A comment piece from our CEO Charlotte Newman. Part one of a series.
Community means more than a postcode
Small charities are masters at doing a lot with a little. But what happens when you make that little look like more than a million quid?*
It creates a pressure cooker. Your wildly expanding pool of beneficiaries love you, demand on your service grows, and yet everything looks so great that no-one thinks you need their help.
At Carefree, we serve over 50,000 unpaid carers nationally. Our budget is £800-900k. That ratio is what excellence under pressure looks like.
We always designed our brand and digital presence to be a charity with a small 'c'. From a beneficiary standpoint, we wanted carers to feel like they were accessing something special, rather than a hand-me-down. From a business standpoint, we wanted hotel partners who donate stays to feel proud sitting their corporate brand alongside ours. And internally, we wanted to build a team that understood the importance of quality cues and aesthetic.
But today I sit here wondering what that choice has cost us.
Would we be unlocking more grants, donations and support if we played the "poor me" card? Probably. Giving is still based on making donors feel that they have a unique role to play in saving the people your charity supports and the more broken things look, the more people will be motivated to step in. The only reason I can think of that Carefree fails to win bids for short breaks funding, is that we lead with the impact of our solution rather than the list of things new money could help to change about ourselves.
Would we tick more boxes if we sold ourselves on lived experience rather than digital excellence? Probably. Donors want to see a board and senior management team that has the "authority" to work on the issue. We value our privacy as employees and the legitimacy of our beneficiary feedback more. Although we tick the box of being carers, we've never led with it.
Would we dilute our impact if we did both of those things? Absolutely.
Because what we pay our team to be is future-facing. They figure out what new tech capability we can exploit, what adaptive value we can draw from the changes going on around us, how we can be better every day. 60% of our costs are our people — and here's what that investment looks like in practice: https://carefreespace.org/research/a-lifeline-not-a-luxury.
Without the brand and without the digital, I firmly believe we'd be stuck helping a couple of thousand people a year. A more sustainable, £400k outfit - possibly. But 50,000 people getting access to our platform? No chance.
So what am I supposed to be fighting for? Social innovation, scalability, a better care future? I've been doing that. But there is no infrastructure of support for organisations like ours.
And I don't just mean money. I mean championship. The sector loses when innovators stay invisible — when the organisations closest to the problem, doing the most creative work, never get the microphone. That's not just Carefree's loss. It's everyone's.
So when you see small charities this week asking for support, listen. They are the innovators. They know what their users need. And they need more people to fight for them.
If you think Carefree deserves a bigger platform, the simplest thing you can do right now is share this post, follow our work, or connect with me directly. And if you're a funder, journalist, or commissioner who wants to back genuine social innovation, please contact me here.
*£1m is the cut-off point for what's classified as a small charity. For more on Small Charity Week see: https://www.smallcharityweek.org.uk/.
