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Economists share wealth of experience with charities
A NEW charity is being launched which will see economists offering their analytical skills to third sector organisations.
ProBonoEconomics will address questions around measurement, results and impact, which could help charities quantify their work in cost savings to the public purse.
Andy Haldane, a senior official at the Bank of England, set up the organisation with Martin Brookes, chief executive of the New Philanthropy Capital charity.
They already have 50 members and are carrying out pilot
projects with charities across the country, including Halt Domestic Violence in Leeds.
Mr Haldane said: "The idea is to have economists use some of their analytical skills to help charities make sense of their data and better measure the impact of their investments.
"This is not about economists atoning for their sins – but it is not the worst way of thinking about it now."
Regulators, including the Bank of England, have come under fire for failures before and after the credit crunch. Mr Haldane, who is from Leeds, and Mr Brookes, a former Goldman Sachs economist, started ProBono after pondering why other professions were able to offer free services to charities, but not economists.
Mr Haldane said: "We think that charities need to point towards quantitative evidence that they are doing the right thing and for economists it could be a useful development to apply their skills to different sorts of problems."
Halt Domestic Violence, which provides support to abuse victims, is working with the organisation to determine the economic impact of its interventions. The charity assesses risk based on nationally agreed template of homicide indicators.
If it can cost the levels of risk before and after intervention, it would be able to demonstrate how much money it saved the state through its work. This type of information could be considered invaluable when fundraising.
Nik Peasgood, director of Halt, said: "If you look at how much it costs to run a project then the savings to the taxpayer would significantly outweigh the costs of providing the service.
"Although we know that, we don't have the skills and knowledge to be able to look at it from an economic point of view."
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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