Charitable Incorporated Organisations (CIO)

Introduction

Once you have decided to create a Charitable Incorporated Organisation or Registered Charity you will need to follow a process in order to register with the Charities Commission.

Step 1

As a first step for all structures you will need to write your charities objects. The charity objects need to be wording in a particular way to reflect that they are “for the public benefit” and wholly charitable.

Choose one or more of the following charitable purposes:

• The prevention or relief of poverty
• The advancement of education
• The advancement of religion
• The advancement of health or saving lives
• The advancement of citizenship or community development
• The advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science
• The advancement of amateur sport
• The advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity
• The advancement of environmental protection or improvement
• The relief of those in need by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage
• The advancement of animal welfare
• The promotion of the efficiency of the armed forces of the Crown, or of the efficiency of the police, fire and rescue services or ambulance services
• Any other charitable purposes

Read in more detail online here

Writing your objects/the public benefit test

Your charity objects need to be worded in a particular way to reflect that they are “for the public benefit” and wholly charitable.

The 'public aspect'

To satisfy this aspect the purpose must:

• benefit the public in general, or a sufficient section of the public - what is a ‘sufficient section of the public’ varies from purpose to purpose
• not give rise to more than incidental personal benefit - personal benefit is ‘incidental’ where (having regard both to its nature and to its amount) it is a necessary result or by-product of carrying out the purpose

The 'benefit aspect'

To satisfy this aspect:

• a purpose must be beneficial - this must be in a way that is identifiable and capable of being proved by evidence where necessary and which is not based on personal views
• any detriment or harm that results from the purpose (to people, property or the environment) must not outweigh the benefit - this is also based on evidence and not on personal views

Step 2

There are specific documents that you should use to as the foundation of your Governing document (also called a constitution). As a first step these can be downloaded from the Charity Commission website.

Download Documents

Much of the content of these templates have been written by the Charity commission and should be treated as static content that should not be edited but there are some decision points for each that you need to work through.

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