The Partnership does not give money to individuals, religious, ethnic or political groups or third-party fundraising.^[1]

Yet when atheist Richard Green was shopping in the Salisbury branch of a Waitrose store (which is owned by the partnership), he noticed that local charity The Bridge was part of the “green token” scheme, where the customer is given a green token at the checkout to deposit in one of three charity boxes near the exit. At the end of the month, Waitrose donate an amount of money to these three charities based on the percentages of tokens they get.

The description of The Bridge that appeared on the box was as follows.

The Bridge is an organisation working in schools and the community of South Wiltshire. It offers a service to schools in providing lessons, small group work, clubs and help with children experiencing problems. The oasis programme helps those students who are finding it difficult to fit into school life and need a programme and mentoring back into school life.

The Bridge is run by a dedicated team of volunteers and paid staff who are chosen for their commitment and their ability to relate to young people. The Bridge is a registered charity and it takes around £12,000 per month to keep it running.

Unfortunately, this is not the whole truth, as The Bridge is a Christian charity. On their website they list their main aims:

We provide a service to all schools with input of an explicit Christian nature. We want to give students of all ages an opportunity to hear and respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Finally we want to follow up the student interest by finding appropriate Church groups and easing the transition into church life.

Of course, none of this was made clear on the donation box, and it is obvious that such a charity shouldn’t be able to even enter the scheme under the current donation policy. Richard Green felt that someone had been dishonest, so he wrote a letter to the manager of the store voicing his concerns. The charity was withdrawn from the scheme immediately.

I contacted The Bridge to get a response statement and received this from Director Andy Lund:

We have been entirely open in our submission to Waitrose and in the very first paragraph of our documentation described ourselves as a Christian Organisation.

It seems the blame lies on both sides. The Bridge seemed to have been dishonest by omitting the word Christian from the paragraphs they submitted for the description. On the other hand, if what Andy Lund says is true and they mentioned that they were a Christian organisation in the first paragraph of their submission, the people at Waitrose are guilty of either not reading the submission properly, or ignoring their own donation policy by allowing this to get further than a simple submission.

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