Read time: 10 minutes

The £50,000 Decision That Nearly Broke Everything

Sarah and her charity are fictional, but their story mirrors what happens to real organisations across the UK every day.

When Sarah first saw the email offering £50,000 to her small community sports charity, she genuinely thought she’d won the lottery. Her organisation had been running youth football programmes in Manchester for three years on practically nothing—mostly small donations and brilliant volunteer coaches who believed in what they were doing. That funding would sort their immediate money worries and let them reach more young people.

Six months later, Sarah found herself sitting in a draughty community centre, fighting back tears as she tried to explain to her trustees how that ‘lifeline’ funding had nearly destroyed everything they’d built.

The grant had come with strings she hadn’t spotted in the excitement: reporting systems that ate up 15 hours every week, programme changes that completely put off their core community, and targets that forced them to chase numbers instead of nurturing the genuine relationships that actually made their work brilliant. By month four, two of her best volunteer coaches had walked away in frustration, and the young people they served were drifting off to hang about street corners again.

Sarah’s story plays out across Britain’s charity sector more often than we’d like to admit. Organisations everywhere are learning a tough lesson: not all funding is good funding.

And that’s a conversation we need to have.