The problem for me is I have always suspected that this saying is not entirely true. In a time of ever more sophisticated ways of spreading information and communicating, I sometimes feel that the world and its problems are in my living room, just as much as my living room and its problems are in the world. Volunteering overseas is something I had always wanted to do, but quite how to go about it took me a little time to figure out.

When I started searching for the right experience, the ‘volunTourist’ industry, now worth around $2.6 billion, bombarded me with “worthwhile” ways to see the world. With so many possibilities and the best of intentions, I found I could go anywhere to work on pretty much anything, from conservation projects in Borneo to building playgrounds in Uganda. But feeling that many organisations were just out to make money by exploiting the plight of the poor, and wary of my own inexperience, finding ethical and legitimate ways to give back was proving more complex than I anticipated. With some perseverance, I eventually found my answer in the form of International Citizen Service. Started in 2011, the ICS is a development programme that brings together young people aged 18-25 to fight poverty and make a difference where it is needed most.

And so it was that in January 2013 I began a placement working with Kabeela, one of ICS’s partners in Burkina Faso. Kabeela is a grassroots association that promotes women’s rights, education, health and income-generating activities in the rural Central-Plateau region.

Before volunteering, I knew relatively little about the small West-African nation, which,  although it shares borders with Mali, Niger and Ghana, often attracts less media attention and aid than its neighbours. Ranked 183 of 187 on the Human Development Index, Burkina Faso is amongst the poorest countries in the world, and although I was ready to work hard, the realities of working in a third world context were difficult to imagine.

Of all the really tough conditions I saw, the hardships that women in Burkina Faso face left the deepest impression on me. Burkinabe women remain one of the most marginalised groups in society. In 2013 they still do not have the same legal rights, inheritance rights and civil liberties as men and are seriously underrepresented in political and public decision-making. Female literacy rates are low, with just 33% of women aged 15-24 being literate, compared to 47% of males in the same age bracket.

My volunteer work focused mainly on engaging local women in income-generating and capacity-building projects. On a day-to-day basis, this involved activities such as working on new packaging for the products they make from shea butter – the fat extracted from the nuts of the African shea tree – researching new partnerships and finding skills training for new revenue generating activities.

As is the nature of capacity- building projects, progress was slow and fragile, objectives were sometimes subject to change and success was difficult to measure. Despite this, I remained motivated because I believed that the work I was doing could have a positive impact on the women members’ capacity to support themselves and their families.

While being able to contribute to Kabeela’s work was a great experience in itself, I couldn’t help feeling that I was only tackling part of the problem. The inequalities that women suffer in Burkina Faso are not simply material, but deeply rooted in cultural mentalities, and as such, I felt there were definite limitations to the impact that women’s empowerment projects led by development agencies could have. The most important ingredient to drive greater gender equality is that Burkinabe women (and men) desire change and take a stand to demand it.

One of the most momentous parts of my volunteering experience was witnessing the whole nation take a stand against gender inequality on International Women’s Day. I was astonished to see how passionately Burkinabe women and men celebrate the role of women in society, and how women enjoyed a free space to talk frankly about their demands and aspirations for the future.

I was compelled to show my support for progress in as many ways as I could, from helping Kabeela members produce shea butter, spices and soap to showcase at local fairs, to playing in a sponsored all-women’s football friendly. I was also keen to spread the word back home, encouraging UK women to reflect on the significance of International Women’s Day in other parts of the world.

Lobbying support was not part of my day to day volunteering, I didn’t have to do it. But unexpectedly, it was a process that really put my purpose as a volunteer into context. Now I look back on my journey, I’m still glad that I gave the “right” VolunTourist experience careful consideration, but I am also glad for the spontaneous moments and opportunities that made my experience all the richer.

For those who are motivated to share their time, open to learning new skills and conscious of their status as a global citizen, what are you waiting for? The world is our home and charity should start here.

Emily Wilbourn is a Bristol University graduate who starts a fundraising strategy internship at the British Red Cross in June

In my experience, the opposite is true; charities are usually punctiliously, scrupulously honest sometimes to a ridiculous and self-sabotaging degree. They tend to want to tell everybody everything about what they do, to ensure that communications are faithfully representative of what the organisation does and to educate the donor about the totality of their work – even the boring bits (though I doubt anyone has ever been educated into supporting any cause).

