Posted on 29 January 2025
Our Chair of the Hyde Charitable Trust Board of Trustees, Katherine Rodgers, discusses how long-term support, partnership and capacity building is just as important as funding for charitable organisations, to ensure they can continue to provide help where it’s needed most.
The last decade has been particularly challenging for the charity, community and voluntary sector. According to the School for Social Entrepreneurs, small charities are facing a number of challenges: their overall income has fallen by a fifth, as costs have risen and pressure to support vulnerable people has grown in face of cuts to public spending.
Additionally, the network of organisations that support the voluntary and charity sector is now smaller. A 360 Insights report, Sector Infrastructure Funding Analysis, published in 2023, found that about 1,000 UK voluntary infrastructure organisations closed between 2010 and 2021, leaving 700 to support the sector.
This is all placing significant pressure on staff and resources. At Hyde, our community partners tell us their staff are exhausted, and the pressures felt by the sector during Covid have not gone away. If anything, they’ve worsened, due to rising costs and increased poverty levels, which has created more demand for their services. Reflecting this, the grants Hyde Charitable Trust (HCT) has awarded to community partners in the past few years have certainly increased.
During Covid, HCT increased its grants to community partners from the £140K a year, to around £400k. Since then, HCT has steadily increased its annual funding to partners, with £510K awarded in 2023/24 and £684K budgeted in 2024/25. This includes grants to support partners so they can continue to deliver existing programmes, and grants to build their capacity to develop and deliver new services, or enhance existing ones.
Since March 2020, HCT has awarded £1.8m to our partners, alongside the £2.3m awarded to Hyde customers in crisis.
HCT is now funding a more diverse range of partners and services than ever before. Its grants support, among other things, programmes addressing food insecurity and tackling social isolation; advice services; wellbeing activities; and training and employment.
Our community investment team, Hyde Foundation, recognises that, alongside more funds, long-term support is critical to our partners. For many years, we’ve supported partners beyond the lifetime of the grant. This ‘Funder Plus’ approach can have a significant impact on our partners and, by extension, the communities in which they’re based.
We provide practical help to develop partners’ capacity and sustainability; creating networks between partners that hadn’t previously existed. HCT grants are often the key to unlocking the next step in the support we offer, from seed funding, to using HCT’s grant commitments to secure match funding and other resources.
One community partner that has benefited from this approach is the Boury Academy in Lambeth. We began working with the Boury Academy when it was delivering classes offering professional arts training and support for young people from a primary school and a community hall.
Caroline Boury, founder and CEO, wanted the Academy to have its own long-term home, so it could provide training and support for Lambeth’s children and young people, particularly those who otherwise would be unable to access it.
On top of an HCT grant, we supported Caroline with business planning and helped access external funding to help with the academy’s development. This funding meant she could employ a ‘youth lead’, allowing her to step back from the day-to-day running of the academy and focus on its development. With more time, Caroline’s been able find the academy a permanent home and secure new partnerships, so she can provide more support for young people and their families.
As well as providing support, it’s equally important to learn from our partners, to review what we do and how we do it. HCT’s considerations are its funding priorities are shaped by partners’ feedback and by measuring the impact of our work. We need to learn what works well, and where improvements could be made, as well as celebrating the fantastic outcomes they achieve with our funding.
Building long-term relationships with our partners, and providing support ‘beyond the money’, is helping us develop a deeper understanding of our communities. This means understanding the immediate priorities of people living in those communities, and any gaps in provision they’re facing, but also the needs of the organisations delivering vital services, at a time when they’re most needed.
This article first appeared in Housing Today on 28 January 2025.