Small Charity Week 2024!

Small Charity Week (24th to 28th June 2024) seeks to amplify, support and connect small charities across the UK, helping them to make new connections, showcase their considerable value and support them to have an even greater impact, despite the many challenges they face.  

Across the country there will be events to inform and support charities and communities.  In Norfolk, The Kearns Foundation are hosting the 2nd Norfolk Small Charities Showcase at The Forum in Norwich on Saturday 22nd June. Organisations working with young people are a special focus for the Kearns Foundation who also provide small grants and a Log Cabin and campsite in North Norfolk for use by youth and community groups.

It is important to celebrate and support charities, and these events are vital for raising awareness and highlighting the great work that they do. 

At Community Action Norfolk (CAN), we continue to support charities across Norfolk every day. This is particularly important in the current climate because the challenges have never been greater as funding is squeezed, volunteering is changing and demands on services are unprecedented.   

We will be at the Norfolk Small Charities Showcase where we will be on hand to talk about the support available and how we are linking to national agendas to highlight issues for charities everywhere.  From supporting research on rural transport, to challenging the banks’ recent approaches to charities, and campaigning for recognition of rural disadvantage.  

In March we saw the launch of the Transport East recommendations for Rural transport, Rural connections: transport challenges and opportunities for communities in the East, providing a set of recommendations for the Transport East Forum and local and National government which focus on rebalancing the policy and investment environment to ensure rural communities are no longer disadvantaged in transport decisions. 

Banking has been of particular note in recent months with many charities reporting frozen accounts, lengthy delays in setting up accounts and banks generally failing to support the sector.  This is exacerbated by the closure of rural branches and the loss of rural infrastructure in general. 

Working with our umbrella body, Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE), we have been challenging the banks and supported the Charity Commission as it renews its calls for urgent action to be taken by the UK banking sector to improve the service it offers to charities.  The Charity Commission recognises that poor banking services result in three key concerns: 

• Risks to the provision of charitable services, resulting from charities being unable to meet financial obligations, such as paying staff and contractors; 
• Unsafe banking and financial practices, for example the use of trustees’ personal bank accounts to meet financial obligations, a direct contravention of the Commission’s guidance; 
• Longer-term impact on morale of volunteer trustees - anecdotal evidence demonstrates some trustees have resigned over frustrations around disruptive banking services. 

In March 2024 the Charity Commission shared early findings from its annual sector survey, revealing that 42% of trustees surveyed said their charity experienced poor service from their banks in the last 12 months. 

6% of respondents confirmed that they had experienced account freezes or being blocked out over the past year, 7% reported that their bank had lost their records, 32% faced issues when trying to update their charity’s contact details or signatories, and 18% found opening an account difficult or impossible. 

Of course, banking is just one challenge when running a small charity and we are committed to supporting a fairer Norfolk which means tackling rural inequalities wherever we find them. 

Such is the level of concern around issues which are clearly exacerbated by rural disadvantage that ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England) have launched its No Rural Community Left Behind, 

a suite of policy recommendations for the next government which it is sending to prospective parliamentary candidates via its 38 member organisations, who work in support of rural community initiatives in every county of England.  ACRE claims that for too long, governments have overlooked the challenges that rural residents face, including diminishing public services, inadequate infrastructure, and housing which has become increasingly unaffordable resulting in hidden poverty and ageing communities. 

We have not forgotten that our focus is on charities in Norfolk and we will be supporting the Small Charities Showcase at The Forum by presenting what good Governance looks like and how to keep your charity safe from Cybercrime, as well as showcasing some of our wide range of support and partnerships. If you want to find out more about our infrastructure partnership, Empowering Communities, or how we are making cancer support information available to the VCSE (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise) across Norfolk or would like to know what we can do for your charity, why not come along? 

Promotional stalls and workshops on volunteer recruitment, fundraising, governance and cyber-security are all on offer and its free! We want to reach as many organisations and individuals as possible to benefit from this event and to bring people in to find out more about what our great communities do. Please share this with your networks, see the full details here. 

As I write this a general election has been called for the 4th July 2024 so I leave you with a few important things to note from the Charity Commission and the key issues that charities, and especially their Trustees and senior spokespeople must keep in mind.  Click here for further detail. 

1.     All charities must be guided by their charitable purposes; political activity cannot, itself, be a charitable purpose.  Be mindful to challenge policies and not parties or individual politicians.  Make sure that political activism does not become your sole activity.     

2.     If you are using your charity’s assets for political activity be sure that this is the best use of the assets in the context of other activities (including non-political) that could achieve the same result.  

3.     A charity may not overtly give support to just one specific political party.  Charities must place their beneficiaries and purposes at the centre of their activity and not become drawn into believing (or promoting) only one specific party will serve them best. 

4.     Charities can work directly, one-to-one, with political parties and politicians to help achieve their purposes.  They should be even-handed and seek to work with all parties.  Their intent and efforts to achieve this should be transparent.  However tempting it may be, charities cannot go beyond discussions with political parties to overtly recommending voters to vote in a particular way, especially in the run up to an Election.  Where the Electoral Commission defines this as ‘in the 365 days before a General Election’, the Charity Commission guidance places stress on ‘once an election is called’.