WRAP members vote for change to charitable status

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A special meeting has seen WRAP’s voting members back plans for it to apply for charitable status.

Over the next few weeks, WRAP will submit its applications to the Charity Commission with the aim of achieving charitable status by the end of March 2015.

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In a blog on the WRAP website, chief executive Liz Goodwin (pictured) wrote: “For WRAP’s board and leadership team, there are three key reasons why this seems right and indeed essential.

“Firstly, it will assist our plans to increase our commercial resilience by diversifying our funding – it will help us to access trust funds and create new opportunities to develop and fund priority areas of work. This will offer us the greatest opportunity to achieve our mission, by helping to shape critical areas of sustainable resource use, such as food waste prevention, and making possible a more circular economy.

“Secondly, it gives us greater flexibility in terms of the way we work, allowing us to react and adapt as the needs of the market. Through diversifying our funding base we are able to bring our expertise to new markets, and increase our international impact.

“Finally, our work is already ‘charitable’ in nature, when seen against the definition within charity legislation. This means very little will change in terms of what we want to achieve, the areas we work on and how we achieve our impact.

“We could indeed apply for charitable funding now. However, charitable status will underline the purpose of our work, and allow us to play a full part in the work of the charitable sector.”

View the full blog at http://www.wrap.org.uk/blog/2014/08/important-step-road-charity-status