21. May 2026

The Question Isn't "How Do We Raise More Money?"

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For years, many charities have operated on an unspoken assumption: if we can just secure enough grants, we will survive.

That assumption is becoming harder to sustain.

Demand for grant funding is ever-increasing, while the pots themselves aren't keeping pace. Application processes are becoming more complex. Reporting requirements are increasing. And smaller organisations — often powered by a small band of volunteers and goodwill — are trying to compete against charities with dedicated fundraising teams, impact officers and bid writers. For international charities supporting locally-led projects, the challenge is sharper still: government contracts are largely inaccessible, and the funding routes that do exist were rarely designed with them in mind.

Meanwhile, Charity Commission data tells a quieter story. Most income for larger charities comes from "charitable activities" — not donations alone. In plain English, charities are increasingly being paid to deliver services, programmes, training and support linked to their mission. The sector has been diversifying its income for years. Many smaller charities just haven't had the space or capacity to keep up.

Sustainability doesn't mean becoming bigger

The honest answer to "what does sustainability look like now?" is uncomfortable: it probably doesn't look like what most small charities are currently doing.

But that's not the same as saying it's out of reach. For most organisations, the path forward isn't "become bigger." It's "become clearer."

What do people genuinely value about your work? What knowledge do you hold that others don't? What transformation do you help create, and what would people willingly pay for because it genuinely helps them?

For some charities, the answer might be training, consultancy or workshops. For others, it could be educational resources, membership communities, leadership development, retreats, or partnerships with schools and churches. None of these require abandoning your mission. Often, the charities that articulate their mission most clearly are the ones best placed to build sustainable income around it.

The expertise is already there. It's just underestimated.

I sometimes wonder whether smaller charities have underestimated the value of what they already know.

An organisation working internationally may carry years of hard-won experience in cross-cultural partnerships, safeguarding in complex environments, volunteer mobilisation or community development. A local charity may hold deep expertise in loneliness, food insecurity, youth work or pastoral care. That knowledge was built slowly, often painfully, through years of showing up.

The question is not simply "how do we raise money?" It's something harder and more important: what do we carry that is genuinely useful, needed and valuable to people beyond our immediate circle?

That is a different conversation entirely. And it tends to be a more honest one.

Grants alone leave you exposed

Relying entirely on external funding doesn't just limit your options. Over time, it reshapes your culture. Every rejected application feels existential. Every funding round becomes a race. Strategy gets crowded out by survival. The organisation starts making decisions based on what funders want rather than what it knows.

A more resilient model looks different. Not dramatically different — most organisations can't rebuild overnight — but directionally different. The charities most likely to be in good shape five years from now will probably be:

• Articulating their value sharply enough that people outside the sector understand it
• Specialising, rather than trying to be all things to all funders
• Building communities of people who care about the work, not just donor lists
• Creating repeatable offers that don't require a grant application to exist
• Mixing income streams so that no single source carries all the risk
• Treating fundraising as one engine, not the only one

None of this is a quick fix. Some organisations genuinely don't have anything people will pay for yet — and acknowledging that honestly is its own kind of governance maturity.

The most important conversation your trustees could have

The organisations that will find this transition hardest are the ones that keep treating income diversification as a future problem. Because the funding landscape isn't waiting.

This isn't about abandoning grant funding. Grants matter, and they probably always will. But a charity whose very survival depends on external funders' decisions has very little control over its own future.

The question every leadership team and trustee board needs to sit with — not as an agenda item, but as a genuine inquiry — is this: what would our organisation still have to offer the world if the grants stopped tomorrow?

The answer to that question is your starting point.

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