Brands in the commercial sector commonly focus on flagship hero products to achieve a halo effect for the brand – the 501 jeans or the celebrity-inspired range, rather than the everyday staples.

Samaritans doesn’t ask for money to pay the rent or to cover the cost of the phonelines, although very likely that is exactly what it needs the money for. It asks for money to help people in need with no one and nowhere else to turn.

It’s benefits, not features that motivate people – the lives saved through access to clean water, not the equipment needed to drill the boreholes. That would be, well, boring. As  Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, famously said: “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.” (He also said “I built this business by being a bastard”, but there we are).

The best advertising is a truth well told. In the third sector we have something commercial brands would kill for: great true stories. If we can put a window on the work and connect donors with beneficiaries so that they can see the real, lasting, human impact of their support, we will deepen the engagement necessary to generate the lifetime value we all seek; the income that will help deliver on the mission and make the vision we want to achieve a reality.

You don’t need to know what’s under the bonnet to want to drive a particular brand of car, although Honda showed that sometimes the nuts and bolts can make utterly compelling viewing. We need to tell the truth, just not the whole truth.

Caroline Gibbs is head of planning at The Good Agency

Sometimes there’s a positive slant to the phrase and the values behind it. In the jubilympics afterglow we’ve seen UK charity brands rise in popularity, income and awareness – and with good reason. UK armed forces, disability, social care, housing and children’s charities have grown in relevance (that is, need) and therefore size.

But all too often, ‘charity begins at home’ is a phrase that’s rolled out as an excuse to make giving smaller and more parochial. To attack international aid (still not even 0.7 per cent of GDP). To restrict it to this country, to this community, or literally to the home (in which case, it’s not charity at all, it’s just buying yourself stuff. Isn’t it?).

As time-travelling cyborg assassins don’t yet exist, perhaps we need to push for a different definition of the phrase, driven by a different worldview.

What if ‘home’ is just bigger? What if you perceive the child dying of TB in Niger as part of your community, social network, or even family? That changes things.

One of the most troubling quotes I know, and therefore one of my favourites, is by Mark Zuckerberg, the boy-faced Facebook founder, who said “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa”.

The irony is that this is from the man behind the network that should be able to make both the squirrel and the child with TB relevant, real, immediate, in front of you, at home.

I believe that that’s our first and foremost job as fundraisers. To bring need, inspiration, stories and people home. That child is your child. Over there is over here. Yes, make charity begin at home. But make home the whole world.

Reuben Turner is creative director at The Good Agency

It’s not what most people think of when they hear the word “voluntourism”—which typically involves a trip to a single place for a defined period, all organised by a third party organisation.

But when it came to our trip of a lifetime, we were selfish. We weren’t ready to give up months of our time for one project in one place. We also weren’t ready (or able) to fork out the hefty fee usually required by the well-meaning organisations that organise volunteer trips.

So we decided to take a different route, going where we’ve always dreamed of (Nepal, Borneo, India, to name a few), while finding short-term volunteer opportunities along the way.

After nearly a year and with lots of volunteer days behind us—we can tell you volunteering even just one day each week is an incredibly rewarding, educational, and fun thing to do as part of any journey. It’s also a way to make a difference, not only for the traveller, but also for the people and places seen along the way.

So, what type of things could a volunteering traveller expect? Here are a few examples from our trip so far:

- On Earth Day in Palau, we worked underwater with local divers and snorkeling school children to clean up the bottom of a bay. They were as happy to have the help as we were providing it

- Near Burma’s Inle Lake, we befriended a local boatman, who wanted to practice his English with us. The next day, we met him to continue our discussions, and he invited us to his home, where he said his daughter was studying. We ended up helping the young girl for the next two days with her English homework—reading by candlelight in her family’s hut as her proud parents looked on

- Hiking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, we tied trash bags to our packs and filled them with countless candy bar wrappers, plastic bottles and other rubbish found along the route. The best part was when villagers or fellow travellers saw what we were doing, they would join in, some trekking with us for kilometers as we cleaned the trails together. It was as contagious an act as any we saw on the trip

Some opportunities, like Earth Day in Palau, were set up in advance. Many others happened spontaneously and became the highlights of our travels.

This type of voluntourism is not without its challenges. First there’s identifying the opportunities, which for us involves lots of online research before we arrive somewhere, as well as training our eyes to see areas we could lend a helping hand without making things worse.

