Celebrating small charities

As Small Charity Week kicks off, Garreth Spillane from the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI) explains why small charities should be awarded all the recognition they deserve. 

This week is Small Charity Week, giving communities across the UK the opportunity to recognise the grassroots organisations who work, often without recognition, in every community.

Small Charity Week is an initiative of the FSI, the largest supplier of free capacity building services to the small charity sector. The FSI has, since its inception, helped thousands of small charities through the provision of training, support and advocacy programmes. Small Charity Week came about on the back of this work, as a means of addressing the difficulty that many charities have in attracting attention from policymakers, media and the wider public.

The celebrations launched with I Love Small Charities Day, offering the public an opportunity to pledge their time to a small charity in the year ahead.  Within hours of going live, the online I Love Small Charities Pledge had attracted thousands of hits, briefly crashing the website- proof that the public really engage with the small charity message.

So what it is about the small charity sector that warrants a whole week? 

Small charities represent the very best of human nature; here we have organisations set up simply to solve a problem, sometimes for the people who everyone else has abandoned. Their founding is the result of someone seeing a problem and committing to solving it, with the goodwill of founders, friends and family, and occasionally local authority support. 

The people that devote their lives to small charities, whether as staff, volunteers or trustees, harness every aspect of their commitment, time, passion, resources and networks to keep that charity going and to grow its impact. It is all of this that Small Charity Week celebrates. 

We know that small charities often work with the hardest to help people. Small charities utilise their depth of engagement with their communities to ensure the best possible outcomes for the beneficiaries they support. When dealing with the most vulnerable members of society, small charities play a valuable, trusted role in ensuring the best possible outcomes in these communities.

We also shouldn’t underestimate the scale of the sector. The FSI defines a small charity as one with a raised voluntary income of up to £1.5m which means there are well over 140,000 small charities active in the UK at present. They are working on every single issue, on every single cause.  Small Charity Week provides these charities with a vehicle to promote their work and reach audiences they might not ordinarily.      

It is an oft-quoted and overly simplistic argument to say that there are too many small charities. If a charity can exist and deliver benefit and sustainable impact to their beneficiaries then it is for all of us to ensure that they get the support they need. Small Charity Week is just one part of this support – it is for all of us as a sector to ensure that small charities are awarded the significance and recognition they deserve.