An Open Letter to the Minister for Civil Society - please sign
21 October 2026
We are losing the infrastructure behind our charity sector.
We need to act before it is too late.
An open letter to the Minister for Civil Society
Dear Minister,
Over the past few years, the charity sector has lost a number of organisations whose purpose was to make other charities stronger.
The Small Charities Coalition. The Foundation for Social Improvement. Children England. Getting on Board.
More recently, Reach Volunteering announced that it would close after 45 years connecting charities with skilled volunteers and trustees. Thankfully, nine funders and donors stepped in and secured its future until the end of 2028.
But only weeks later, the Directory of Social Change - after more than 50 years supporting charities across the UK - appointed an insolvency practitioner to manage its closure.
Many smaller local infrastructure organisations are facing the same pressures away from the national spotlight. This is starting to look less like a series of isolated closures and more like a warning about the infrastructure supporting our charity sector.
Why infrastructure charities matter
Infrastructure charities are not always the easiest organisations to explain, celebrate or photograph. They do not have the same emotive pull as charities doing front-line work, providing hot meals in a food bank, delivering counselling support or end-of-life hospice care.
They help charities recruit volunteers and trustees. They provide training, advice and governance support. They connect organisations to funding. Ultimately they help charities access the people, expertise and funding they need to be stronger, more resilient and more effective.
Unfortunately this impact is not always easy to quantify. In an environment where donors want to see clear, reportable impact - that creates a challenge.
Grant-makers are narrowing their focus towards particular places, issues and groups to help them deliver more tangible impact. Funding charities whose role is to help other charities, is increasingly unpopular.
The irony is that supporting infrastructure organisations is precisely where returns can be multiplied. Investing in these organisations, in turn helps thousands of charities find volunteers, train staff and maximise their impact for the communities and groups they serve.
A volunteer recruitment platform helps a charity find a treasurer. That treasurer may strengthen the charity’s finances allowing it to support more people.
A trustee training organisation helps a board make better decisions. Those decisions may affect thousands of beneficiaries.
A funding database helps a small organisation secure the grant that keeps a service open.
A local infrastructure body helps dozens of community organisations navigate problems they could never afford to solve alone.
Infrastructure enables frontline impact. And because one infrastructure organisation can strengthen hundreds of other charities, the multiplier effect can be enormous.
This is why the recent pattern of closures is so concerning. Dame Julia Unwin, Chair of the Charity Commission, described this powerfully at the Commission’s Annual Public Meeting this month, warning that these closures may be the “tremor ahead of what might be a quietly destructive earthquake.”
This is part of a wider crisis facing charities
Infrastructure charities are not alone in facing extraordinary pressure.
Across the country, charities are dealing with rising employment and operating costs, increasing demand, falling donations and intense competition for funding.
Charities also need to adapt. Technology and AI are changing how organisations work. Charities need resilient funding models, diversified income, efficient operations and services that continue to meet changing needs. DSC itself acknowledged many of these pressures in explaining its closure.
This letter is therefore not an argument that every organisation should be preserved. However it is a call to understand what we are losing before it has gone.
Charities and community organisations are part of the glue that holds communities together. But to do that effectively, they themselves need support.
They need infrastructure that helps them operate effectively
They need people with the time and skills to help
They need funding that is accessible without consuming disproportionate amounts of already-limited capacity
These are not nice-to-haves around the edges of the sector. They are part of the foundations charities rely on to operate effectively. And those foundations are starting to crack.
What happens when the infrastructure disappears?
The immediate effects will be different depending on which organisation disappears. It might become harder for charities to find skilled volunteers and trustees. Training and governance support may disappear. Funding information and advice become harder to access. Local organisations lose trusted networks and specialist expertise.
The consequence is not just inconvenience. It puts greater pressure on existing charity staff, it leads to weaker governance, inefficiencies and less time spent delivering services. Ultimately, the cost is felt by the communities those charities exist to serve.