We also learned to watch out for organisations that seek to take advantage of tourists, such as the “orphanage” we were led to in Bodh Gaya, India. All seemed OK until the manager told the kids to line up in rows and “perform” while he simultaneously asked us for money and flipped through a guest book listing pages of donations supposedly bilked from previous visitors.

As we near the end of our trip and consider returning home to look for jobs, we aren’t under any false impressions that what we did somehow changed the world. What we are carrying with us is that we were able to take the trip we’ve always dreamed of, while giving back a little something to many of the places and people that gave so much to us. We saw that simple acts of kindness, such as picking up trash on a beach or helping a local load her produce on top of a bus, are infectious.

And best of all, this trip also taught us that whether at home or far from it, there’s always something we can do to help others—even if it’s just one day each week.

Kip Patrick and Liz Zipse

Read Kip and Liz’s tips for others looking to do volunteering while travelling

In 2010, the Coutts Million Pound Donor Report showed that there had been more than 170 individual donations to charitable causes that were worth more than £1 million. The total amount of these donations was £1.3 billion. In 2011, The Sunday Times Rich List showed that donations from major charitable givers had in fact fallen by 11.5 percent, but that was in the face of a 37 percent drop in total wealth. In total, giving from family foundations in the UK was worth more than £1.4 billion in 2011. Given the overall squeeze on wealth, philanthropy is holding up pretty well.

There remains a great deal of secrecy about philanthropy: there are plenty of hedge fund owners and city financiers who quietly give substantial funds to causes that are important to them.

But increasingly people are prepared to talk about their donations or the foundations they set up. Everyone knows about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the incredible work it does in fighting and preventing diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis. But there are plenty of smaller, equally-focused foundations that are doing amazing work at a local or international level, whose founders recognize that talking about that work can and does encourage others to do more.

Experts say that the growth in philanthropy, and increasing recognition that it is the right thing to do, is because of a change in the donor profile. The Sunday Times Rich List of 15 years ago showed that in Britain, 75 percent of individuals on the list had inherited their wealth. Today, 75 percent are self-made. Surveys conducted in the U.S. have showed that people who make their own money are more likely to give it away. They should know: it is standard practice for American high net-worth individuals to donate 3.5 percent of their investable assets every year and total giving from the wealthiest easily reaches double figures.

We’ve also seen more people engaging with the idea that “giving while living” is more effective – and a lot more rewarding – than creating endowments that only really become beneficial after the donor’s death. Again the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the great example: it was set up specifically so that its £15 billion capital will be spent down within 50 years of the last donor’s death.

So it’s not surprising that perhaps the most noticeable feature of this second golden age of philanthropy is the business-like approach that many take to it. To me this is absolutely the right approach. Rich individuals are setting up foundations and charitable trusts and then selecting donors with strategic precision, to make sure they maximize the impact of their investment – very much like picking a stock portfolio.

And so we see donors rightly conducting due diligence of the projects they invest in, considering the scalability of the programme and whether it can be ported to other, equally deserving areas, and ensuring that outcomes can be accurately measured and meet agreed outcomes. Impact measurement, monitoring and evaluation are becoming increasingly important. The language of business now applies to philanthropy: return on capital, leveraging investments, constant assessment, target definition and accountability to stake-holders are all part of the lexicon, because philanthropists recognise that if they can prove the merits of their work they can engage more people in its success.

I believe this is a far more active form of philanthropy than perhaps we have seen in the past. It is emphatically not about writing a cheque for some vaguely deserving cause, and leaving the work to others. It is about carefully selecting areas of interest and investing in it for the long-term.

Are we in a new philanthropic golden age? Yes. Undoubtedly we are. And not just because the wealthy are giving in new and more effective ways. But because more people from all strata in society are encouraged to contribute something – be it ideas, skills, expertise, or simply time. Active philanthropy gives everyone a change to get involved.

Tej Kohli is founder of the Tej Kohli Foundation, which operates in India to eradicate corneal blindness and Costa Rica, where it runs educational and nutritional programmes for underprivileged children

Over the past seven years I have had the opportunity to work with a number of different charities both in the UK and Ireland. I have worked for charities that are run mainly by a student committee and for those run by professionals. I have also had the opportunity to run two charities that rely entirely on students to volunteer. I find that the volunteering experience varies greatly between organisations and between sections of organisations. Largely my experiences have been positive and I am not afraid to question the way other organisations do things if I feel that things could be done more effectively.

