Don’t be taken in by Sports Relief tonight

Don't be taken in by the hype around Sport Relief - there are serious concerns over how they spend your money

You may have read in the news recently about ‘Sport Relief’ - an event organised jointly by Comic Relief and BBC Sport to raise money for "vulnerable people in both the UK and the world's poorest countries."

Tonight there will be a telethon broadcast on BBC One. And a very noble cause, you might think. However, the problem lies in where exactly the money actually goes.

Comic Relief is the same organisation which runs Red Nose Day every two years, and has been running Sport Relief as well since 2002. Both these biennial events exist to raise money for Comic Relief.

Bucket fund

But Comic Relief is not actually a charity itself either - rather, it is a fund-raising company which transfers all its profits to the registered charity called Charity Projects.

The money raised in Comic Relief’s fundraising campaigns is paid out in grants to thousands of exterior charities. This is the first problem. Comic Relief is a bucket fund. If you give money to Comic Relief, you can never be certain where it will go, as the organisation’s hierarchy decides how the money raised is spent, including which charitable organisations and causes it wishes to give cash to.

Rather than giving money directly to a cause, you are giving away control over how your donation is spent. This means a significant degree of risk for anyone who wants their donation to go to a specific cause or charity.

Abortion-linked charities

But there is a far larger problem: Comic Relief has been known to pass on funds to charities involved in the provision of abortion services. While they do not themselves directly fund abortion services, Comic Relief has a record of supporting all the major UK-based promoters and providers of abortion, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) - currently at the centre of a scandal over the money they make from baby body parts.

We’ve recently updated our Charities Bulletin, so you can see exactly which charities you can trust - and which you should avoid.

Previous Comic Relief grants

Here are just two examples of where your donation to Comic Relief could have gone in previous fundraisers:

• A grant of £374, 694 was given to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in January 2011 for work in Swaziland, Mozambique and Ethiopia. IPPF's 2011 financial report says that IPPF affiliates carried out over 1.5 million abortion-related procedures in that year. Also in 2001, IPPF launched "It’s all one curriculum", a sinister programme to indoctrinate children into the culture of death
• Amnesty International was given £107,376 for UK- wide work in September 2013, while in November 2012 Amnesty International UK was given £394,395 for work in Kenya. This means a combined total of £501,771 given by Comic Relief to Amnesty, which is actively campaigning for liberalisation of abortion laws in Northern Ireland and Latin America

You can find more examples in our recently updated Charities Bulletin.

So this evening, stay away from Sport Relief and give your money straight to a cause you can believe in (and of course, feel free to donate to SPUC at any time!)