On 1 September, Reach Volunteering announced that it would close after 45 years. Three weeks later, nine funders and donors came together to keep it open until the end of 2028. On 14 October, Directory of Social Change (DSC) announced it was entering insolvency. In the wake of that news the chair of the Charity Commission described what she called the “gradual impoverishment” of sector infrastructure, a “tremor ahead of what might be a quietly destructive earthquake.”
The response for Reach was generous, quick and welcome. But it is a rescue rather than a solution. It buys valuable time, but it does not explain how an organisation so many small charities rely on came within weeks of closing, nor does it offer a lasting answer to how the sector’s infrastructure is sustained. It is not a sustainable option to be applied to the infrastructure ecosystem more widely, or that other infrastructure bodies can rely on.
Starting with the right question
Much of the conversation since Reach’s closure announcement and rescue has focused on funders: whether they should do more, sooner, for infrastructure or act faster when an organisation is in difficulty, and how they decide whom to support.
These are worthwhile and relevant questions, but we don’t believe they are the right place to start. They address only one half of the equation - the funding, rather than the functions infrastructure needs to undertake.
We are writing as the leaders of four national infrastructure bodies: ACEVO, CFG, NAVCA and NCVO. We bring together local and national, specialist and general, organisation and individual focused interests. In our view, the first questions need to be held by organisations like ours and the multitude of other organisations and networks that make up the tapestry of sector support.
Even more importantly, they belong to the sector we exist to serve. What is infrastructure for? What will charities, voluntary organisations and community groups need over the next decade, as opposed to what they needed when today’s infrastructure bodies were founded ten years or forty years or over a century ago? How can we best be organised to provide that? And finally, how should that support be paid for, when the sector’s own finances can’t sustain the infrastructure it needs alone? This presents key questions around function, form and finance in that order.
A pattern, not a one-off
Reach and DSC are not isolated cases. In the past few years Children England, the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI), the Small Charities Coalition (SCC) and Getting On Board have all closed, as have a number of local infrastructure organisations and volunteer centres. Each closure arguably left charities and community groups without support or resources they relied on; left communities and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector (VCSE) less connected; quietened the voice of the VCSE and reduced its influence.
Beyond these closures almost every infrastructure body, our own included, is under pressure. The needs of our sector for support, leadership and connectivity haven’t reduced, and in some ways they have grown in urgency and complexity. Membership fees, training budgets and event attendance, which make up much of infrastructure’s income, are in slow but steady decline. Commercial income is under strain and funding from the statutory sector has been shrinking for years. Analysis commissioned by Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2023 found that infrastructure had not grown in real terms over a decade in which the wider sector had, and that very few trusts and foundations fund it at all.
Being honest about infrastructure’s part in this
It would be easy to stop there and simply argue for more money. But we don’t think that argument is credible on its own, and we don’t think it would be entirely honest.
The sector’s infrastructure has grown up organisation by organisation, each created to meet a real need at a particular moment. The result is rich and diverse, but it is also fragmented. Infrastructure bodies, ours among them, may have overlapping memberships or beneficiaries and compete for the same members, the same audiences, the same funders and the same attention. For a small charity trying to work out where to turn for help, the landscape can be confusing; for statutory organisations and stakeholders wanting to engage the sector it isn’t always clear where to start. And too many infrastructure organisations have proved to be more fragile than the charities and groups they exist to support.
Infrastructure holds a great deal of hard-won knowledge, relationships, trust and expertise that needs to be protected. But a shortage of strategic definition may in the end harm the sector as much as a shortage of money, and funding the status quo one emergency at a time will not address that.
What we are proposing
Between them our four organisations connect, directly or through our networks, with more than 170,000 charities, voluntary organisations and community groups. We certainly don’t claim to speak ‘for infrastructure’ – that would be impossible, and we know we are only one part of the picture.
But we would be naïve to think that we don’t have a voice or influence in this space, and we have a responsibility to use it well. So, together, we are proposing an independent review of voluntary sector infrastructure in England, led by an independent chair. A Commission in which the voices of infrastructure bodies must be heard, certainly, but that proactively seeks out the views of key stakeholders, from small volunteer led community groups to the biggest charities in the country, from government nationally and locally, and of course from funders.
The Commission’s work should start from the functions the sector needs, rather than the organisations that happen to exist today. It should look at the connections and interdependency between local, national and specialist infrastructure; deliberately seek out the views of the groups and communities who infrastructure reaches least; and set out recommendations for a sustainable and effective future. It should review whether there is a case for infrastructure at all, and if so how that infrastructure should be delivered and how its impact could best be understood. It must be rigorous, independent and equity focused. It must set out function, form and finance which are fit for the future.
To be clear, while we intend to act as a catalyst for this work and to hold oversight of its progress, we will not be leading it. We intend to approach this review with nothing off the table, and no presumption of outcomes. It may conclude that some of what our sector’s infrastructure organisations do, including our own, should be shared, merged, handed on or stopped. It may come to completely different conclusions. That is why its independence is so important; this is not and cannot be about finding a way to simply protect the status quo.
As the four organisations proposing this Commission, we commit to:
• being open about our own conflicts of interest, and keeping the review independent of them
• publishing what it finds, including where that is uncomfortable for us
• giving its recommendations serious and thorough consideration, including where they would come at a cost to our own organisations.
An invitation to others
Infrastructure bodies cannot do this alone, and sustaining infrastructure needs to be a shared responsibility. Expecting individual funders to support infrastructure organisations in isolation no longer works; we would welcome working with funders on a coordinated approach that backs what the sector needs, rather than whichever organisation is closest to the edge. National and local government have a part to play too. Above all, though, this review must hear candidly from our sector about what is and will be needed from its infrastructure, and what isn’t.
We are already in early conversations with funders about how to move this work forward. We want the widest possible range of voices to shape what comes next and one of the first tasks will be to set out how and when organisations and individuals can contribute, so that everyone is heard on the same terms. Until then, we ask everyone who cares about the future of our sector in all its diversity to think about what support is really needed in order for it to thrive, and to watch for the invitation to contribute. Charities, voluntary organisations and community groups need strong infrastructure. They do not necessarily need the infrastructure that exists today. We would much rather shape that change together, carefully and deliberately, than see it happen one closure at a time.
Authored by
Jane Ide OBE (CEO, ACEVO)
Kate Lee OBE (CEO, NCVO)
Maddy Desforges OBE (CEO, NAVCA)
Clare Mills and Sarah Lomax (Co-CEOs, CFG)