Matt Hyde, chief executive of NUS, Minister for Civil Society Nick Hurd, Student Volunteer of the Year 2013 Thomas Holt and chief executive of Student Hubs Adam O’ Boyle

I think there should be a way of sharing information about volunteers across volunteering bodies. This can include the use of references, a general CRB check for all voluntary work and general shared information. This could be something that a university body could do – vet all interested students themselves and gain references on behalf of charities. Many organisations may honour a recent CRB from a university until their own CRB can be processed, thus speeding up the process of vetting volunteers, interviews and reduce costs. I feel keeping in contact with volunteers is also very important; if you lose contact with them, they may lose interest.

It’s my experience that a social angle can inspire and maintain interest. For every charity group I have been part of I’ve always tried to arrange a social aspect. Volunteering can be a special thing and often you find it attracts the same sorts of people, so meeting outside of volunteering times for a meal or a drink is sometimes vital.

However, just having a social side is not enough to encourage volunteering. Sometimes the process itself seems over-complicated. For instance, I think having more effective systems in universities is vital. Having as standard a direct contact in all unions who is responsible just for volunteering and co-ordinating the charity opportunities available. There has already been progress made here by Student Hubs and the NUS,  and it’s my hope that Student Volunteering Week will highlight the tremendous voluntary work students do.

Charities also need to make signing up students an easy process; many require CRB’s and background checks now. This process can be long and scary for students when they begin. Paperwork, interviews and providing references could also scare people away. As these are necessary procedures for many volunteering groups, it is very important that the charity can deal with it all in a very quick and informative fashion. Many student volunteers, if they do not hear anything from a charity, will forget they applied or look somewhere else.

I think it’s important for charities to value students as a resource. We are smart, energised, and committed. I hope national Student Volunteering Week highlighted this.

Thomas Holt is the winner of the Student Volunteer of the Year awards

Bill Gates, delivering the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby lecture last week, claimed polio could be eradicated throughout the world by 2018. That’s if the world supplies “the necessary funds, political commitment, and resolve”.

Of course everyone knows about the inspirational Gates Foundation, and the incredible work it does in fighting and preventing diseases. But there are plenty of smaller, equally-focused foundations that are doing amazing work at a local or international level, whose founders recognise the importance of philanthropy and are trying to provide the necessary funds, commitment and resolve.

Many of us who run such organisations, no matter how modest, are inspired by what the Gates Foundation has achieved. As Gates recently said, “Our giving is based on the simple premise that everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life.”

Thanks to Gates’ efforts there are now only three countries – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria – where transmission of polio has never been halted, compared to 125 countries in the late 1980s. India has been polio-free for two years – a remarkable achievement.

The Gates Foundation’s success is an example of a far more active form of philanthropy than we have seen in the past.  Active philanthropy is emphatically not about writing cheques for some vaguely deserving cause, and leaving the work to others. It is about carefully selecting areas of interest and investing in it for the long-term.

And so we see donors rightly conducting due diligence of the projects they invest in, considering the scalability of the programme and whether it can be ported to other, equally deserving areas, and ensuring that outcomes can be accurately measured and meet agreed outcomes.

Impact measurement, monitoring and evaluation are becoming increasingly important. The language of business now applies to philanthropy: return on capital, leveraging investments, constant assessment, target definition and accountability to stake-holders are all part of the lexicon, because philanthropists recognise that if they can prove the merits of their work they can engage more people in its success.

It’s also about investing effort. Because active philanthropists are more likely to take a personal interest in the work they fund, they take a more hands-on role and engage on a more than financial level. They can also invest in areas where governments can’t or won’t, or where there is a vacuum or failure in the marketplace.

An example of this is my own Tej Kohli Foundation, which focuses primarily on treating curable blindness in India, my home country. It’s a huge problem, but an entirely fixable one with the right interventions. Our active approach to philanthropy sees us working alongside experts on the ground to make sure as many people as possible can benefit from free health checks, glasses, treatments and surgery where necessary. We believe the benefits of restoring sight go farther than the treated individual: their family, their community and society as a whole benefits – and that’s where we see return on the investment.

And, importantly, I believe that the term active philanthropy is fully inclusive so that people without the financial resources to set up charitable organisations can also contribute to the philanthropic cause. Indeed, money alone won’t deliver commitment, and resolve.

