This article introduces the London Communities Emergencies Partnership (LCEP) which is supported by City Bridge Trust, the Greater London Authority (GLA), and London Councils. LCEP is run jointly by London Plus and the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership. Recruitment is now underway for staff positions. Background One Friday in August…

Executive summary The recent legal judgment deciding that £600 million of charitable money currently held in the “National Fund” should be given to the government was flawed. It is based on the idea that the choice facing the high court was either to use the money to pay off government…

This is a personal article. There are more articulate and many prominent voices on this subject, and I rarely write about myself. But I feel compelled to write this. I am a middle-aged man who grew up in north-west London, exactly where the three boroughs of Harrow, Brent, and Ealing…

The vaccination programme currently underway in London requires volunteer involvement at a level not seen since the 2012 Olympics. Time to Spare and London Plus have developed a vaccination volunteer database to support, coordinate and manage the programme. — This article also appears on the London Plus website, here. Volunteers are central to the vaccination efforts. As an example, the mother of one of us received her first Covid-19 vaccine dose at Central Middlesex Hospital in north-west London recently. This was the Pfizer vaccine which requires a short period…

This article also appears on the London Plus website, here. This year’s BBC Reith lectures are being given by Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England. Carney’s theme is “how we get what we value” as he charts the rise of financial value at the expense of human…

This article considers whether support for youth mental health services can achieve parity of esteem with physical health. Different attitudes towards losses and gains — what behavioural economists call “loss aversion” — might make it difficult to achieve equality. …

Executive summary This article considers whether there could be a movement for youth mental health akin to the climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion. Young people’s mental health has deteriorated significantly in recent years. The government recognises the problem and has taken, in the words of the National Audit Office…

This is the first of three articles about the strategic lessons for charities from the climate change activist movement Extinction Rebellion. This article focuses on the lesson from Extinction Rebellion’s strategy for all charities which seek to change society. This lesson is about overall strategy design rather than simply the…

This article shares lessons for charities on how to go about reviewing and reforming front-line delivery models in order to become more effective and achieve better outcomes. The lessons draw on the experience of the charity Tomorrow’s People which introduced a new model in 2017 after a review lasting eight…