Daily Lessons from Life 11 March 2010

"Charity Council to refine Code of Governance - Channel News Asia 11 March 2010 2326

SINGAPORE: The Charity Council will embark on an exercise to refine the Code of Governance for Charities and Institutions of a Public Character or IPCs, which was first introduced in November 2007.

The code would be refined to be more concise and easily understood by charities.

Currently, the code operates on a 'comply or explain' approach and its guidelines are tiered according to sizes of charities.

The exercise will consider whether the guidelines in each tier should be adjusted."

Charity is charity and a good thing for most people. However, for some, charity is BIG business and opportunity to explore the do gooders of the world to enrich themselves deliberately at worst. Or not able to administer the charity properly at best. While the 1st case is to be avoided at all cost, the latter is also to be avoided though the gravity is lesser when it happened.

Lessons for me are:

1. the fundamental belief must be: I want to do good for the less fortunate or less privileged people that I can help. It is not about fame or fortune;

2. to be a do gooder, it is no longer sufficient just to have a good heart. One must be professionally qualified to administer the programs and activities designed to help the target audience with the highest efficiency and effectiveness expected of an excellent profit-making organization!;

3. since we have the RIGHT Attitude to begin with, we then must work on Applying Skills and Acquiring Knowledge on how to run an efficient and effective charity. Corporate governance activities like risk management, proper accountability of receipts and payments, internal control mechanism that protect the assets of the organization while promoting operational efficiency and effectiveness, etc must be properly carried out. So, adequate identification of skills and knowledge gap must be performed, follow by targeted training and development, and close off by monitoring proper application on the jobs that produces the expected results and performance as confirmation that the training is really effective and value adding!

We had our fair shares of scandals in the past 2-3 years with very big and visible charitable organization with supposedly superb CEOs that were endorsed by high ranking people in the country. The public trust was shaken and the willingness to donate and help out at these charitable organizations took a dive. While we had slowly and painstakingly rebuild the confidence and win back the trust, we must continue to ensure that leaders with Personal Integrity take the helms and the behaviors of Enabling Self and Others takes root!