Active philanthropy isn’t just about the glorious names of the past like Getty and Carnegie, Rowntree and Rockefeller or the wealthy of today such as Li Ka-Shing, Warren Buffet and, of course, Bill Gates. It’s about people from all strata of society being encouraged to contribute something – be it ideas, skills, expertise, or simply time. Active philanthropy gives everyone a chance to get involved.

As Gates said in his lecture last week, “By doing something really hard for each other, we will demonstrate what is best about humanity. And that will inspire us to be more ambitious about what is possible in all our endeavours.”

The Gates Foundation is achieving this and leading the way for others to follow.

Tej Kohli is founder of the Tej Kohli Foundation, which operates in India to eradicate corneal blindness and Costa Rica, where it runs educational and nutritional programmes for underprivileged children

The explosion of smartphone connectivity across Africa means that many more people are now online and able to interact with aid project organisers and volunteers, uploading videos and photos showing exactly how donations are improving living conditions and fighting poverty.

But as well as making visible how charities are aiding third world countries, social media is also helping forge huge networks of volunteers who can continue to maintain a personal connection with the people they support even once they’ve left the country.

I recently returned from a project in The Gambia, where I met with Jackie Church, founder of development organisation The Glove Project. The local team consists of dedicated staff along with visiting volunteers, many of whom have only heard of the group by scanning the Trip Advisor forum when preparing to visit the country. The charity cannot afford to produce billboards or full page advertising in the national press, so it has to rely on a team of unsung heroes who originally visited once and have since become heavily involved, revisiting the country several times.  These volunteers keep in touch online, using Facebook to co-ordinate fundraising efforts, engage donors and encourage visitors to The Gambia to explore some of the project’s villages.

But small projects such as this, which rely on micro-donations and a few committed supporters, are beginning to rapidly expand their footprint due to the rise in social media use across the continent and beyond. Awareness campaigns can easily be driven via a few tweets from visitors, uploading photos of the work achieved in villages, pushed through the numerous Twitter hash tags and popular Facebook groups.

Online forums have also created a buzz of activity, with users often only logging on before their holiday to pick up tips on the local culture, then finding themselves getting heavily involved in local aid work for the rest of their lives.

Africa may be an impoverished continent, but it is also a connected one. It is this growth in connectivity that will help improve aid co-ordination and offer visibility into how donations are transforming villages and saving lives.

Organisations in the third sector should look towards a new generation of connected volunteers, many of whom start their journey on a traditional holiday to a developing country, but end up working for good causes for the long term. Thanks to social media, I now have a long-term connection with everyone I worked with in The Gambia, and it’s a connection I hope will last forever.

Steven George-Hilley is director of technology at UK think tank Parliament Street

While the NCVO might argue that it is largely only the very small charities that have suffered, if the big guns of the sector (who account for 80 per cent of all donations) are reporting static or even marginally increasing levels of giving, then the fall in small charity income must have been pretty catastrophic for a 20 per cent fall to be recorded overall. I see no evidence of that.

I’m equally unconvinced that it is lower value donors who are reining in their charitable donations. Giving is dramatically skewed with a relatively small number of very generous people supplying the lion’s share of the income. If Gift Aid claims are largely static then lower value giving must have fallen dramatically. I see no evidence of that either.

A much more plausible explanation for the figures is the various errors that sometimes creep into even ‘nationally representative’ samples of donors. Sometimes the folk selected turn out to be atypical of the population as a whole or individuals give answers that reflect their mood rather than their genuine behaviour.

My prediction for 2013 is thus that the debate we’re now having about the accuracy of the figures will finally prompt the creation of a panel of charities prepared to count the income from a variety of sources. Such panel data, over time, would give us a much more accurate picture of the true pattern of individual giving in the UK.

 Adrian Sargeant is professor of marketing and fundraising at Plymouth Business School

The dark side of this is that in many ways the name of the charity is perfect for a tale where the people outside of the organisation didn’t, in my view, step up and do the right thing. They didn’t take a risk to protect the vulnerable and didn’t stand by a charity whose central belief is that our talents are worth more than our deficits. People Can revealed that many people just believe that “People Can’t”.

The pension issue has been covered in other articles about our demise and so I just want to highlight a few things I witnessed in our dying days that came from other sources other than the pension scheme – sources that I thought would have known better.

It turned out that I was naive to believe that local authorities would make a priority of protecting services to very vulnerable people. I thought it was a pretty obvious safeguarding issue;  the ongoing fund was still there, it was just us that disappeared.