Small charities do not sit at the margins of the charity sector. They represent 96% of charities in the UK. Yet Small Charity Week research found that nearly half of small charities fear closure within 12 months. That should worry all of us.
What happens when small charities disappear?
It is very easy to think of charities as somehow separate from the essential infrastructure of society. They aren't. Charities and community groups are the glue that helps hold our societies together.
They run youth clubs and foodbanks. They support victims of domestic abuse. They provide mental health services. They look after community spaces, support disabled children, visit isolated older people and help families through crises. When they disappear we lose some of the relationships, knowledge and social fabric that make communities work.
And the public recognises this: four in five people believe small charities are vital to society, while more than half say the closure of a small charity in their area would negatively affect the welfare of their local community.
We cannot keep managing this one closure at a time
What happened with Reach gives us reason for optimism. Funders recognised that something valuable was about to disappear and acted collectively to save it. But crisis intervention cannot become our model for sustaining civil society infrastructure.
We need to get ahead of the problem rather than waiting for the next organisation to reach the cliff edge.
And this is not something for government or grant-makers to solve alone. We all have a part to play in making the system work better:
Government can create the conditions for a strong civil society.
Funders can rethink how infrastructure and core capacity are supported.
Businesses have funding, technology, networks and most importantly millions of people with skills that charities desperately need.
Charities themselves must continue to adapt and build resilient models.
The Civil Society Council already brings government and civil society together and is considering how the Civil Society Covenant translates into practical action. We would therefore like to propose three practical actions for the Council to consider.
Infrastructure. People. Funding.
1. Infrastructure: undertake a Civil Society Infrastructure Review
We are asking the government, working through the Civil Society Council, to undertake a review of civil society infrastructure across England.
The review should map the national, regional and local infrastructure on which charities depend; identify services or areas where significant gaps or vulnerabilities are emerging; consider where duplication exists; and assess which forms of infrastructure provide a wider public benefit but are inherently difficult to sustain through commercial income alone.
It should then make practical recommendations for how critical infrastructure can be made more sustainable - including the respective roles of government, grant-makers, businesses and the sector itself.
Infrastructure organisations must demonstrate their value, adapt as needs change and build resilient funding models wherever possible. But we should also know which foundations we rely upon before they disappear.
2. People: unlock the enormous potential sitting inside UK businesses
Businesses have a significant role to play in strengthening civil society too.
Many employers already give their people paid time to volunteer. Yet too much of that opportunity remains untapped with an estimated 140 million hours of support unused.
We would like the government to work with employers and professional bodies on a Corporate Volunteering Challenge: encouraging businesses to measure participation, make skills-based opportunities easier to access and recognise relevant volunteering as part of professional development and CPD.
Making better use of an enormous pool of skills and expertise that already exists - while giving employees opportunities to develop their own experience, confidence and leadership should not be a difficult ask.
3. Funding: make it radically easier for small charities to access it
Funding is scarce enough without charities spending disproportionate amounts of time applying for it.
Small organisations should not have to complete substantially different application forms, due-diligence processes and organisational information every time they approach another funder.
We would like the Civil Society Council to explore a more standardised or centralised approach to core charity information and due diligence, allowing trusted information to be supplied once and reused across multiple funding applications.
Funders would still make their own decisions and ask questions relevant to individual grants. But we could remove an enormous amount of duplicated administration from organisations where every hour counts.
For a small charity, reducing bureaucracy is not simply a matter of convenience.
It gives time back to deliver the mission.
Please put these three proposals on the agenda
The Prime Minister, told the Civil Society Council this month that civil society is “absolutely critical to the success of our country”. We agree.
But if that is true, we need to make sure charities can access the infrastructure, people and funding they need to survive and thrive. Without action, more organisations will close and the sector will become weaker just when we need it most.
Alice Clementi | Chief Executive Officer
Charterpath CIO (1207509)
