CharityBags - Our aims

Headings on this page :

Our aims - introduction
Our aims - in detail

Our aims - introduction

We estimate that over £10 million income is lost by genuine charities each year because of misleading, bogus and poor-value "charitable" house-to-house collections of clothing etc in the UK. Many of these collections are illegal.

We want to improve this situation. One crucial problem here is the lack of readily-available, handy, reliable information, organised into one place. We hope this website will help meet this need.

If the information on our website (and our campaigning) result in only 1% of bogus collections being stopped, that will raise an extra £100,000+ a year for genuine charities to spend on good causes.

Charities with shops which are losing out because of this problem include:

Our aims - in detail

Charity shop (courtesy of Oxfam)

1. Encouraging people to give unwanted goods (clothes etc) to charities :

by taking the goods directly to charity shops (the best method), or
by taking the goods to re-use/recycling centres and placing them in containers (banks) run by charities, or
by using collection bags delivered by genuine charities which are collected house-to-house, with the contents then being sold in their charity shops (or given to the needy)

Clothing collection leaflet - 'Do Not Delay'

2. Discouraging bogus or misleading "charitable" house-to-house collections of clothing etc

3. Discouraging people from giving their unwanted goods to poor-value charitable house-to-house collections - especially those where the goods are collected by commercial companies which sell them for a profit, and donate only a small "royalty" to the charity (typically around £50 per tonne)

4. Discouraging people from giving goods to purely-commercial house-to-house collections (where charities don't benefit at all)

5. Providing information, advice and encouragement on these issues to :

the public
central and local government, especially the organisations responsible for regulating house-to-house collections
charities
the media

6. Researching the issues and publishing the information

Our secondary aims include promoting :

charities (and other good causes) in general
charity shops
'safer giving' - reducing fraud in respect of giving to charities
re-use and recycling
use of computers, the Internet (and traditional information systems) to help the aims described above

Our secondary aims also include discouraging :

scams, cons, fraud etc

Note - We run the website as volunteers, with not-for-profit, charitable intentions.

So far we have no financial support.

Please see About us.

our email address (image) :

www.CharityBags.org.uk

Postscript: The dialogue below helps explain our approach . . .

Excerpt from "Downton Abbey" (series 1: episode 6 of 7 - at around 23 minutes in) :

Sybil:
"There's a meeting of my borstal charity ..."

Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham (her father):
"Why are all your causes so steeped in gloom?"

Sybil:
"Because it's the gloomy things that need our help.
If everything in the garden's sunny - why meddle?"

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