Why small is good, actually

It's Small Charity Week, the FSI's annual celebration of all charities petite, wee and tiny. The charity I work for, Chapter, is one of them. We support around 200 people with severe mental illness every year in Cheshire West and Chester, helping them to grow in confidence, make friends, improve their mental health and feel hope for the future.

I have some pals who work in big charities. One of them made me laugh recently when they said moving from Alzheimer's Society to Centrepoint was a reality check because Centrepoint's income is "only about thirty million pounds". LMAO. (No offence mate).

Chapter's annual income is about ￡200,000. It is absolutely dwarfed by that of the UK's larger charities, and it places limitations on what we can do and who we can reach. But a charity being 'small' is not necessarily a bad thing. There are some real advantages small charities have over large ones. If we lean into them, we can make our dinkiness an advantage, not a drawback.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the reasons why small charities are better than BIG charities:

• Your donation actually makes a difference. It costs nowhere near as much to run a small charity, obvs. But it also costs us less to help people. Macmillan's Horizon centre in Brighton cost ￡6m to open. That ￡200 you raised by running a 10k will barely pay for the admin time it takes them to process it. For a small charity like Chapter, that amount will pay for several months of one-to-one support for someone struggling with suicidal thoughts.
• We're experts. Being small means we can't be jacks of all trades. We work exclusively with adults with severe mental illness, and over almost 30 years we have become very good at it. It's not just about the particulars of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia - we're also experts in the context of Cheshire West and Chester. We're deeply embedded in the community and we know the needs of the people, the professionals, local businesses, the community organisations and the overall local mental health picture inside out.
• Agility. Making changes to a large charity can be like turning round an ocean liner. Trillions of departments, stakeholders and management teams mean that it takes so long to change course that by the time you've done it, your reasons for doing so are no longer relevant and you need to start the process all over again. Small charities don't have layers of bureaucracy to negotiate. We can be incredibly nimble and react to events and changing priorities quickly and decisively.
• Our CEO salaries aren't absolutely fucking stupid. Cancer Research UK's CEO's salary is ￡240,000 a year. That's more than it costs to actually run Chapter. Macmillan's is ￡170,000. NSPCC's is ￡162,000. And the above salaries were only accurate a few years ago, so they could be even higher now. I'm not sure our Chief Officer would want me to share her salary so I won't. But it's... not ￡240,000. It's extremely not that.
• We treat our staff well. Many large charities (not all) share a lot culturally with the corporate world. Targets, KPIs, and managers who say "can we have a quick chat?" heap pressure on charity workers to the extent that 8 out of 10 recently reported that they had experienced work-related stress in the last 12 months. Small charities with close-knit staff teams are like little families, and while that doesn't mean our work is not stressful at times (how can it not be?) we look out for each other and we know that, when we're struggling, real understanding and support is never far away.