Concerns are mounting among charity leaders about support for small charities at the NCVO after redundancies slashed the organisation’s Practical Support Team, including the long-running small charities helpdesk.

The changes, first communicated publicly by departing staff via LinkedIn, have caused alarm among small charity leaders and infrastructure specialists, many of whom say they were taken by surprise and left without clarity about the future of key services.

NCVO has insisted the restructure will not affect support for small charities, but several sector figures remain unconvinced.

Questions about transparency

Earlier this month, NCVO confirmed it had made a “small number of changes” to its workforce as part of a wider organisational restructure. Public reporting shows that most of the Practical Support Team, which is responsible for training, guidance, and direct advice to small organisations, was made redundant.

However, stakeholders, including members of NCVO’s own Small Charities Advisory Panel (SCAP), have claimed they were not informed until they saw posts on social media.

One SCAP member, who is also co-founder and CEO of Kids Club Kampala, Olivia Barker White, described the moment she learnt of the changes as “shocking”, adding that the panel had repeatedly been excluded from major decisions affecting small charities.

“The first any of us saw were LinkedIn posts from [the practical support team],” she told Charity Times. “We weren’t informed. We were just completely blindsided.”

Barker White described the experience as part of a pattern in which NCVO has sidelined SCAP despite creating the panel in response to sector pressure following the closure of SCC and FSI.

“It’s really felt like the panel is just this add-on… almost a box-ticking exercise. Decisions are made higher up at NCVO and we just aren’t involved.”

She said the panel’s consultations on Small Charity Week and the Power of Small project had repeatedly been ignored. "We'd give insight, evidence, recommendations… and it wouldn’t go anywhere. Then major decisions would be made without us,” she added.

Concerns about the future of small charity infrastructure

The redundancies also reignited longstanding concerns about the fate of support functions and assets inherited by NCVO when the Small Charities Coalition (SCC) and the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI) closed.

According to sector reports, NCVO took ownership of SCC’s helpdesk and later FSI’s remaining infrastructure services.

Both Barker White and an anonymous NCVO consultant, said little of this support has been visible in recent years.

“NCVO had a duty to safeguard the SCC and FSI assets. But a lot of those resources have never re-emerged. With the helpdesk staff now gone, it’s unclear what, if anything, is left,” Barker White said.

These concerns come at a moment when small organisations make up a large majority of NCVO’s membership. In 2024/25, NCVO had 11,585 free members (up from 11,049 the previous year) and 5,590 paid members — a decline from 5,830 in 2023/24.

This has raised questions around why NCVO is reducing specialist roles at a time when more small charities are joining and paid membership is falling.

The anonymous consultant stressed that the timing is concerning. With many small charities facing unprecedented financial pressures, “the loss of yet another piece of the support ecosystem” risks widening existing gaps in infrastructure, they said.

Concerns also centre on the loss of human, relational support that many charities depend on.

“The value of the helpdesk was speaking to someone, not a bot,” Barker White said. “If they’re replacing this with AI, that’s a real loss for small charities.”

NCVO responds

Charity Times asked the NCVO several questions on the rationale behind the redundancies, the future of small charity support within the organisation, the lack of communication to SCAP about the redundancies and what has happened to the assets from the FSI and Small Charities Coalition.

In response, NCVO’s executive director, Saskia Konyenburg provided the following statement: “Small charities are a vital part of both the voluntary sector and NCVO’s membership community. We work with and speak to small charities day in day out, across all areas of our work. We listen closely to their feedback and their needs, and use the input to constantly evolve our services and make sure our limited resources are deployed to have the biggest impact.

“Small charities are at the core of stronger communities, and we are ambitious about the opportunities ahead to continue to ensure they have the tools they need to meet the needs of the people who rely on them. Alongside our learning programme, we were proud to launch a first-of-its-kind match funding campaign during Small Charity Week last year, helping to unlock £1.8 million for the small charity sector.

“We’re building on that success this year — expanding the programme to as many organisations as possible from the more than 1,000 charities that applied.”

NCVO has previously said that its “service for small charities remains unchanged” and that support “flows through everything we do,” emphasising that 67% of its membership is made up of small organisations.

Despite NCVO’s assurances, questions remain about how core services, previously delivered by experienced staff, will operate without the team that ran them.

It is not yet clear whether advice functions will be replaced by technology, outsourced, or reshaped into a new model of support.

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