Preparing for the financial unknown

Resilient charities aren’t immune to challenge — they feel the pressure like everyone else. What sets them apart is that they’ve prepared the conditions that give them the best chance of bouncing back when they do.

In this session, we explore one of the key ingredients in resilience building: reserves. We’ll dig into the real role reserves play in building financial resilience — not as a luxury, but as a strategic tool for flexibility and response. We’ll calculate actual and target reserves for a small organisation and review what makes a good, usable reserves policy.

But we’ll also face the common reality: many small charities struggle to build reserves. That’s why we’ll also explore what you can do when reserves aren’t possible — and how to strengthen resilience in other ways while planning ahead for better conditions.

This session is about more than saving for a rainy day. It’s about setting your organisation up to weather the storm — and recover well when it hits.