Small Charity Week reflections: What next for small charity infrastructure support?

Written by Vic Hancock Fell, Fair Collective founder and Non-Exec Director

Here's what you told us

During Small Charity Week, we ran a session asking a deceptively simple question: what next for small charity infrastructure support? During the session we gathered honest, anonymous responses from the people in the virtual room, a mix of small charity leaders and infrastructure folk. The answers were thoughtful and remarkably consistent. Here's what came out of it.

The mood in one word

We started by asking people to describe, in a word or two, what small charities actually need from infrastructure support. The word cloud that emerged told its own story: funding, accessibility, tailored and relevant support, respect and trust, clarity, collaboration, and a relational approach.

It seems what people are asking for is a quality of relationship, not a volume of resources. Support that meets them where they are, speaks their language, and treats them as capable and trusted partners.

What small charities really need

The discussion responses were striking in how often the same themes surfaced independently.

To be a priority, not an afterthought. This came up repeatedly. Small charities want dedicated support designed for them and delivered by small charity specialists, not a scaled-down version of something built for larger organisations.

Funding and consistency. Infrastructure itself needs to be properly funded so the support is reliable rather than dependent on whichever grant happens to be live this year. Several responses also pointed to core costs and access to functions like HR, legal and IT support as the practical backbone small charities are missing.

Connection, on realistic terms. People want opportunities to get together and share learning with other small charities, but they're honest about being time poor. Support needs to flex around that reality, offering online and face to face options, working around daytime availability, and staying alert to digital exclusion and language barriers.

No judgement, and permission to go at their own pace. Small charities are often run by people doing five jobs at once, and support that starts from "you should already have this sorted" helps nobody. One infrastructure colleague described their approach as working through things together without ever asking why a policy isn't already in place. That mindset, meeting organisations where they are rather than where a checklist says they should be, came up again and again.

Funders joining the dots. There was clear frustration that for the most part funders don't coordinate, with grants overlapping in small towns while small charities struggle to get access to funders at all. Whilst there is some good practice the impact of the collaboration that is happening is not comprehensively felt.

What exists, and what's missing

The most voted-for response summed up the whole session: support exists, but it's patchy and not easy to find. It's not joined up enough, and it's declining due to funding. It needs prioritising, funding, expanding and connecting.

Close behind was the call for a cohesive offer aimed specifically at small charities, and, unsurprisingly, funding itself.

Some gaps came through particularly sharply:

Small charities that aren't place-based fall through the cracks. If your charity serves a community of interest rather than a geographic patch, you can't always access CVS support built around localities. "National smalls" feel largely unserved.

Local infrastructure organisations are stretched impossibly thin. One LIO described being a very small team dealing with hundreds of organisations. There were also pointed questions about how community development workers are trained and supported themselves, with several people noting that training for CVS development officers simply doesn't exist.

Nobody is bringing the good stuff together. There's loads of brilliant practice, but no one really collating it, no coordinated signposting, and no "one front door." People described support as hard to find, sometimes locked behind copyright, and often written in legalese that makes it useless in practice.

There was also appetite for open sourcing resources, standardising the basics so infrastructure teams can spend their limited time on targeted, relational support instead of reinventing template policies.

We've heard this before

If you've read our Breaking Point report on the mental health of small organisation leaders, published in February 2025, this will all sound familiar. In that research, leaders told us support exists but time and mental energy are barriers to accessing it. One put it plainly: "I'm sure there is more support out there, but I haven't found it yet and not sure I have time to!"

The session findings and the Breaking Point findings point at the same underlying problem from two different angles. Fragmented, underfunded support doesn't just limit what small charities can do. It lands directly on the people leading them, 85% of whom told us their role has negatively affected their mental health.

They also point towards the same solutions. In Breaking Point we made recommendations that map almost exactly onto what this session called for:

For funders, we recommended making unrestricted, multi-year funding the norm, adopting common application and reporting processes, and becoming vocal small charity champions. The session's frustration about funders not joining the dots, overlapping grants and inaccessible processes is precisely why. Every hour a small charity leader spends duplicating application forms is an hour not spent on the work, and often an hour of unpaid evening time.

For infrastructure and sector bodies, Breaking Point highlighted the strong appetite for peer networking, knowledge sharing, and subsidised practical support with HR and finance. This session repeated that call, and added the sharp reminder that the people delivering infrastructure support need training, funding and capacity themselves.

Across the board, we urged funders, boards and infrastructure bodies to adopt a power lens. The session responses about small charities being treated as an afterthought, and support being designed around what providers can offer rather than what small charities need, show why that lens matters.

So what next?

Reading these responses back alongside Breaking Point, the picture is clear and consistent. The problem isn't a lack of goodwill or even a total absence of provision. It's fragmentation, chronic underfunding, and support that too often isn't designed with small charities in mind. And the people paying the price are small charity leaders and the communities they serve.

At Fair Collective we think the sector needs infrastructure that is funded properly, coordinated deliberately, and built by people who genuinely understand small charities. These results will shape how we continue to try and contribute to systems change through advocacy and our pro bono support, and we'd love to hear from you if they resonate.

If you're a small charity, a funder, or an infrastructure organisation wrestling with the same questions, get in touch. And if you haven't yet read Breaking Point, you can find it in our resources section.