Telling it like it is

Many thanks for the digest of Graham Devlin’s and Nicola Thorold’s reasoned demolition of the case against arts and cultural organisations being charities (AP204). This needed saying, and it needed saying as lucidly and unemotionally as this. My then Chair and I both walked out of an early Mission, Models, Money event because the facilitator was making such a hash of trying to persuade us that we needed to drop our charitable status in order to be more entrepreneurial. The reality is that charities are among the most entrepreneurial businesses out there. The proponents of the anti-charity case seem to forget exemption from business rates. We’d have to be seriously entrepreneurial to make up the cost of losing that!