A nice insight into how the the UK’s wealthiest givers are responding to the recession on the BBC News website today. It highlights the fact that, rather than cutting back, recent research from Barclay’s Wealth suggests that a quarter of rich philantropists have actually increased their giving in the last 18 months.
The article references Radio 4′s The World at One programme, which has been speaking to some of the UK’s biggest givers about their giving and what they feel needs to change in the charity sector.
Interestingly, two of the philanthropists, John Studzinski (a senior figure at Blackstone, a private equity firm) and Rory Brooks (founder of private equity firm MML Capital) both suggest that charities should be looking more seriously at the possibility of merger and acquisition. Studzinski refers specifically to the high number of homelessness charities and suggests that merger in this sector ‘would not be a bad thing.’
This idea – that charities should be more open to the possibility of mergers as a way to increase their effectiveness – is one that NPC has discussed recently in our report ‘What place for mergers between charities?‘.
