Charity Organisation

Charity Organisation, the effort by combined action and experienced direction to prevent misplaced, useless, or harmful charity. There are now over ninety societies working to this end in Great Britain, and in America and Germany the movement has considerably developed. The "London Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity" is a federation of forty district committees, one or more in each poor-law division, and a central council. The committees investigate individually all cases referred to them; they supplement the poor-law, act as dispensers for special charities and private benefactors, procure pensions, employment, medical treatment, surgical appliances, entry to convalescent homes, hospitals, and almshouses, and give aid towards emigration; they also make loans and grants from their own funds; and they are generally representative of local philanthropy. Of 21,402 applicants in 1889-90, 9,823 were assisted, 9,211 not assisted; and the rest withdrew. Of the money spent, £4,431 came from other agencies, £3,738 from the Society's funds, and rather less from individual donors. The Council (Mr. C. S. Loch, Hon. Sec, 15, Buckingham Street, W.C.) chiefly plans the wider application of the Society's principles and the suppression of imposture. It has also specially considered such subjects as exceptional distress, the management of medical charities, free meals for school children, poor-law out-relief, General Booth's scheme, etc. On these and other matters it has published papers; and it issues periodically the Charity Organisation Review and the Charities Reyister and Digest.