Small is neglected

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The closure in quick succession of the Small Charities Coalition, the Coalition for Efficiency and now the Foundation for Social Improvement have one thing in common. They were among the few sources of direct support for small charities.  

Our pledge is that Pilotlight will do all we can to step up and work with others to fill the gap, for support and for a voice for small charities.  

There are 165,758 voluntary sector organisations in the UK according to the NCVO Civil Society Almanac. 80% of these are micro or small entities, volunteer (or trustee) led with an income of less than £100,000 pa — a further 16% have an income of less than £1m pa.  

The diversity of small charities is astonishing, in part because they respond to and help to highlight the diversity of societal needs, and human vulnerabilities. Pilotlight supports a wonderful variety of creative charities, around 160 a year, and we are inspired by those we work with. 

There's a charity for everyone

I have a rule of thumb which is that when there is a public concern needing action, ‘there will be a charity for that’. 

I had a personal example when struggling with the changing guidelines and bureaucratic procedures of the animal health protection team in Government this time last year. Bringing in someone from Kharkiv in Ukraine to the UK was easier than bringing in their much-loved pet companion, Keks (‘Muffin’). And yes, it turned out that there were volunteers, Eden Aid — who were helping refugees from Ukraine, who saw there was a problem in terms of obstacles to bringing pets with them and found a safe and secure route through. Two minivans came to the UK.  One was for people with cats, and another for those with dogs, including Keks. One person with a guinea pig took her chances - in with the dogs' minivan.  

It wasn’t a formal charity, but it was voluntary action of an inspiring kind and whether it is for different long-term medical conditions or environmental sanity, we know from our work at Pilotlight that this kind of collective action is at the heart of what it means for society to move forward in an inclusive way.  

Collaboration is the new voluntary action

Now, you can argue that there are too many charities or, more convincingly, that there is not enough collaboration between them, but even so, in an open society, we urgently need the wellspring of new voluntary action for our future well-being.  

It was the formation of charities on mental health, largely by people suffering from mental ill-health, that was instrumental in gaining the recognition that well-being has today. Charities, many of them small and local, were providing services for people well before the NHS developed its own support offer.  

The voluntary sector working on the challenge of food justice provides a perfect case study over the last decade of a dramatic scaling, including many new charities, of action to tackle hunger across the UK as well as working to expose and address its causes.   

Over a number of years, the Lloyds Bank Foundation has published some eloquent findings on the value of small charities to national life. 

So, the fact that we are seeing a decline in the number and proportion of small charities over time in the UK and linked to that now, a decimation of the hands-on support services to them is a real concern.  

There is a need for organisational support. Over half of small charities have not spent any money on management or leadership training over the last two years.  

Pilotlight is one continuing source of help. It has perhaps been a strength of ours that we haven’t been so reliant for our income on grants from foundations which have been withdrawn, or reprioritised perhaps, from these three support bodies. Their closure, in each case, has been for a lack of financial sustainability, rather than a lack of impact.  

As we chart in our recent business report, Give Your Culture a Workout, others in the pro bono field also offer valuable support for small charities, including the Cranfield Trust, Reach Volunteering (for example — recruiting trustees) and LandAid.  

LawWorks, for example, is piloting a support service for setting up new charities – an exercise which has very few other places to turn to for help.  

But the wider landscape for small charity support is worsening. As the recent report of the Law Family Commission (Pro Bono Economics) argues, “social sector infrastructure has seen financial decline and increased fragmentation in recent years, with funding driving a shift away from coordination and towards competition.“ 

A recent report by 360 Giving, supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation, talks of a “fragile ecosystem” and identifies a decline of over 25% in the number of local infrastructure bodies over the last eleven years.  

There is welcome collaboration across infrastructure bodies – I have blogged on the Civil Society Group here – but to date there has been less progress on what infrastructure should look like, and as a result, less vision and less of a business case for investment. The comfort zone is still that it is down to individual organisations to win their own resources, at times in competition with each other.  

There is scope even so for change. The Law Family Commission points to potential resources such as the £380 million of Gift Aid that the social sector currently misses out on because it is unclaimed by charities. 

In all of this, I see an extraordinary contrast here with the field of social enterprise.  

Meeting with the founders of the Fredericks Foundation this week confirmed my sense that there is a brilliant framework of infrastructure support for new and emerging social entrepreneurs and social enterprises now in the UK – take a bow, the likes of Unltd, School for Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprise Academy, or the incubators such as Cambridge Social Venture Accelerator.   

The scale of support for social enterprise is something that is entirely welcome and a genuine achievement for those in the field. I speak as someone with the sympathetic view of running a social enterprise, Pilotlight, and having been supportive throughout. 

But is our vision, as a society of how we serve the common good, now limited to privileging forms of action that have trading potential?   

We should in truth value all forms of social action, self-help, mutual aid and voluntary activity, as the wellsprings of a more hopeful future. The focus on charities was once perhaps on too high a pedestal, compared to the role of informal community groups, volunteering and formal co-operatives say, but the lack of focus and support for the charity sector now is marked. 

Pilotlight will continue to support and be an ally for small charities in this unstable environment.  But we want to aim higher.  

Can we reverse the neglect of small charities? And if so, we will come to see that time and again, small is still beautiful.