The Clock Is a Barrier: Rethinking What We Ask of Small Community Groups

Every grant programme begins with good intentions. All too often, it ends with a form.

That is not an argument against due diligence. Money given in the name of our city — whether from a mayoral charity appeal or a national funder — must be accounted for, and the public rightly expects that it is. But somewhere between the first draft of an application pack and the fourteenth question about the date of the last safeguarding review, a great many of the smallest and most effective community groups quietly step away. They do not fail the assessment. They never reach it.

This is an argument about time: the hours we ask volunteers to surrender before we have given them anything at all, and whether that bargain is a fair one.

The filter we never meant to build

Consider a group typical of those we see each year. Eight volunteers run a weekly lunch club for around forty older residents in a church hall. Annual turnover is a little over £11,000. The treasurer is 71 and does the books on a Sunday. The secretary works full time.

The group would like £1,800 — for a replacement commercial fridge, some new crockery, and a contribution towards transport for members who can no longer manage the bus.

To apply, it is asked for a completed 22-page form, three years of accounts, a business plan, a monitoring and evaluation framework, two referees, a safeguarding policy, a health and safety policy, a copy of its constitution and a letter from its bank.

Set the volunteer hours against any sensible hourly rate and the cost of applying approaches the value of the grant. That is before anyone has been told whether they have been successful.

What volunteers tell us

The pattern is consistent. Groups rarely object to scrutiny; they object to repetition, jargon and duplication.

One treasurer described keeping a folder of the same six documents, sent to six funders in six slightly different formats. Another described abandoning an application midway through because the monitoring section required outcomes data the group had never been asked to collect and did not know how to gather. A third, running a small youth club, said simply that the form assumed a member of staff existed to fill it in.

None of these groups lacked governance. They lacked capacity — the specific, unglamorous capacity to translate good work into a funder's preferred vocabulary.

The five-minute test

We propose a simple discipline, borrowed from the way good editors read: if a document cannot be understood in five minutes, the fault usually lies with the writer.

Applied to grant-making, the test has two halves.

The first half is for the applicant. Can a volunteer sitting at a kitchen table answer the essential questions in five minutes? We think there are five of them:

• What will you do with the money?
• Who will benefit, and roughly how many?
• How much do you need, and what will you spend it on?
• When will it happen?
• How will you know whether it worked?

That is a paragraph of plain English, not a strategy document.

The second half is for the assessor. Can a panel member read the whole application in five minutes and reach a confident view? If not, either the form is asking for material that will not change the decision — in which case stop asking — or the decision is being made on something other than the applicant's answers.

Accountability is not the same as paperwork

The objection arrives predictably: shorten the form and you weaken the checks.

The two are not the same thing. The genuine risks in small grants — money paid to the wrong account, a group that has ceased to exist, an undeclared conflict of interest, a safeguarding gap — can be tested quickly. Is the bank account in the group's name? Do two trustees confirm the details? Is there a current constitution? Is there a named safeguarding lead? Those questions take minutes, not pages.

What takes pages is the material that reassures funders rather than protects them: the business plan for a £2,000 grant, three years of accounts from a group eleven months old, the theory of change for a summer playscheme.

Proportionality means matching the paperwork to the sum and the risk. A £25,000 grant and a £750 grant are not the same proposition and should not share a form.

Why it matters beyond one funder

Small community groups are the connective tissue of a neighbourhood. They are also, in a year when household budgets remain tight and demand for advice, food and company stays high, the first place people turn.

When applying costs more than the thing being applied for, the system rations by confidence and spare time rather than by need or merit. A funder that shortens its form is not being soft. It is widening the pool of groups it is able to hear from at all.

Three changes we could make quickly

First, collect after rather than before where possible. Receipts, photographs and a short acquittal note are more informative than a forecast written in hope.

Second, pay in advance for small sums. Requiring a group to spend its own reserves and then reclaim is a subsidy to the well-resourced.

Third, publish the questions in full before a round opens, and accept a telephone or video application where writing is a barrier. Neither costs money. Both change who applies.

A fairer door

None of this is radical, and none of it requires a funder to take its eye off the ball. It requires only that we count the cost of applying as part of the cost of the grant.

The Mayor's Hope Fund exists to reach the groups closest to the people they serve. If our paperwork is the reason they turn away, we have built a door only the already-confident can open. The question is not whether we can afford to simplify. It is whether we can afford not to.