Ten services were, however, terminated, depriving 452 people of their support – these were people with serious mental health conditions; risk of suicide; learning disabilities; severe depression and also some high risk offenders with a history of gun violence, child abuse etc. When I asked the councils what support they were going to provide for these people, they said “a phone number to call”. One commissioner even hung up on me – and I wasn’t even being angry. He kept talking about “commissioning strategy” and seemed to get irritated when the discussion turned to the specific needs of the 71 clients in his borough. I guess commissioning strategies are nice and neat things, whereas vulnerable people are messy. I can see the attraction of ignoring them.

In truth this commissioner had done very well to save almost all our services in the town, but unfortunately in this business “partial success” results in human damage somewhere along the line. With needs like the ones mentioned above, you end up with the 71 people in that town drifting back onto the streets, taking up police time, and turning up at A&E. Aside from the chaos and horror for people, it also negates whatever savings you made cutting the service.

Some councils, like Hackney and Brighton, were superb. The former found a new provider within a matter of days and even had the time to make it fair with a mini-tender exercise. The latter ensured all community groups were looked after and our local staff’s reputation in the town was untainted in a joint press release.

One thing you learn fast is that all dignity must be jettisoned, both when you are trying to save your charity and when you are actually in administration. Of course we were relieved when our services were saved, but it’s naturally galling when you’ve fought all year to win some of these contracts and then they are just handed over to all the organisations that came second to you. Worse still, our flagship service was given to a demonstrably poor provider who was the shockingly bad landlord in the project. Within a week of taking over our contract, all the maintenance and serious safety issues we’d been raising with them for two years were miraculously put right… fancy that.

And of course, in the final weeks, I begged ten housing associations to take us over. We were pretty attractive in that our services were out-performing most others, we’d ensured every contract was paying its way and we came with £6m of cash. We also said that they didn’t have to find a job for me, any of my senior team or any of our central staff if they just saved the services and got those people their contractual redundancy (I think it’s pretty incredible that no-one on my senior team or in central teams argued with this . It shows you what a set of believers we had working in the charity – everyone knew what mattered most).

I have to thank the ten housing associations for putting teams to work on it. I do believe they were mostly good people really trying to make it work. I’d be lying, though, if I wasn’t underwhelmed by their reasons for passing on the opportunity: “it’s not in our strategy”, “I don’t want to travel to Bristol”, “the client group is not quite right”, “it might store up a problem for 20 years time”. I wonder, does this say a lot about our charities and our housing associations? If your strategy doesn’t allow you to respond and help vulnerable people should you not change that strategy? Are we so risk-averse now that we don’t step up when a crisis appears?

I’ve felt for many years that the “provider” culture has robbed our sector of the fire in the belly we used to possess. Where is the innovative, risk-taking sector that knows when to put people before business? When I express this, of course, I’m told I’m “naive” and that these other chief executives are more savvy – they’re “smart people” . Of course that may be true, but is it mutually exclusive to be smart, run a tight ship and also know when to take a risk when your mission demands it? I wonder if people remember the word “charity”, what it means, and how it should govern your behaviour?

I met one charity in the final days to see if they could pick up as many of my services as possible (if commissioners were willing). It was pretty obvious as I sat there that our charity was on death row and I was in the worst place a chief executive could be. My opposite number had been a close friend in the sector but he could barely look me in the eye. When we got up to leave I was handed an invoice for some work they’d done for us and asked to put it at the top of the list for payment if that was still possible. I felt that showed a distinct lack of class.

Now, as we try to move on after the charity has closed, the dignity-stripping continues as those responsible for our collapse justify their actions in the press, on websites and in correspondence to my staff. “Must have been financial mismanagement”, “they didn’t need to go into administration”, “I blame the senior management”.

I have a resounding and profound respect for people like Stephen Lawrence’s mother or the Hillsborough families who can campaign year after year to get to the truth. I don’t have their pain, and yet I am absolutely finished. Just writing this article has made me shake. I just have to look at the homeless people, the domestic abuse victims, the offenders and community groups that we’ve worked with and realise that they go through this kind of treatment all the time. I’ve seen many of them come through it and be better than the people who tried to hold them back. For that reason I refuse to stop being positive about the future and keep hoping that charities rediscover what it is they are here for.

Maff Potts is the former chief executive of People Can, a social justice organisation running services for homeless people, victims of domestic abuse, offenders and communities across the UK. It went into administration last month.