This campaign has now closed
For most of the Citizen's Income Trust's twenty-three years of hard work, no grant-making charitable trusts have had the promotion of debate on the reform of the tax and benefits system as a grant-making criterion. It's time to change that, and we're hoping that a few generous visitors to the Big Give site will help us to do so.
Categories
Beneficiaries
Situation
There have been periods when the trustees of grant-making charitable trusts have been generous in their interpretation of their grant-making criteria and have funded the only educational charitable trust the sole purpose of which is to promote debate on the reform of the tax and benefits system; but for the past seven years there have been no grant-making trusts willing to do so and we have run on voluntary labour and £4,000 p.a. from individual donations. We're not complaining. We've done a lot of useful work during that time, as a visit to our website and our recent Newsletters will show. But it can't go on like this indefinitely. The irony is that the Government's benefits and pension budgets are huge, that major changes (such as tax credits) occur without public or parliamentary debate, that there is very little public or parliamentary understanding of the tax and benefits system or of its possible futures - and that the only organisation working hard to change that is running on a shoestring. If we were in the transport, health, housing or education fields there would be other organisations doing the research and promoting debate, and there would be funds available. In the tax and benefits field there is nothing. With the small resources available to us we concentrate on our core publishing and dissemination activities and we undertake one project a year (such as our recent parliamentary surveys and our submission to the Benefits Simplification Select Committee). We can't manage any more than that - and we can't afford the time or resources to apply for funding for core funding or projects when we know that we'll be turned down because we don't fit anyone's criteria. So we need core funding. We've got ideas for some projects, too, and particularly our own commission on the possible futures of the tax and benefits system. Is there anybody out there?