This has been a year of both clarity and contradiction.
Across the voluntary sector, especially among small and medium-sized charities, a shared truth has surfaced: the work has never been more needed, more complex or more undervalued.
Rising need, shrinking resources and deepening societal divides have pushed local organisations into a new era - not defined by crisis, but by exposed fault lines. 2025 has shown us the limitations of old assumptions: about partnership, funding, capacity and the very role of charities in civic life.
UK Charity Week offers a moment to highlight the contribution of small and medium charities. But this year, it also forces a deeper question:
What does genuine partnership look like when the voluntary sector is holding responsibility without power, and delivering impact without recognition?
Because beneath the surface, something more fundamental has shifted - and we must be brave enough to name it.
Hope still exists in this landscape.
But it is not passive.
It is held up by people, organisations and decisions that refuse to give in to the noise.
This is the quiet architecture of hope - and it deserves to be understood.
The New Economics of Local Charity: Mergers, Markets and the Morality of Competition
2025 has been the year when mergers stopped being unusual. Across the UK, organisations that have served their communities for decades have begun to consolidate, restructure or close - not because their work matters less, but because the conditions around them have become unsustainable.
This trend has forced a difficult truth into the open - The voluntary sector has become a competitive marketplace - not as a choice, but as a consequence.
We have seen:
- partners once aligned now guarding information
- charities quietly removed from commissioner conversations
- collaboration replaced by tactical positioning
- relationships narrowed by funding pressure rather than widened by purpose
- strategic alliances dictated by survival, not shared belief
Not because values have faded, but because the environment rewards defensiveness over cooperation.
There is a moral tension here for every leader - How do we hold steady in our values when the system itself incentivises the opposite?
At Communities 1st, we have remained rooted in openness, fairness and partnership - but it has been hard to watch organisations we have supported or partnered with choose exclusion as a strategy for stability.
This is the unspoken challenge of our time - good people, driven into difficult behaviours by a system that no longer makes sense.
Complexity Without Capacity: The Voluntary Sector as the System’s Default Navigators
Public bodies often describe “more complex cases” - they are right. But the same complexity is landing in the voluntary sector, just without the structural support to meet it.
- Small and medium charities now routinely support people navigating:
- financial instability tied to health
- digital exclusion blocking access to work and essential services
- caring responsibilities limiting employment
- housing insecurity undermining wellbeing
- loneliness entangled with confidence, mobility or trauma
- immigration and bureaucracy layered with anxiety
This is not single-issue work. It is multidimensional, emotionally loaded, and administratively heavy. Recent national announcements merely confirmed what our frontline teams have known all year: complexity is rising faster than the structures designed to support it.
The Autumn Budget highlighted the wider financial pressures across health, local government and social care, and with that comes a quieter truth: as statutory systems continue to evolve and reorganise, charities become the navigators of the gaps.
Charities have effectively become:
- the interpreters of bureaucratic systems
- the navigators of fragmented services
- the bridge-builders between statutory bodies
- the relational anchors in people’s lives
- the discoverers of root causes, not just symptoms
Yet the role is rarely funded - or even recognised - in commissioning frameworks.
The voluntary sector often finds itself bridging system fragmentation without the accompanying capacity to match the task.
Naming this is not negativity.
It is honesty - and honesty is the first step toward structural change.
The volunteering consultation showed another layer of this complexity. It asked the sector to take on a policing role — tracking involvement, reporting activity, validating contributions — as though this could be absorbed into existing workloads - a fundamental misunderstanding of both the pressures we face and the purpose of volunteering itself. It missed the reality that many organisations are already operating at the limits of capacity just to support the human beings who walk through their doors.
When systems are stretched, the voluntary sector becomes the default interpreter, translator and bridge-builder — not because it is formally designed to be, but because people trust it.
That trust is the currency that keeps local systems functioning.
But trust alone cannot replace capacity.
