Income drop ‘hitting the smaller charities’
SMALLER charities face a “slow death”, experts fear, amid declining donations and limited grants, writes Claire Miller.
There are 478 micro or small charities registered in Cardiff.
While not all of them will be at risk of closure, analysis by the BBC Shared Data Unit suggests smaller charities are more vulnerable to Covid income shocks than their larger counterparts.
The leader of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) said the declining income from collection tins, charity shops and events has already hit the incomes of smaller operations by “hundreds of millions of pounds”.
Cardiff has 186 micro charities (with a turnover of less than £10,000) and 292 small charities (with a turnover of between £10,000 and £100,000). These make up 55% of all charities registered in the area. Based on their most recent accounts, these charities had a combined income of £11.8m.
According to the data from CharityBase, these smaller charities have no employees but are reliant on volunteers – 8,658 in total across Cardiff.
A CAF poll of 270 charity chief executives in March found 54% of charity bosses believed their charities would cease to operate “within a year” and 37% “less than six months”. When polled in July after the release of the government’s £750m support package, 9% said they were at risk of permanent closure as a result of the crisis, while 50% were operating at a reduced capacity. Separate polling by the Small Charities Coalition (SCC) in March found 34% of charity bosses would have to make redundancies “within three months”, while 25% reported having to shut all services “immediately”.
In September, just over 50% of charity bosses surveyed had not received government support. Seventy per cent had seen a serious drop in income as a result of the pandemic and 68% said demand for their services had increased.
Rita Chadha, SCC chief executive, said nearly all the funding was six-month emergency grants, mostly given out at the start of June, meaning fears about the long term and a lack of certainty. She said: “The real pinch point will be next year when these charities officially start closing.
“It’s a slow death. “Many of our charities are already having to decrease their operations already.”