Funding Is Not Enough: A Case for Rethinking How We Support Britain's Grassroots Charities
Photo: Lifeline Aid Foundation Uganda, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a comfortable fiction at the heart of much British philanthropy: that a grant, wisely awarded and duly reported on, constitutes support. Write the cheque, receive the report, close the file. It is tidy, measurable and, in our view, increasingly inadequate.
The Fraser Thomson Foundation funds small, grassroots organisations across the UK — the sort of charities run by two part-time staff and a committee of volunteers, often with annual incomes below £100,000. These organisations are the connective tissue of their communities. They are also, we would argue, systematically let down by a funding culture that ends at the money.
The Quiet Crisis of Capacity
Ask any small charity chief executive what keeps them awake at night and the answer is rarely a shortage of good ideas. It is capacity. The treasurer who resigned without a successor. The safeguarding policy that needs rewriting. The funding application that competes with the very delivery work it is meant to enable.
A grant addresses none of this directly. Indeed, short-term, project-restricted funding can worsen it, generating reporting obligations and funding-chasing cycles that consume the scarce hours of people already stretched thin. Research across the voluntary sector has repeatedly highlighted that small organisations spend a disproportionate share of their time on fundraising relative to larger peers.
Money matters, obviously. But money without accompaniment is a half-service.
What 'More Than Funding' Actually Looks Like
We are not calling for vague expressions of solidarity. We mean practical, structured forms of non-financial support, several of which we have trialled and got wrong before getting right.
Mentorship with humility. Pairing charity leaders with experienced trustees or retired executives can be transformative — provided the mentor arrives to listen, not to lecture. The most valuable mentoring relationships we have observed are those where the mentor asks questions rather than issues instructions.
Skills-sharing that meets real needs. A charity in Leeds told us bluntly that it did not need another workshop on fundraising strategy; it needed someone to fix its data protection compliance and train a volunteer to maintain it. Foundations hold networks full of people who can help with precisely these tasks. Few of us mobilise them systematically.
Convening power. Foundations sit at the centre of wide networks of funders, local authorities and sector bodies. Small charities often do not. Simply introducing a grantee to two other funders, or to a council officer who can unlock a premises licence, can be worth more than a top-up grant.
Long-term, unrestricted commitment. The trend towards multi-year unrestricted funding is welcome, but progress is slow. If a small charity must reapply every twelve months, its leadership spends their energies auditioning rather than leading.
An Honest Reckoning for Foundations
It would be disingenuous to frame this purely as criticism of others. Foundations, including our own, have historically favoured the clean transaction: defined outcomes, tidy reports, a clear line between grant and result. Non-financial support is messier. It is harder to count, harder to attribute and harder to explain to trustees.
But difficulty is not an excuse. If a foundation's theory of change stops at disbursement, it is treating a symptom and calling it a cure.
There are encouraging signs across the sector. Several UK funders have adopted commitment to flexible, trust-based principles, and the language of 'funding plus' has entered the mainstream. Language, however, must become practice. The test is not whether a foundation's website mentions capacity-building, but whether a small charity in Barnsley or Blaenau Gwent can pick up the phone and ask for help with something other than money.
What We Are Committing To
From this year, the Fraser Thomson Foundation is making three changes. Every grantee will be offered a named point of contact with time dedicated to non-financial support. We will fund a pilot mentoring scheme matching charity leaders with experienced trustees from our own network. And we will extend our default grant period, so that no organisation is forced back into the application cycle annually.
We offer these commitments publicly, in the knowledge that we will be held to them — as we should be.
Britain's small charities do not need rescuing. They need resourcing, respected and backed by partners who understand that a cheque is a beginning, not an end. The foundations that grasp this will find that their money goes further than they imagined. More importantly, the communities those charities serve will feel the difference.
