How to leave a gift in your will to animal rescue

What kinds of gift can a will make to an animal organisation?

A residuary gift (a percentage of what remains after debts and other gifts), a pecuniary gift (a stated sum), or a specific item. Residuary gifts keep pace with the estate. Pecuniary gifts can be eaten by inflation. Specific items need to still exist. Your solicitor will map family provision first — that is not optional politeness, it is how wills survive challenge.

If you have dependents who should be provided for, do that in the will before you add a cause. Animal rescue does not need to win a family dispute.

What wording should a solicitor use for World Animal Rescue Network?

Something in this shape, which your solicitor must still check: “I give [X% of my residuary estate / the sum of £X] to WORLD ANIMAL RESCUE NETWORK CIC (Company number 17298990), a community interest company registered in England and Wales, to be applied for its community purposes.” Trading names alone are how gifts go missing.

Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, London, England, WC2H 9JQ. WARN is not a registered charity and cannot claim Gift Aid. A solicitor who assumes every animal organisation is a charity will draft the wrong clause.

Should you tell the organisation while you are alive?

Useful if you want them to know, not required for the gift to work. Telling them does not lock you in. You can change a will. Do not let anyone — including us — pressure you into a legacy conversation you did not ask for.

Contact: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/17298990 for the filing identity, and [email protected] for the shop. For a gift already in a will, your executor deals with WARN after death — we should not become a second family.

What about leaving a gift to a local rescue instead?

Often better if that is the place you actually know. Use their legal name and charity number from the Charity Commission. The <a href="/directory">UK rescue directory</a> is a starting list, not a recommendation to write them into a will without checking they still exist.

Organisations close. Solicitors can add a fallback (“to such similar animal-welfare organisation as my executors think fit”). That clause is worth discussing.

A codicil can add a gift to an existing will, but homemade codicils are a regular way to create a dispute. If your will is already with a solicitor, ask them to amend it. Do not staple a printed paragraph from this page to the back of a 1998 will and call it done.

When should you not add an animal organisation to your will yet?

When you do not have a will at all, when dependents are unprovided for, or when you have only read a web page. Get the will right first. Add the cause second.

• No will yet — book a solicitor before you pick a percentage
• You are being rushed on a doorstep or a phone line
• You wanted Gift Aid on a lifetime gift and are mixing that up with a legacy