UKH

As a result of a decade of exploring the climbing in the Sinai desert, I became involved with a dog rescue shelter in Egypt (Help Dahab Dogs). We have recently received notice from Barclays that they will be closing our fundraising account in 3 weeks as we no longer meet their T&C. We are currently a non registered charity, but it looks like we will have to become registered as we raise far in excess of the threshold of £5000pa to avoid having to register. Maybe this threshold is new, or maybe we've just flown under the radar for longer than we should have. None of that was intentional, we just kept on doing what we were doing.

Becoming a registered charity seems like a daunting prospect with the need to get trustees, a constitution, AGMs etc. Does anyone have any practical, relevant advice or contacts they could share to help us get this process underway sooner rather than later?

Hi Martin, a friend of mine runs a charity and may be able to help. I've sent you an email with his contact details.

Hi Martin

I've been a trustee (a few years back) for a charity we set up with a particular tranche of European funding in mind.  Yes, there were formalities to work through, but it wasn't particularly onerous.  We used to do our AGMs in the pub over a meal and just took reasonable care of the way funds were handled and distributed - after all, plenty of larger charities have apparently done this fairly badly!  In our case, it was definitely worth it - we accessed several hundred thousand pounds over a ten year period that supported various learning disability related projects all over Europe.  My personal risk as a trustee was a quid.

Derek

I'm a trustee of  a charity, and we did spend a lot of time at the beginning doing a lot of admin (constitution etc), but that's mostly (!) behind us, and we're doing a lot of useful stuff now (and even get to have a bit of fun).

I would also guess someone like CAF (https://www.cafonline.org/) would do the admin/setup for you in an off-the-peg sort of way (for a fee) if you don't want to do it yourselves, or find a solicitor/accountant to do it.