While Rome burns
Peter Gotham looks at how organisational myopia has affected voluntary organisations and offers some learning points to minimise insolvency risk
The modern charity sector has experienced one or maybe two recessions and now we are in another. By modern I mean a sector that is still voluntary but, in the round, is anything but amateur… a sector that is not a poor relative, but is engaged, powerful(ish), and listened to. Crucially, over recent years the sector has grown enormously and charities are taking on many more commercial commitments. However this economic perspective will not be seen as central to all the war stories we tell of this recession in years to come. Generally failures beg a mixture of reactions; from ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, to disbelief that the problems were not seen coming. After all, arrogance and wilful disregard of good governance and risk management is not restricted to the banking sector.
Author: Peter Gotham
Peter Gotham is a partner in Gotham Erskine, a non-profit specialist accountancy firm in London. He also chairs the Charity and Voluntary Sector group at ICAEW and is on the Charity SORP Committee
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