Charities are not failing. We are starving the thinking that keeps them alive

As a member of the Institute for Social Value, I’d like to take a moment to respond to The Guardian’s article from last week.

When people donate to charities, they expect their money to be spent on delivery. On food parcels, crisis lines, care workers, advice services. And they are right to expect that: trust is fragile and charities depend on it.

But this assumption has quietly created a dangerous blind spot. Because while donations fund delivery, almost nothing funds the thinking that makes delivery sustainable.

Britain’s charities, especially small and regional ones, are not struggling because they are inefficient or bloated, they are struggling because we have built a system that demands constant output while refusing to invest in planning, design and long-term resilience.

We celebrate frontline work while treating strategy as an indulgence charities should somehow absorb for free. That contradiction is now breaking the sector.

The Guardian is right to highlight the scale of the crisis. Demand is rising, funding is falling, staff are burning out and reserves are being drained just to keep services running. But the conversation often stalls at the same place. How do charities do more with less.

That question misses the point.

The real issue is not delivery capacity. It is structural fragility. Charities are forced into permanent reaction mode, chasing short-term grants, last-minute contracts and social value commitments designed by someone else, long after the decisions have been made. Strategy, if it happens at all, happens at night. Or unpaid. Or not at all. This is not because charities do not value planning. It is because the system does not.

Donors quite reasonably want their money to go to visible impact. Commissioners want evidence of outcomes. Politicians want quick wins. Somewhere in between, the work of designing sustainable services gets squeezed out.

We have created a model where charities are expected to be endlessly adaptive without being resourced to adapt.

None of this is caused by bad intentions. It is caused by a funding culture that treats thinking as overhead rather than infrastructure.

Hospitals are not expected to fund their own estate planning out of patient donations. Schools are not expected to redesign their curriculum in their spare time. Yet charities are routinely expected to plan their survival on goodwill alone.

Delivery funding should remain delivery funding. Donations should continue to pay for the work people care about most. But alongside that, we need explicit investment in strategy, design and coordination. Not hidden. Not apologetic. Not quietly relabelled as admin- separate funding for: service design and long-term planning, partnership development before contracts go live, building social value programmes that are ready rather than improvised, coordination roles that stop duplication and burnout.

We need to recognise that preventing collapse is cheaper than rescuing it. And w

e already know this works because it’s how all organisations, including businesses, except Charities work.

Charities that are given time and space to plan and deliver better outcomes, waste less money and build trust with the communities they serve. The state saves money because problems are addressed earlier rather than at crisis point.

Yet we continue to fund the symptoms instead of the system.

If ministers are serious about a renewed covenant with civil society, this is where it must start. Not with warm words, but with a funding model that understands charities as long-term partners, not infinite shock absorbers.

Charities do not need to be told to do more with less. They need permission, and resources, to think.