PEACE PARTNERS' FINANCE UPDATE

​A report from Christopher Pease, Peace Partners' Finance Trustee

The request to prepare this piece coincided with my coming across a report on the current challenges facing UK charities and how they were responding; and as you would expect all is not well with most: “stable managing current pressures, but with concerns about the future”. A lot of this concern was with respect to Government grants which are starting to dry up; many charities are reliant on these to carry out their functions.

We are fortunate in being funded by individual donations and subscriptions. 
Despite these difficult times, core subscribers to Peace Partners and TPRF (via Peace Partners) have on the whole maintained their financial commitment. Thus we have been able to maintain our commitment to The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF), the promotion and provisioning of the Peace Education Programme in the UK and our work with other partners.

Our other source of funding is in response to appeals. 
We have run two so far this year: TPRF - California Wildfires and also Bedrock Books re “Breath”. It is only in the response to these that we have noticed the effect of the general lack of money.

In terms of spending.
Of note are two recent payments totalling £416 to print booklets for three PEP EDU projects in different parts of the UK. I understand these packs - for the recently rolled out form of the Peace Education Programme - are of a higher quality than those produced so far.

We are in the process of changing how we record our finances. 
This journey began when I became Finance Trustee in 2022 and found the systems in place difficult and time consuming. After discussion with the Trustee board we began the search for Charity Finance software. This continued throughout 2023 and 2024 in which we tried and rejected one system, and then another because of their lack of simplicity, adaptability and lack of availability of suitable training; it being imperative that lay people like us are able to use it successfully.

The solution came by chance when I engaged a local book-keeping firm to provide an independent inspection of our 2023 accounts. This was because in that year with a turnover of nearly £29,000 we were well over the £25,000 audit limit. In addition to pointing out an important inconsistency in our accounting, they were able to set up and provide training in Xero accounting software. Modern, flexible and easy to use it is better than anything else we’ve tried and the set up and training is really necessary for us. So far, So good!