Trusts, foundations and philanthropists

Every year, we help thousands of charities and groups to build stronger boards and grow their capacity and resilience, and we inspire thousands more people to participate in creating change.

We could not do our work without the support of trusts, foundations and philanthropists

See our current funders

What we do

Recruiting trustees: Reach is the UK’s single biggest source of charity trustees, helping boards become more effective and more representative. Learn more.
Building organisational capacity: we connect small charities and volunteer-run groups with people with useful expertise in areas like digital, finance or communications. People who will join their teams, deliver projects or give advice. Learn more.
Encouraging participation: We make it easy and inspiring for people to act on their values, through 1,500+ live roles, a network of partnerships and campaigns like Change the Story, Volunteer for Climate Action and within reach. Learn more.

Why fund Reach?

Proven impact and scale

Scale: Last year we enabled 5,996 trustees and volunteers to join charities and groups – a 10% rise on the previous year, and more than double those in 2019.

Impact: 94% of organisations said their volunteer or trustee made them more effective.

Return on investment: from delivering high impact projects to taking long term roles like trustee positions, the volunteers make a significant contribution. We estimate that over £60 million worth of skills was transferred to the sector last year through our service.

Bucking the trend: despite a widespread decline in volunteering, we have experienced year-on-year growth:

16,301 people signed up to volunteer in 2025 — almost four times the number in 2019
Over 60% of new volunteers were under 40, in contrast to the wider trend of ageing volunteer demographics

Learn more.

Skills-based volunteering drives change

By supporting charities and groups to build their capacity through skills-based volunteering, you create a ripple effect: each placement strengthens an organisation and volunteers often use their networks and knowledge to recruit more volunteers. Volunteering is contagious, in a good way, and helps build trust and inspire generosity in others.

Skills-based volunteering does not replace the need for funding, but it does have some unique advantages:

Organisation-led: groups can seek support for the areas that they want to prioritise, instead of having to try to fit funders' criteria
Responsive: organisations can recruit for the skills and capacity they need now, instead of waiting for funding decisions, or for funders to develop new programmes to catch up with events
Abundant: there is an untapped appetite among the public to share expertise - and the more it's used, the more it grows

Reach’s unique approach

Bespoke platform: purpose-built for small charities, skills-based volunteering and trusteeship. With over ten years of continuous improvement, our platform is mature and can evidence a strong track record. Unique features include volunteer profiles and ‘reverse matching’, and prompts to nudge interaction.

Strategic partnerships with LinkedIn, Escape the City, Rest Less and others, reaching tens of thousands of people each year, including those who were not actively looking to volunteer.

Trusted guidance – our Trustee Recruitment Cycle and expert resources embed equity and inclusion into governance, and support organisations and volunteers to develop productive relationships.

Co-produced and responsive – our service is driven by the energy and creativity of the organisations and volunteers who use it. We build on their successes and iterate our service in close collaboration with them. See more about who we work with.

Our business model

Reach combines digital scale with a lean, high-impact staff team and the support of over thirty skills-based volunteers. The cost per placement continues to fall, as we grow.

We earn income from trustee recruitment and partnerships, but because over 60% of the organisations we support have incomes under £250k, philanthropy is essential to keep our service free and open to all.

However, funding for infrastructure charities like Reach has become very scarce in the last four years. We can only continue if you support us.

With falling transaction costs and a high return on investment, your funding directly translates into capacity, confidence and change across the sector.

Our ambition

We launched our upgraded platform in October 2025, and we are now well placed to scale and innovate. With these strong foundations and a growing community, your support would enable us to:

Grow scale and quality
We have a user-centred, test and learn approach to service development, ensuring that every new development is grounded in real user experience, and actually works. From reducing friction to inspiring action, every improvement generates many more volunteers, roles and / or impactful matches, on an ongoing basis. It is a powerful investment in civic infrastructure.

Pilot innovations
We want to prototype a new feature that gives charities and groups a way to ask questions of experts, be that to troubleshoot a problem, scope a project, evaluate options or think together. This feature would also provide volunteers with bite-sized volunteering opportunities, extending the ways they can contribute. With a community of over 10,000 volunteers with an extensive array of expertise available at any one time, the opportunity for impact is huge.

We are also keen to explore Team Volunteering for small businesses. Although our site is designed for individual volunteers, small businesses already use it to source team pro-bono projects and we want to optimise this.

We are also interested in developing cause-based communities around issues like climate action, generating momentum by building communities of volunteers with a shared purpose.

Target support where it’s needed most
We have seen significant growth from movements and organisations led by and for marginalised communities. This has happened organically, and these groups have particular success using our service (with higher application and placement rates than average). We want to build on this success, carrying out research to understand what helps and what hinders, and co-designing and producing a targeted service so that the charities and groups furthest from power and wealth have access to the expertise and social capital that they need to flourish.

Inspire wider participation
We know that many people are concerned about the state of the world and want to be involved in social action. We want to run more campaigns rooted in values and citizen framing, to connect people’s personal motivation with collective purpose. As we all face growing challenges (inequality, climate crises, institutional failings), we will need to lean into people’s potential for collaboration and care. Your support can help us grow the number of people volunteering through Reach and help support wider civic participation too.