There is something uncomfortable happening in communities across the country.
It rarely makes the headlines, there is no dramatic announcement when it happens, no ribbon is cut. no photograph appears in the local paper.
A youth worker simply isn’t there anymore.
A weekly group quietly disappears from the calendar.
A valued and much needed support service just stops, such as the Galloway Action Team.
A support worker who has spent years earning people’s trust moves on because another twelve-month funding cycle for their wages has come to an end.
Yet somewhere else, another funding programme opens looking for something new.
That word appears again and again across the third sector: innovation, new ideas, new approaches. new projects. new ways of working.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, communities change, needs change and organisations absolutely should change with them. Some of the services we depend upon today exist precisely because somebody was once prepared to fund an untested idea.
But perhaps we need to ask a much more uncomfortable question.
When did “new” become more valuable than something we already know works? Especially when “new”, is a duplicate of something that already exists, or “new” is something the community doesn’t want.
The things holding communities together aren’t always exciting, bright and sparkly, with that new car smell.
Think about what the backbone of a community actually looks like, It might be the youth club that has opened its doors every Friday night for the last ten years.
It could be the community centre that has been about for 20+ years, where people come together because it might be the only conversation they have that day.
It is the organisation that, if you can’t cut your grass, they will, if you can fix that hole in your fence, they can.
It is the volunteer who knows three generations of the same family.
It is the worker who notices that a usually outgoing teenager has become unusually quiet.
Or it’s the reliable always available community tea room where everyone is welcome, much like Isle Futures
None of this is particularly revolutionary.
And that is precisely my point.
Sometimes the greatest achievement of a community project is not that it invented something new.
It is that it was still there when somebody needed it.
Yet many of the organisations providing these services live with extraordinary financial uncertainty, and ultimately stop.
Research from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, found that, by spring 2025, 81% of organisations were reporting financial-related challenges. Some 43% had used their reserves and 19% had cancelled or deferred planned work.
By autumn 2025, funding delays or reductions had become a top challenge for 28% of organisations. Among organisations experiencing funding delays, the consequences included cash-flow pressures, drawing upon reserves and postponing or cancelling services. The research also identified effects on staff morale, wellbeing and retention.
These aren’t simply problems on a balance sheet.
There are people at the other end of them, in some cases, the very people we should support.
A project might last twelve months, a relationship doesn’t.
This is perhaps where traditional project funding misunderstands community work most profoundly.
Relationships don’t operate according to funding cycles.
Trust takes time, I find this a very true and interesting statement, as charities, we are run by trustees, a group of people that come together and gain trust from the community, it’s in the name TRUSTees, most are volunteers and are not paid for the (in some cases) 100 hrs a month they put in.
A young person who has had difficult experiences doesn’t necessarily walk through the door of a youth project on week one and immediately tell somebody what is happening in their life.
An isolated older person doesn’t necessarily arrive at their first community activity feeling confident enough to make friends and family struggling financially might take months before they feel comfortable enough to ask for help.
Good community work builds slowly. week after week, conversation after conversation, cup of tea after cup of tea.
Then something remarkable begins to happen, people stop seeing a project, they see somewhere they belong.
And just as that trust has been established, the organisation can find itself approaching the end of its funding, the effect of that is more profound the more imbedded the organisation has become within the community.
The staff members who built those relationships may be facing redundancy; the organisation begins searching for the next grant. And the question becomes:
“What new project are you proposing?”
But what if the community doesn’t need another new project?
What if it needs the existing one not to disappear? In my own community this is happening, why? no core funding to support the staff that are supporting those in need, even writing that sentence just sounds wrong, doesn’t it?
We seem to promote the new shiny projects, while the majority of the community don’t want them and the backbone organisations slowly disappear.
The constant reinvention of good work
Anyone who has spent time around community organisations will recognise the cycle.
Identify funding, Read the criteria, develop a project, Apply, Wait, Deliver, Measure, Report, Repeat.
The cycle is wrong, for a start, an organisation should not need to develop a project based on funding criteria, instead the project should already fit with it, but why do most organisations recognise the cycle, revenue funding for existing community backbone projects rarely come up and when they do, it is heavily oversubscribed.
Funding applications and accountability are necessary. Organisations spending charitable or public money should absolutely demonstrate that it is being used effectively.
But there is a difference between accountability and forcing organisations into continual reinvention.
Research published by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in 2025 found that small charities repeatedly raised the administrative burden associated with funding applications and reporting. Organisations reported that time spent applying for funding was taking them away from frontline delivery.
Think about the contradiction in that, we create community organisations to help people, then we create a funding environment in which some of those organisations must spend an enormous amount of their time proving, repeatedly, that they should be allowed to continue helping them.
A successful project reaches the end of its funding period.
It has participants, It has outcomes, It has evidence, People trust it.
The need still exists.
But rather than asking “How do we protect this?” the system encourages organisations to ask “How do we make this sound new?” That cannot be the best use of anyone’s time and is wrong, in the organisation I work for we have a number of different projects, and we do receive restricted project funding, (Funding that can only be used for a specific purpose, much in the same way as described with Isle futures closing) but funding forgets, without the core staff to run the project, the project wouldn’t happen.