The Parent–Child Dynamic: The Outdated Relationship Holding the Sector Back
The most challenging truth of 2025 has been the persistence of a parent–child dynamic between parts of the public sector and the voluntary sector.
- It looks like:
- being presented with solutions, not invited to design them
- being told the priorities, not asked about the realities
- being consulted late, rather than co-producing early
- being treated as “delivery agents” rather than equal partners
The volunteering consultation made this dynamic impossible to ignore. It introduced a model to the sector without meaningful engagement, failing to understand the foundational principle that volunteering must remain voluntary. The Budget, meanwhile, reflected the continuing pattern of expectations increasing faster than the available investment. Both moments revealed the same disconnect - an assumption that the voluntary sector will always absorb whatever the system cannot.
- This model is outdated. It fails to recognise the voluntary sector’s unique assets:
deeper community trust - closer relationships
- richer cultural fluency
- more flexible engagement
- earlier insight into emerging need
- the ability to reach those statutory services cannot
In countries like:
- Finland (co-governance boards for community planning)
- Canada (multi-year place-based funding rooted in local priorities)
- New Zealand (shared commissioning responsibility with community organisations)
- Denmark (municipalities working as convenors, not controllers)
- Netherlands (charities as equal partners in prevention models)
…the voluntary sector is not treated as supplementary or secondary.
It is treated as essential civic infrastructure.
There is an opportunity for the UK to move in this direction, too.
For change to happen, this dynamic must shift from parent–child to equal–equal.
Competence, Consistency and Civic Infrastructure: Where Hope Really Lives
Hope is not an emotion.
Hope is an infrastructure.
It is built through:
- competence - organisations that know their communities deeply
- consistency - turning up every week, even when systems wobble
- connection - relationships that build trust over time
- local presence - noticing the person who quietly disappears
- patience - understanding the story behind the story
- fairness - making space for people who are overlooked elsewhere
Small and medium charities provide stability in the places where instability is felt most sharply.
They are:
- the early-warning system
- the relational fabric
- the navigators of complexity
- the voices of lived experience
- the holders of trust
- the builders of belonging - often doing so long before statutory services even recognise emerging need.
This is civic infrastructure - not charity as crisis response.
Undermining it weakens the social fabric.
Investing in it strengthens everything else.
A New Social Contract: The Civil Society Covenant and the Gap Between Words and Reality
The UK Government’s Civil Society Covenant acknowledges the importance of voluntary organisations in public life. It speaks the right language: collaboration, partnership, prevention, trust.
But language is only the beginning. Right now, the gap between rhetoric and practice remains wide. If the government wants a social contract with civil society, it must be prepared to treat the sector as equal civic infrastructure, not peripheral support.
A genuine social contract requires:
- co-production that starts at design stage
- multi-year investment aligned with complexity
- shared decision-making, not top-down instruction
- realistic funding for relational, preventative work
- commissioning that rewards collaboration, not competition
- trust in community insight
- transparent local processes
- respect for the VCS as equal partners, not delivery arms
If we want a stronger, fairer, more connected society, then we must treat the voluntary sector as the civic infrastructure it already is.
The blueprint exists - internationally and locally.
What we need now is shared will and structured action.
Closing Reflection: Practical Hope for 2026
Hope is not the absence of challenge.
Hope is what remains when people choose to stay steady in challenge.
This year has shown us:
- the voluntary sector is adaptable, not fragile
- communities are resourceful, not passive
- small and medium charities are civic institutions, not stopgaps
- values matter more in difficulty than they ever did in comfort
- and partnership is possible, but only when built on honesty, not hierarchy
As we move into 2026, the task is not to reinvent our purpose - it is to ensure the system finally recognises it. Because if this year has shown anything, it is that the voluntary sector remains the most adaptable, most trusted and most human part of the public realm. And strengthening it is not just good policy - it is essential to the stability and fairness of our communities.
By Stephen Craker, Chief Executive of Communities 1st
