Home› General Chat
If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Options

Question about thesite: charitable status

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
This is mainly a question for Jim. What are the guidelines with regards to this forum in order for you to be fulfilling your charitable aims? Are there any lines you could cross in terms of failure to moderate against particular content, that would be a threat to the charitable status as a whole, since effectively it is Youthnet which is publishing everything that we write on this website? I know there are forum rules, but how many of them are intrinsically linked with protecting your charitable status? I assume the "no using the forum to find a dealer" rule would be one, for example. For example, if you let the sex board become overrun with tales of people's sexual exploits, would that be a risk to your stated aim to offer advice on that subject to people, and your charitable status, or is the message board not a factor in that?

Comments

  • Options
    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    The aim of the boards is essentially to allow people to provide safe, legal peer advice. When we consider what we do and why we do it we think of how well we are achieving those goals. The issue of our charitable status doesn't really come into - as our stated aims as a charity are so close woven into our day to day work it doesn't really get considered seperately.

    So fundamentally we aim to run a good service based on the ethical and philosophical position of the charity - the rules are there to preseve and encourage that service.

    The legal terms and conditions are closer to the kind of things necessary to prevent possible legal problems -
    http://www.thesite.org/about_us/legalinfo


    Where complaints have been made it's never been because we're doing something different from our charitable aims, but because people disagreed with YouthNet's aims as a whole - you can see more info about YouthNet here -
    http://www.youthnet.org

    Why you asking man?
  • Options
    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Because I go on another website linked to a charitable organisation, that is changing its guidelines because the owner thinks that some of the topics in the off topic section would be of risk to its charitable status. I think he's just being paranoid. Obviously, you couldn't run a website like this without having a large number of topics that have nothing to do with the aims of Youthnet, but I was wondering whether there are any (off) topics that would cross a line, other than the usual issues, like personal abuse and illegal stuff. Or if the forum didn't reflect the stated aims of the charity whatsoever, but was just a social site, would the charity be legally allowed to continue to use donated money to run it?
  • Options
    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I would imagine as long as a charity was still meeting its charitable aims in other areas then there wouldn't be a problem - a bigger issue would be if dedicated funding for other areas was being used to support areas outside of the charitable aims.

    But for us, you're right that we sit in a different space, as our stated aims are essentially empowerment through knowledge, for anything that concerns or interests someone in our age group.

    So the view has been - you can talk about anything, but you do it within the defined framework. It would how someone is saying something that matters - though obviously saying something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc is nearly always going to be inappropriate.

    But yeah, hard to know without knowing the details of the other charity and how focused they are supposed to be on particular issues.
Sign In or Register to comment.