When we began our report series A System at Risk, our goal was to build a shared understanding of London’s voluntary sector infrastructure: what it is, the value it creates across the wider sector, and the increasingly challenging environment it operates in.
The sector was already under pressure when we began: rising costs, increasing demand, a difficult funding environment. What we didn’t anticipate was quite how much the conversation around infrastructure itself would shift while we carried out the research.
By the time we published our final report, debates about the future of infrastructure felt noticeably more urgent than when we started. Questions about sustainability and resilience had moved from being discussed mainly among infrastructure organisations themselves to becoming a wider sector concern driven by closures and increasingly public conversations about organisational survival.
That growing pressure exposed just how much infrastructure operates as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a set of standalone organisations, and how little of that is visible from the outside until it’s gone. Infrastructure organisations bring together partners across sectors, support volunteering, build organisational capacity, amplify community voices, and represent the sector strategically. In doing so, they not only strengthen the wider sector, but also help create more connected and resilient communities, enabling local people and organisations to work together more effectively to address shared challenges.
Therefore, their value lies not in any single function, but in the way these roles combine to create a stronger and more effective civil society than any organisation could achieve alone. Yet, this collective value and impact is also why infrastructure is often overlooked. While frontline services are highly visible, infrastructure works behind the scenes, making it easy to take for granted until it is no longer there.
When crisis becomes the funding strategy
This brings us to one of the most important conversations to emerge during this project. Recent months have seen real debate about the future of voluntary sector infrastructure, with several organisations turning to emergency funding to keep operating. Reach Volunteering’s funding package was one very recent example, and its success was welcomed across the sector, and rightly so.
But these moments raise a harder question. Emergency funding doesn’t solve the structural challenges that caused the emergency in the first place. Many infrastructure organisations are expected to provide long-term leadership, coordination, and support while relying on short-term, often project-based funding that struggles to cover the core costs those functions depend on.
The sector clearly values its infrastructure. When organisations face closure, people mobilise fast because they understand what’s at stake. The harder question is why infrastructure so often has to reach a crisis point before sustainable investment arrives. If it’s genuinely essential, conversations about its sustainability need to happen long before organisations are at risk.
What a coordinated approach could look like
Recent events have also exposed the limits of thinking about sustainability one organisation at a time. No single funder can realistically underwrite large parts of an infrastructure landscape, regionally or nationally, and given the scale and diversity of the ecosystem, a string of individual rescue packages however well-intentioned would never be a sustainable solution.
This was a core argument of our second report, which looked specifically at the funding crisis facing London’s local infrastructure. One key recommendation was that funders move toward a coordinated, London-wide approach to infrastructure funding – one that reflects the long-term, system-wide nature of infrastructure support rather than short-term or piecemeal investment, and one that’s co-designed with Local Infrastructure Organisations.
We have already seen what can be achieved through the innovative collaboration of funders and civil society. For example, the Collaboration Circle, a subsidiary of London Funders, already brings funders and civil society partners together to re-think traditional grant-making and pool money and expertise more equitably. It currently hosts Propel, a seven year programme backing organisations leading long-term systems change across London.
Local Infrastructure Organisations need to be recognised explicitly as strategic partners, including within the Civil Society Covenant, with real investment in their capacity for strategic leadership and advocacy. And while funders and local authorities will always have different priorities, that shouldn’t rule out shared commissioning standards and a more transparent, accountable funding environment where funders learn from one another and from what works.
None of this argues for preserving every organisation as it is, or shielding infrastructure from the need to evolve – it always has, and will keep doing so. But there’s a difference between supporting evolution and managing decline. Infrastructure creates value as a system, not just through individual organisations, and funding needs to reflect that.
What should people take away?
Infrastructure isn’t an optional extra. It’s part of the foundation effective voluntary action depends on. It helps organisations collaborate, adapt, learn, advocate, and respond to changing needs, and helps knowledge flow across the sector rather than sit in isolation. Throughout our report series we encountered real innovation, collaboration, and resilience across London’s infrastructure organisations. But we also found an ecosystem under pressure, and the real challenge now isn’t how individual organisations survive, but whether we’re prepared to invest in the networks and relationships that make London’s voluntary sector thrive.
