Reach Volunteering, which describes itself as the single biggest source of trustees for the UK voluntary sector, began a managed closure on 1 September. Operations are expected to cease by 30 November.
The closure is not yet certain. Reach has said it would need around £200,000 a year for at least two years to stabilise and grow its earned income, and that the funding would need to be in place by 10 September to stop the process. That leaves just over a week.
Nearly half the organisations that used Reach last year had annual incomes under £50,000, which makes this a bigger problem for very small charities than the headline suggests.
What Reach did
The charity was founded in 1979 and connects people with professional skills to charities that need them, both as skills-based volunteers and as trustees. It is registered in England and Wales, number 278837, and its chief executive is Janet Thorne.
The figures Reach has published for 2025 are the strongest in its history. It placed 5,996 volunteers and trustees. More than 16,000 new volunteers registered, which the charity notes is roughly four times the pandemic level and runs against the national decline in volunteering. Nearly 30,000 applications were made through the platform.
Of the 2,440 organisations that used the service, Reach says 96 per cent had annual incomes under £1 million and 40 per cent were led by and for communities facing structural injustice. The charity puts the value of expertise contributed by the volunteers and trustees it placed last year at around £60 million, which is its own estimate rather than an independently audited figure.
On the trustee side specifically, Reach reports that more than 40 per cent of its applicants are under 40 and more than 40 per cent are from ethnic minorities. Small boards struggling to recruit beyond the people they already know were the point of the service.
Why it is closing
Not for lack of demand. Reach’s own statement is direct about this: it is not closing because the work has lost its value, and the board describes the closure as happening at the peak of the charity’s impact.
The stated cause is a change in how funders behave. Reach says funders have increasingly narrowed their focus to particular places, issues and groups, and that money for national services helping a broad range of organisations build capacity and connections has declined accordingly. Infrastructure charities, which support other charities rather than delivering to the public directly, are hard to fund under that model.
Roughly half of Reach’s operational income is earned, through its TrusteeWorks recruitment service and fees charged to larger charities. Grants covered the rest, which is what pays for the free service that small organisations use.
The sums involved are smaller than the scale of the service suggests. Reach’s most recent reported income was £489,000, down from a peak of £531,000 in 2020. Its 2024 accounts show an operating deficit of just under £20,000, against a surplus of a similar size the year before, with grants from other charities of £114,800 in 2024.
The charity says it examined the alternatives before deciding, including redesigning the service, further cost savings, charging smaller charities, asking volunteers for donations, merging, and transferring the platform to another organisation. None of them produced a sustainable route forward.
What is not yet known
Several things that matter to charities mid-recruitment have not been settled publicly.
Reach has said it will work with sector partners to share its digital assets, learning and frameworks where possible, but has not named a partner or confirmed that the platform itself will survive in any form. It has published a closure FAQ and a timeline page, and is contacting service users directly. Charities with a live trustee search should read both rather than wait to be told.
Nor is there any public sign yet of whether the funding Reach has asked for is being discussed. Its statement asks for a conversation among funders, policymakers and sector leaders about how this kind of infrastructure gets sustained. Whether that conversation produces anything before 10 September is the question of the week.
What small charities should do now
If you are recruiting through Reach, check the closure timeline for your own search rather than assuming it runs to the end of November.
If you were planning to, you now need another route. Local volunteer centres, Trustees Unlimited, Getting on Board, Young Trustees Movement and sector-specific networks all operate in this space, though none replicates Reach’s combination of scale, free access for the smallest organisations and a diverse applicant pool. Boards that have relied on Reach should expect trustee recruitment to take longer and cost more from next year.
The broader point for anyone running a small charity is worth sitting with. A service placing nearly 6,000 people a year, at its most effective, is closing over a funding gap of around £200,000. That is a statement about how infrastructure is funded rather than about how well Reach was run.
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