United Kingdom voluntary organisations in mental health

<p>This report forms part of a series on the UK component of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, a thirteen-country study of the voluntary or non-profit sector. The international study was initiated by the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, under the direction of Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier. The other twelve countries are Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Thailand and the USA. The full UK study contains a number of local or national surveys, including that which is reported here. The full UK results will be reported in Kendall and Knapp, 1994.

<p><p><p>The report is laid out in two sections, the first focusing on a national survey of voluntary organisations in mental health in the United Kingdom, with results based entirely upon the data collected by this survey, and the second combining these data with other sources to extrapolate to national levels of finance and staffing levels for the whole of this sector including organisations with both local and national catchment areas.

<p><p><h3>Definitions</h3><p>The nonprofit sector is defined as comprising organisations which are formally constituted, independent of government, not distributing profits to those who control them, self-goveming, primarily non-sacramental, not party political and benefitting to a meaningful degree from voluntarism. These criteria are arguably enshrined in UK charity law but also describe many organisations which do not hold charity status. <p.<p><p><p>Within the broad definition of nonprofit organisations, Salamon and Anheier (1992) developed the International Classification of Non-Profit Organisations (ICNPO) to permit comparisons between different 'industries', and this codified system has greater detail in those areas where the nonprofit sector has a significant presence. A 'UK-specific' version which locates each of the ICNPO categories in the national context was also developed. Using these common structures, data on income, expenditure and staffing were collected from all types of organisation in every country.