The figure cited for the Microsoft licences was mad.
I don’t get why charity/education licences weren’t used from the outset, or the civilian pillar given guidance on how to sign up for a charitable plan on an email/office suite.
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It’s sometimes easy to forget that the civilian committees operate with quite literally no resource. Absolutely no one is paid on that side of the organisation and it is not someone’s full time job to do any single part of [it]. It has no budget, no permanent office, no staff and no real remit above Wing level.
I think it’s also fair to say that most senior civilian committee members are… senior. Technology, even if they can use it and use it well, is not their strong point and implementing technical or modern systems (like getting to grips with needing to use debit cards to pay for things in 2010 or, as you say, using email and sharepoint effectively) is not their strong point and most of the people I’ve met who are senior enough to be able to make an impact or lead a project wouldn’t know where to start. If they did, who would be the person who entered new committee members as they entered and left the system?
It’s also started to become apparent that the Air Cadet Charity doesn’t consider funding Civilian Committee activities to fulfil their objects, meaning there is now no chance of resource being available unless a Corps committee is created and has a budget which bypasses the application process (rather like the functional staff at HQ must be doing). Because of that, if the organisation wasn’t awarded charitable status by Microsoft (we weren’t previously eligible), the Air Cadet Charity would not have helped fund accounts for civilian committees because a) there isn’t any one committee who could apply for the funding (it couldn’t be a squadron, wing or region and there’s nothing above that) and b) it wouldn’t have fitted their objects meaning they would not support it anyway.
There are a few problems that need fixing right now - that missing Corps committee which really has to be a mixture of youth and experience otherwise it will be useless and also the Air Cadet Charity’s objects need fixing so that they cannot exclude any part of the organisation as everything committees do is (or should be) for the benefit of cadets in some way or other.
I think the Air Cadet Charity is less than [we] had hoped for. It is not the top of the pillar for Civilian Committes. It’s some separate organisation that can effectively do what it wants. However, I think that now this is evident, people will stop putting all the money into it.
If Regions are now organising transport rather than HQ (for example) it makes much more sense to pay some subscriptions directly to Region - at least then it’s not going to a bunch of random people have no current working knowledge of the Air Cadet organisation and especially local knowledge. The only trustee with any relevant experience is SJE, the national chair. I’ve met some bad regional chairs but I would still trust them to make the right decision (and more quickly) than these trustees.
I think some of the problems above are excaserbated because HQAC has paid staff who will have been primed (during working hours) on how to get their funds (which they didn’t initially!) and every other part of the organisation is voluntary and will muddle along depending on who has the most time. I also wonder how transparent their information will be - I want to see a breakdown of grants by squadron, Wing and Region and I’d love to see that directly compared against their “donations”.
The status is for tech is technically for Not for Profit, and although the rules differ somewhat between Microsoft, Google and others Scout Groups, which mostly have the same status as CivComs, were eligible. So AFAIK Squadrons can still get MS licences this way - there was a thread on it some time ago I think.
The terms are a little bit more complex than “not for profit”. The Air Cadet organisation is part of the MOD, however distant and different in its aim is. If I recall from when making an application, the reason that the organisation was not eligible was that it was essentially a Government organisation and these did not qualify. I’m aware some squadrons managed to squeeze through but this was probably through a certain level of dishonesty (or misunderstanding of funding and management streams) rather than fitting the criteria. As you’ll be aware, the scouts are not a government organisation and therefore immediately qualify. At the time I looked into it I was working with someone from Microsoft who was the person who suggested applying.
I’d be interested to know if the terms have changed (I might look but not now) or if someone convinced the bods at MS that we’re separate enough to qualify.
To move into the finer point you make - Civ Comms could have been eligible… I’m not sure that’s true. Squadrons are still part of the MOD owned structure and civilian committees are not charities in their own right - they are attached to the squadron. But even if that were the case, there is no national committee or paid retained person to attach any of this to which is probably the specific reason it never happened.
Some are which causes some of the issues as it’s a general mish mash some sqns own land & buildings in their own right, some even have independent trusts.
This does of course occasionally cause issues
Same with Scout groups. Some are charities but by no means all are. Very similar structure, exec committee of non leaders with the group scout leader attending.
There is no MOD funding to CivComs and all CivComs are volunteers so they should have been eligible for not for profit licences.
Whether licences for CFAV or cadet use would be, is a different (grey) area.
But water under bridge now.
But the not for profit organisation is the squadron, not the civilian committee. It’s the squadron name in ACP 8.
You could absolutely set up a not for profit organisation whose sole purpose is to raise money for an air cadet squadron but you would not be the civilian committee of a squadron in that case; you’d just be some thoughtful individual who enjoys raising money and whose objects are to raise money only for xxx squadron. As such you’d get no access to Bader, you wouldn’t be bound by ACPs 11/10/300. In fact you could do what you like as long as you didn’t give your money to anyone else except the squadron. You wouldn’t have any say in how it’s spent (unless you put restrictions on it at the point of donation) nor would you be anything to do with the squadron.
This doesn’t make any practical difference for registered charities, excepted charities or unregistered charities except for the risk to the donator (in level of increasing risk). Scout groups would be the same.
Also, having just checked, this summary from 2021 indicates what I recalled about government organisations not being eligible: