Here for the Long Term: why investing in organisational resilience helps charities navigate today's pressures

Why investing in organisational resilience helps charities navigate today's pressures and still be around for tomorrow's beneficiaries.

Why investing in organisational resilience helps navigate today's pressures and still be around for tomorrow's beneficiaries.

The sector is under pressure

We don't need to read much of the sector — or indeed local or national — press these days to be acutely aware that organisations are operating in increasingly uncertain and challenging times. Financial instability, rising demand, workforce pressures, and constant change have become part of everyday organisational life. What once felt exceptional now probably feels all too routine.

The reality of where we are

Across the sector, charities are restructuring, merging, or closing altogether. Local authority funding is shrinking, increasingly short-term, and highly competitive, often requiring organisations to deliver more for less while absorbing greater risk.

At the same time, demand for charitable services continues to rise. Communities are facing multiple, overlapping pressures, and charities are often stepping in where statutory provision has withdrawn or reduced. This leaves leaders having to take increasingly difficult decisions, with one of the hardest being when to say yes and when to say no.

You say sustainability, we say resilience

Organisational resilience is one of those terms that is bandied around without much specificity. It is not uncommon for resilience to be used interchangeably with sustainability, for example, but the two concepts really are very different. Sustainability is being able to generate a stable or growing income. It is built by looking in and down at our operating model — think activity-based budgeting, full cost recovery, and earned income generation. Building financial sustainability is a valid goal for any charity. Unfortunately, it is not a realistic option for every charity at all times.

Resilience, however, is available to every charity. Resilience is looking up and out at what's coming up ahead and responding accordingly — think horizon scanning, reserves (deficit) management, and adaptive leadership. That may well mean stability, and, happily, at times, growth, but it could equally mean temporary service reductions or organisational contraction, to expand again later, when times allow.

Frustratingly, all too often, contraction is seen as failure and something to be avoided at all costs. Trustees and Chiefs frequently share with us that contraction can feel like a failure of leadership and a source of personal shame. For us, it is anything but. To follow the ebb and flow of funding and murmur like starlings, expanding and contracting as circumstances allow, to keep going decade after decade is far from failure. It is often a brilliant survival strategy. It is resilience in action.

So what is it exactly?

According to the British Standards Institution and Cranfield School of Management, "organisational resilience is the ability of an organisation to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper."

Developing a resilient charity is not a single action or system, it is an ongoing practice that includes ways of working embedded deep in the organisational culture that make it feel natural for a charity to:

• Anticipate possible futures, rather than assuming the present will continue forever
• Prepare for financial uncertainty and opportunity through robust planning
• Take design decisions that will enable the charity to adapt — structurally, financially, and culturally
• Respond thoughtfully, rather than reactively, when change occurs.

Resilient organisations are not immune to challenge. They experience the same pressures as everyone else. The difference is that they have created the conditions that give them the best possible chance of bouncing back when difficulties arise. Resilient charities recognise that every decision can lead to a more rigid, fragile future or to a more flexible, adaptive one. To be resilient is to be anti-fragile.

Organisational resilience builds financial viability

In 2025, the Charity Commission for England and Wales identified financial resilience as a key regulatory risk for the sector. This reflects what many charities already know from experience: financial challenges can escalate quickly, putting services, and sometimes entire organisations, at risk.

While it is absolutely a trustee's duty to understand the financial position and respond promptly to difficulty, financial resilience is so much more than compliance. It is often the difference between being able to continue serving beneficiaries over the longer term and not being able to. Financial resilience creates options. It allows charities to make decisions earlier, more intentionally, and with greater control, rather than reacting almost blindly when many options have already been removed because time has run out. Good resilience practices help charities spot problems early. Really good resilience practices buy time to fix them.

Organisational resilience protects people

Too often, charities are resilient because the people within them are resilient. Leaders absorb pressure, staff work beyond capacity, and everyone holds things together through goodwill and personal sacrifice. When this is due to a temporary, unavoidable surge in need, it simply reflects the dedication of folks in the sector. When this is a systemic way of working that never changes, this is not okay.

Organisational resilience can never come at the expense of an individual's well-being. The job of leadership is to nurture cultures of resilience — cultures that allow time and space to think, that support decision-making grounded in operational capacity, and that recognise when contraction is necessary and when growth is possible.

Is it that simple then?

If only. The power of charities to build lasting resilience on their own is limited. True resilience comes from all stakeholders working together and taking collective action to create a more enabling environment — think unrestricted, multi-year funding, pooled reserves funds, commons infrastructure, participatory budgeting. In this collective resilience-building movement, members think beyond organisational boundaries, make decisions together, and shift power.

If charities are to be here for tomorrow's beneficiaries, resilience — organisational and collective — must be built deliberately, collectively, and it needs to start now.

What three things can charities do to build resilience?

Building organisational resilience doesn't require having all the answers or unlimited resources. Small, intentional steps can make a meaningful, lasting difference, especially when taken early.

1. Create space to look ahead, not just respond. Many charities are stuck in constant reaction mode. Making regular time, however limited, to look up and out is critical — a monthly meeting to do scenario planning, review the financial forecast or ask "what if?" questions about income, demand, and capacity.

2. Be honest about capacity and design accordingly. Resilient charities are realistic about what they can deliver with the resources they have. This means aligning ambition with capacity, making conscious decisions about when to contract, and ensuring growth, when it happens, is sustainable.

3. Invest in collective leadership and peer support. Resilience is not built in isolation. Even an informal connection with peers to share learning and create spaces for mutual support strengthens decision-making and reduces the sense of carrying risk alone.

By Organisational Resilience programme