A comment piece from our CEO Charlotte Newman. Part one of a series.
The penalty for looking too good
Most of us grew up in a charity sector that was issues focused. Funding revolved around things like human rights, education, health - the labelling system was clear.
Then funders tried to become more specific in figuring out the most strategic way to direct their resources, the framework started to get unpicked.
The most common trends I see coming out of funder strategies today are to redress imbalances by pushing resources towards historically marginalised groups and to regenerate place-based communities. Both have ended up narrowing the pool of funding available for anything issue-specific or national in reach.
To be clear, Carefree still managed to fall outside of funder guidelines when things were more issue-based because carer breaks were perceived as being one-off rather than long-term support (something we've disproved with independent research). But for a very broad spectrum of charitable organisations like support groups for people with specific health-conditions or household name charities tackling homelessness, poverty etc the move to shift more money towards local communities to build local solutions will leave them behind.
The simplest way to close the chasm that's opened up would be for trusts and foundations to broaden their concept of "communities" to encompass umbrella identity groups of people facing similar challenges, rather than over-estimating the causal influence and remedial impact that a place can have over broad and common social issues. Sarah-Jane Pickering has made this point brilliantly in her quest to get funders to understand what well-communicated, accessible funding looks like:
"So many communities are joined by lived-experience. Be that by diagnosis, shared backgrounds, by trauma, by age or life-stage. In 2026 community means a lot more than who lives nearby. Surely?"
This is what the intention of these community strategies - to place people in the lead for change - should look like.
Another option would be to preserve some element of funding for national charities holding up local infrastructure. I'm sure some funders will say that their local pots remain open to national charities but will these organisations really score well on their points system for grading applications? A target of say 30% of funds going to national charities with a local impact would offer meaningful protection to existing operators and the communities they serve.
Whilst funders are celebrating their alignment and the potential multiplier impact of their coordinated place-based approach, every charity leader I know is frightened. To us it symbolises more words on what we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to operate and more reasons for a grant assessor to exclude us for not ticking a box that they don't even fully understand.
So far the responsibility of answering the bigger questions on the unintended consequences of these strategic shifts is being passed to individual grant assessors and fundraisers to handle, when what we already need is for funders to establish an open and continuous learning process with charities on what works and what doesn't.
It's not that some funders didn't run co-production processes to underpin the basis of their new strategies. They did. It's that there is a big gap between developing a strategy and how that translates on the ground.
If more funders understood their role as a service provider, they would have more of an elastic band to how they work. The ability to stretch their strategy to fit new information and change shape to keep pace with the shifts in our operating context - as a nation, as an economy, as a society.
If you think Carefree deserves a bigger platform, and that small charities like ours deserve greater grant and funding support, 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.
