23 June 2026

Small but mighty: why Somerset’s small charities are the backbone of our communities

Blog post by Andrew Ridgewell, our Programmes and Partnerships Director.

It’s Small Charities Week, and I’ve been thinking about one of the small charities we recently awarded a grant to.

Wivey Link is the community transport service run by Wiveliscombe Area Partnership, a charity that runs on about £150,000 a year. They take people who cannot drive, including older residents, people living with a disability, people without cars in a rural area with almost no bus services, to where they need to go. That might be a GP appointment, a hospital visit, the supermarket, or to see a friend.

We’ve just awarded £5,000 to support this work, the latest in a long line of grants that go back to at least 2010. These add up to just over £45,000. There is nothing dramatic about that story. That, precisely, is the point.

The case for small

Small charities don’t tend to headline-grab. They don’t run national campaigns or publish annual reports with impressive production values. What they do is show up and then they stay.

During the pandemic, research found that small and local charities consistently reached people that mainstream services fail to reach, and that in times of crisis, they’re the ones who remained present when larger organisations stepped back (Lloyds Bank Foundation, 2020). They were there before the crisis, and they’re still there after.

That’s because small charities are embedded in their communities in ways that larger organisations structurally cannot be. Their roots in their local area build trust, and their reach, especially in places like rural Somerset, is irreplaceable.

The Somerset picture

Somerset has thousands of registered charities, most of them small. They’re run largely on volunteer time, covering an extraordinary range of community needs and aspirations. Befriending services, foodbanks, community transport. The list goes on.

And the rural dimension really matters. West Somerset is one of the more sparsely populated parts of England. Public transport gaps here are not minor inconveniences, and community solutions are the difference between getting to a chemist and not. Without community transport volunteers doing quiet work every week, we would see very isolated people.

How SCF connects local giving to local need

When you give to a cause in Somerset, the money stays here. It funds someone’s petrol expenses so they can drive an elderly neighbour to a clinic. It pays a part-time worker to coordinate rotas. It keeps a small organisation viable for another year.

This is what SCF exists to do – to make it easy for people who care about Somerset to direct their giving to the organisations that need it most.

Looking back on our funding over the years, which you can explore yourself on 360Giving, I can see that 80% of our grants go to small charities and community groups. These are for services like Wivey Link. They are awards based on relationships we’ve often held for many years with people who are doing work our communities would genuinely miss if it disappeared.

If you’d like to support more organisations like Wivey Link, explore ways you can give.