Small help, when help is small.

In February last year a parishioner I had taught in Year Three came back to me as a parent. He was forty-two, the father of two young children, and he asked me — not as a trustee, but quietly, after morning service — whether the Caer Llan fund could help with school shoes. Both pairs had gone through, he said, and the older child’s coat had finally given up. He hadn’t spoken to anyone else.

I rang the chair that afternoon. The two of us, between us, can authorise up to one hundred pounds from the Discretionary Fund between meetings. We agreed eighty-five. The chair drove down with the envelope the following Tuesday on his way back from Builth, and that was the end of the transaction.

I want to write about that grant in this dispatch, because it is the kind of decision a small charity makes most often and almost never discusses in public, and because I think the way we make it is worth defending.

Why £85?

Two pairs of children’s school shoes, in February 2025, came in at about £62 from the nearest practical shoe shop, which is in Llandrindod Wells. A half tank of heating oil at the prevailing price was around £140 — more than we had to give, and more than he had asked for. We rounded the eighty-five to cover the shoes plus a little towards the oil. We did not ask for receipts. We did not ring back to ask whether the shoes had been bought. The grant assumed competence on the part of the parent, which is the only assumption a small charity has any business making.

The grant assumed competence on the part of the parent, which is the only assumption a small charity has any business making.

Why call it small?

I have, in the past year, sat in two professional rooms — one a continuing-professional-development session for primary teachers, the other a regional voluntary-sector conference — where the word ‘small’ was used as a kind of polite apology. ‘We are only a small charity, but we…’. The room nodded, encouragingly. The chair of the conference, in her warm way, said something about ‘punching above our weight’.

I think we should stop apologising. The eighty-five pounds, in our parish, was not a small amount of help. It was the amount of help that fitted the problem. Two pairs of shoes is two pairs of shoes. A half tank of oil is a half tank of oil. If we had given eight hundred and fifty pounds it would have made us look generous and the parent uncomfortable. If we had given eight pounds we would have insulted him. Eighty-five pounds, paid in cash, in a plain envelope, with no further conversation, kept the matter where it belonged — between the parent, the child, the shop, and the heating company.

Why not a form?

The most-asked question I get from people outside the parish is why we do not require a written application. The answer is that the form is the ration of dignity that a small charity can least afford to keep. To require a parent to write down, in their own hand, that they cannot afford their children’s shoes, is to require them to write a sentence that no parent wants to write. To require them to send that sentence in the post to seven other parents from the same parish, however discreet those seven are, is to require something we have no business requiring.

Our trust deed gives us discretion. We use it.

A note to other small charities

If you run a small parish hardship fund and you are reading this, I would say only: trust your trustees. Trust the parishioner who is telling you. Keep the discretion. Keep the privacy. Do not let a bigger funder bully you into a paperwork architecture you do not need. The Charity Commission asks for very little; what it does ask for, give it cheerfully and on time.

The boy is wearing the new shoes. The kitchen, I am told, has been a little warmer through March than it would have been. That is, in February, what eighty-five pounds means.

— S.M.