One of the most common routes to setting up a charity is first to become a company. This was the route we took.
As a result of the way it was set up, the charity is subject to the regulations of Companies House as well as to the Charity Commissioners. In principle, each requires us to be accountable to a public, through them, as well as to our own Trustees. So long as the charity was handling a budget of any size, we were required to report to each of these organisations on an annual basis, sending in accounts, plus – in the case of Companies House – an annual report.
Following and extending that same principle, we decided to publish our annual reports on this site, as well as sending them to the bodies mentioned above.
This continued for a while, until the charity was no longer seeking or receiving funding and its bank account was down to a few hundred. In these conditions, Companies House no longer requires a report to accompany accounts and I no longer write them.
For several years, Hyphen-21’s annual reports always included a Statement of Principle as part of the introduction. That statement grew and developed as more thought was given to it year by year, which in turn made the report ever longer and also meant that every year the regular reader, ie the charity’s Trustees, had to wade through a great deal of repetition each winter !
So, in 2012, the charity’s statement of principles was extracted from the main body of the annual report, to be read as a separate standing item by anyone who might be interested. You can find it at the top of the right hand column on this page, entitled “More Thoughts on the Principle”.
The piece is also being added to this site’s “Background” section (see the top of the left hand menu on the Home page). It obviously belongs there.
But we shall leave it on this page as well. Beneath it on the right, you will find the last Director’s Report. It was written at the end of 2021.