Full Cost Recovery Goes International.....

Meeting this morning with an interesting group of academics and local government officials from Japan; most of them involved with the third sector and some working with JACEVO. An impressive array of mechanical gadgetry around the table greeted me on arrival. Great interest in Full Cost Recovery and our template so my dynamic Director of Strategy, Seb, ran through the concept with them. He is off to Toronto tomorrow to launch the Canadian version of the FCR template which has been developed by Seb with the Canadian non-profit sector based on our own model. We are also working with the Americans similarly. And the upshot is we will be doing this in Japan too. How incredible: FCR goes international! The Empire may be dead but the UK's third sector is influencing the world!

And Europe too: this week Euclid Network released the ten recommendations on how European funding can better work for our sector. The recommendations were based on contributions of ACEVO and Euclid Network members and other networks across Europe. With an official from DG-Budget committing to consider all recommendations and introduce them in the new EU procedures as appropriate, our views may well make a difference in an incredibly problematic area.

The ten recommendations reflect common frustrations with European funding: high levels of administration, difficulties with co-financing and complicated process. It's good that Euclid is already making a difference in the relatively short time it has been running. As a network of leaders across Europe it was clear that funding headaches are a very common problem whatever country you operate in!

FCR was developed with that great organisation NPC led by ACEVO member, Martin Brookes. They email me to say they are keen to find out what people really want to hear NPC writing about on their blog, so they want people to send them any questions they want debated on the future of the charity sector. And they say, "to add a bit of credibility to this, we’re also asking a couple of prominent bloggers from the charity sector, such as yourself, if they would mind contributing a question to the debate". So I shall: I want to hear about Martin's dog!

And if there is any particular question you think could be interesting for debate, regarding the future of the third sector, post a comment here and the good folk of NPC will see it.

The Japanese were also fortunate to be introduced to the Hound! Sparkles came with me to work en route to the Cotswolds and sniffed and licked her way round my lucky staff. Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of "dress down" Friday!