Youth With A Mission (Brisbane) Inc: charity review
Care: At least some of the information about this charity is no longer current. Use the ‘Search charity names’ box to see if there is a later review. If the latest review has a message like this, you are welcome to make your case for an updated review via email to ted@businessbythebook.com.au.
This is a review in the series ‘Members of Missions Interlink’, Missions Interlink being the Australian Evangelical Alliance Inc‘s ‘network for global mission‘. We review these charities because their membership means that they must sign up to a set of standards, and this, at least on paper, makes them a better bet for your donations.
‘YWAM Brisbane Inc’ is one such member.
It seeks donations on its website[1]. (And receives, based the 207-2018 year, the latest information it has released, a not insignificant sum.)
Donors
The ACNC, in their article, Donating to Legitimate Charities, gives “some things to consider to help you make sure your donation is going where it is intended”:
- Check the charity’s name.
- Ask for identification from anyone seeking a donation.
- Be careful of online requests for donations.
- No tax deduction doesn’t mean the charity is not a legitimate one, and
- Find out more about how the charity says it uses donations.
Here’s the results for ‘YWAM Brisbane Inc’’[2], with #5 supplemented by the essentials of the ACNC’s What should I consider when deciding which charity to support?[3]
1. There’s no charity in that name. Using the website name, ‘Youth With A Mission Brisbane’, gives a result: Youth With A Mission (Brisbane) Inc. (YWAMB).
YWAMB still don’t have any of the other names they use registered as business names.
________________________________________________________
2. There is nothing to indicate that YWAMB uses either door-to-door or street collectors.
_________________________________________________________
3. The web address begins with a closed padlock symbol, so the website is secure [the ACNC article above[4]]. But there is no mention of security on the page where you enter your information.
_________________________________________________________
4. YWAMB’s ABN record says that it is not entitled to receive tax-deductible gifts. But it has a fund that accepts such gifts: Youth With A Mission Brisbane Incorporated Educational Building Fund. There is no mention of this Fund on the website.
________________________________________________________
5. The use of your donations
For context, see the third, fourth and fifth items in the main menu.
The audited account of how a charity uses donations is the Financial Report on the ACNC Register.
For YWAMB the Financial Report consists of merely an incomplete set of Notes to the Financial Statements for the previous year (the year ended 30 April 2018). Apart from this information being well out-of-date, the Financial Report is missing the four required financial statements, the declaration by the directors, and an audit report[5].
The names of the directors who approved this reporting are not available, but these are the ‘responsible persons’ on the ACNC Register today:
Angela McGill
Darcie De la Porte
David Neibling
Gwendolen Carman
Jason Solari
Valma Neibling
Charity response
The introduction to the Mission Interlink standards (see above) includes this statement:
We sent the member a draft of this review. They got the email but chose not to respond.
End of review.
- Normally the name in the Missions Interlink list leads to the member’s website. Today, for ‘YWAM Brisbane Inc’ it gave this result:
↑ - The last review was in 2016. The charity was previously a member of Missions Interlink but resigned, so no subsequent review was done. ↑
- A section in the article, Donating and Volunteering:
- Focus on the nature of the charity’s work, its beneficiaries and the impact the charity is having in the community.
- Is it clear what the charity is trying to achieve and how its activities work towards its objectives?
- Would you like to spend your money, or time if volunteering, to support these objectives?
- Is the charity being transparent about its activities?
- The ACNC’s information (in its article above) is not correct for the Chrome browser; it does not have ‘https’. ↑
- Hidden under the name ‘Annual Report’ in the Documents section of YWAMB’s ACNC record is an Independent Auditor’s Report to the Members for the same year. ↑