The boring things matter too
The uncomfortable reality about community organisations is:
They have electricity bills, they need insurance, buildings need repaired, staff need paid. rooms need heated, computers need replaced.
Someone needs to answer the telephone, clean the toilets, complete the safeguarding paperwork, manage volunteers, prepare accounts and unlock the building in the morning.
None of that looks particularly inspiring on the front page of a funding application.
But without it, there isn’t a project.
This is why the debate around core funding and duplicate projects matters. Even from a local council perspective, it shouldn’t be about who your friends with, it’s about who has been making an difference, a real difference, not one made up of un substituted figures and dreams.
SCVO argues that fair funding for Scotland’s voluntary sector should include longer-term funding of three years or more, flexible unrestricted funding, timely payments and funding that recognises inflation.
Locality.org has similarly argued for moving away from short-term, project-based funding towards core, multi-annual capital and revenue funding for community organisations and spaces.
These organisations aren’t arguing that charities shouldn’t demonstrate impact.
They are recognising something much simpler:
You cannot build long-term change on permanent short-term uncertainty.
Imagine running anything else this way
Imagine a successful business being told:
“Your customers love what you do. Sales are strong. You’ve demonstrated excellent results. Unfortunately, we’re only interested in funding something completely different next year.”
It would sound absurd.
Yet community organisations can find themselves in a strangely similar position, success does not necessarily create security, sometimes it simply creates another report demonstrating that the project worked before the organisation starts searching for the money required to do it again.
That uncertainty has consequences.
Experienced staff leave because they need secure employment.
Organisations lose knowledge.
Volunteers become exhausted.
Managers spend increasing amounts of time fundraising rather than developing services.
And communities lose consistency.
Nationally, the pressure is becoming difficult to ignore. NCVO described the environment facing charities in 2025 as a “big squeeze”, with organisations facing falling funding, increasing costs and growing demand.
In Scotland, public-sector funding alone was worth around £3.3 billion to the voluntary sector in 2023, demonstrating just how closely public services, charities and community organisations have become intertwined.
This isn’t a small side issue affecting a handful of organisations, It concerns part of the infrastructure that holds communities together.
We should fund innovation. But we should also fund continuation.
This isn’t an argument for protecting every existing project forever, projects should be evaluated, poor services should change.
Organisations should listen to communities, demonstrate outcomes and adapt when people’s needs change.
And yes, new ideas deserve opportunities.
But there must surely be space between blindly funding something forever and constantly demanding something new, if a project has existed for five years, is well attended, demonstrates meaningful outcomes and remains wanted by its community, its age should not count against it.
It should count in its favour, longevity can be evidence, trust can be evidence, attendance can be evidence, community ownership can be evidence.
The fact that people continue walking through the same door every week can tell us something that a spreadsheet occasionally struggles to capture.
What do we lose when the funding stops?
Perhaps this is the question we should ask more often. Not “What new thing can we create?”
But:
“What already exists that we cannot afford to lose?”
Because once community infrastructure disappears, rebuilding it isn’t as simple as awarding another grant, you can reopen a building, you can recruit another worker.
But you cannot instantly recreate ten years of relationships, you cannot purchase trust, you cannot manufacture belonging.
Those things are built quietly over years. and because they are built quietly, we sometimes don’t recognise their value until they are gone, we are soon to see this in Stranraer where I live and work with the closure of the Galloway Action Team, and further down our region with Isle Futures, both these organisations are a great, great! Loss to its community, organisations that have been in the community for a significant time, organisations that get hidden behind the sparkly new projects, that, in some cases, projects that are lead on by faceless steering groups who have their own agenda (that’s another topic)
There will always be exciting new ideas deserving investment, there should be.
But alongside innovation, perhaps funding needs another measure of ambition.
Keeping something good alive.
Because sometimes progress isn’t launching the next project, sometimes progress is making sure the doors of the one people already depend upon are still open next Monday.
My Ask
My request, my hope, really is that we start talking more about the organisations that have stood beside our communities for years. The organisations that were there in the good times, but more importantly, were still there when things got difficult. The ones that opened their doors, found a way, stretched limited resources and continued showing up when their communities needed them most.
To the people in our communities: use your voice. Speak about the organisations you value before they disappear. Ask questions. Challenge decisions that don’t make sense. And when decisions affecting our communities are being made, whether at council level or by faceless, unelected and self-appointed voices claiming to speak on our behalf, demand to know who gave them that voice, whose interests they represent, and whether they truly understand the communities their decisions affect.
To funders: look again at how we fund community work. Ask whether the constant search for innovation is actually serving communities. When an established project has spent years demonstrating its value, building trust and meeting a continuing need, should being “new” really carry more weight than being needed?
To those who are the strategic voice of our sector: shout louder. Challenge a system that allows established organisations and vital services to slowly disappear. Stand alongside the organisations that have stood alongside their communities for years. Fight for longer-term, sustainable funding and recognise that survival should not depend upon constantly repackaging proven work as something new.
Because when an organisation that has served its community for decades finally closes its doors, we shouldn’t pretend that we simply lost a project.
We lost experience.
We lost relationships.
We lost trust.
We lost a piece of the community.
And perhaps the saddest part is that, by the time we realise just how valuable it was, it may already be too late to save it.