable trust funds by linking their trustees to local community foundations, so that they can take advantage of relevant knowledge, expertise and capacity.

The national project is led by Community Foundation for Merseyside on behalf of the Community Foundation Network. See http://www.boostinitiative.org.uk.

This month’s Legal Eyes article written for the Directory of Social Change newsletter by solicitors Bates Wells & Braithwaite answers the question “We are a charitable company. It’s a hassle and expensive for us to post the accounts and AGM notices to all our members – can we use email instead?”

http://www.dsc.org.uk/charityexchange/legaleyes0907.htm.

Personnel professionals’ body CIPD has a new downloadable guide ‘Managing drug and alcohol misuse at work: a guide for people management professionals’.

This is quite detailed with useful example policy statements, http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/health/drugs/_drgalcmsgd.htm.

Leeds. Urban Forum Annual Conference 2007

See Urban Forum events info

Newry. CO3 is holding its first ever conference for leaders in Northern Ireland’s Voluntary and Community Sector.

See CO3 website for details.

The chief executives of NCVO and Acevo have held an informal meeting with the head of the Learning and Skills Council, to discuss the nature of the problems between the government agency and the sector.

Following this, a formal meeting is to be held between sector representatives and the LSC to look at how working relations can be improved.

NCVO news item at http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/press/releases/?id=6398, or see New Start news.