The international development charity Concern Universal today (3 November) announced their rebirth as United Purpose following a merger with Olympics-linked sport-for-development charity International Inspiration. The move is part of United Purpose’s new strategy to challenge the international development sector to do more, better - and ultimately end the need for organisations like themselves to exist. Part of this approach is to merge with other charities or build new forms of partnership to increase collective impact, improve efficiencies in the sector and modernise the structures of UK-based development charities to be fit for the future.
United Purpose’s portfolio of programmes already includes CUMO, a highly successful Malawi-based micro-finance organisation, Village Aid, a UK based fundraising charity and CarbonUP, a not-for-profit enterprise delivering the profits of selling gold standard carbon offset credits back to the communities that generated them. It is set to reveal further innovative initiatives over the coming year.
“As the world evolves, the demands and expectations on development NGOs have also changed. We must radically re-imagine and change our approach as NGOs if we are to stay effective in a changed world. If we don’t we face well-deserved extinction or irrelevance. So today we’re celebrating forty years of amazing achievement by Concern Universal. But to stay true to our mission to help people lift themselves out of poverty, we are also setting out an ambitious new path on how we are going to achieve this - and a new strategy and name to reflect this.
”We lift people up out of poverty by providing solutions to poverty that last. Our mergers with other charities embody our approach. What we aim to do is bigger than ourselves as organisations. We want to have a bigger impact, to modernize and to streamline. To do this, we as NGOs need to change from within. With one billion people still living in extreme poverty, we can not dig our heels in and refuse to adapt to global changes. We need to cost-save, find alternative self-sustaining funding streams and use innovations to make our impact bigger and better. ”