Financial Sustainability Within UK Charities: Community Sport Trusts and Corporate Social Responsibility Partnerships

The change in political leadership in the UK in 2010 has created financial uncertainty and instability for many third sector organisations. In a shifting funding landscape, it is clear that an over-reliance on Government funding is a risky strategy and that there is a need to diversify and seek out alternative sources of revenue. This article considers the impact of political change on the financial sustainability of community sports trusts associated with Premier League and Football League clubs in England. It explores sources of revenue through the analysis of financial statements, revealing that on average community sports trusts receive a significant proportion of income from grant funding whilst sponsorship income is relatively small. The article goes on to discuss the potential for community sports trusts to diversify revenue streams by developing social partnerships that address the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agendas of commercial organisations. It illustrates that although commercial sponsorship can provide benefits including the provision of additional funding that can enable financial stability, key issues include the balance of power, the impact on organisational flexibility, whether there is a need to restructure, and the development of long-term partnerships. Although the findings from this article are focused on a particular type of charity, given the importance of CSR partnership income for the charities sector they may also have broader implications for other charitable organisations.     

Re-counting 'illiteracy': literacy skills in the sociology of social inequality

Recent media reports have repeated claims that there are very large numbers of illiterate people in Britain, seven million adults being the most common figure. The moral panic this engendered has helped to justify educational initiatives and greater public spending on basic skills. However, a closer investigation of definitions and measurements of illiteracy in major national studies reveals the peculiarity of this social construction of illiteracy. Not least, it is argued that the numbers actually suffering significant literacy deficits are much lower than reported. Partly because British sociology has given literacy little attention (despite the advent of the 'New Literacy Studies'), official accounts of illiteracy remain unduly 'normative', seriously under-estimating cultural differences like gender, ethnicity and class. A new classification of low literacy skills is proposed, with the intention of demonstrating connections with structural accounts of social inequality and sociological theory. Low levels of literacy skill remain important because they are related to other forms of social inequality, even when the number of people disadvantaged in this way is much smaller than previously claimed.