Reflections from Connect Over A Cuppa July 2025 with Angela Ellis, CEO of The Advonet Group
Running any organisation involves making choices about where to invest time, money and people. But what happens when the people you serve need more from you at precisely the same time as the resources available to help them are being squeezed?
That was the challenge at the heart of Angela Ellis’s presentation at Connect Over A Cuppa. Angela is CEO of The Advonet Group, a Leeds-based charity providing independent advocacy and user-led services. The organisation has more than 20 years’ experience, supports over 3,000 beneficiaries each year, employs 77 people and has an annual income of around £2 million.
Angela’s presentation was about the charity sector, but much of what she talked about will be familiar to anyone running an organisation through difficult circumstances: increasing demand, rising costs, pressure on employees, limited resources and an ever-growing list of things that need attention. The difference for a charity is that deciding to do less can mean saying no to people who genuinely need help.
The uncomfortable gap between demand and resources
One of the most striking parts of Angela’s presentation was the contrast between demand and income. Advonet faces ever-growing demand while remaining dependent on statutory funding and a declining pool of grants and foundation funding. Around 60% of its income comes from one contract, alongside 13 other funders supporting more than 11 projects and four services.
The chart Angela shared on demand versus income makes the problem particularly clear. Demand for one service is projected to continue rising substantially, requiring increasing numbers of advocates, while the real value of the associated contract has fallen. The slide shows a contract worth £1.22 million in 2018/19 falling to an inflation-adjusted value of around £1 million by 2024/25, despite the headline contract value having increased slightly.
This creates a challenge which is easy to describe but much harder to manage. If the money available doesn’t keep pace with demand and costs, an organisation eventually has to find another answer. Efficiency can help, but there comes a point where simply asking people to work harder or finding another small saving is no longer a sustainable strategy.
When saying yes to everything becomes part of the problem
Purpose-led organisations understandably want to help. When a new need emerges, the natural instinct is to find a way to respond. New projects develop, funding opportunities are pursued and services expand. Over time, however, that can create complexity of its own.
Angela described an organisation delivering a diverse collection of projects and services, some operating at a deficit, with siloed teams and, historically, a lack of a sufficiently coherent strategy. Supporting multiple projects and services also creates its own management and administrative burden.
There is an interesting lesson here for organisations outside the charity sector too. Growth in activity isn’t necessarily the same thing as progress. Every new service, customer group, project or initiative consumes management attention and organisational capacity. Sometimes good leadership means deciding what an organisation should stop doing as much as deciding what it should do next.
For a charity, however, those decisions carry an additional weight. Stopping an activity isn’t simply discontinuing an unprofitable product line. There may be real people at the other end who need that support.
This isn’t just an Advonet problem
Angela also put Advonet’s experience into the context of the wider third sector in Leeds, and the figures she presented were sobering. An April 2025 survey found that 63.5% of responding organisations said their financial position had deteriorated compared with the previous year. Some 78.3% had either already reduced or closed services because of cost pressures, or believed they were at risk of doing so, while 63.5% had lost or were at risk of losing staff.
Perhaps even more concerning was that 41.9% of respondents said they were concerned about the risk of their organisation closing. Funding sustainability was identified as the biggest concern, followed by staffing costs and workforce mental health.
These figures help explain why the challenges Angela described can’t simply be solved by telling charities to become more efficient. The sector is dealing simultaneously with rising costs and demand, dependency on financially stretched local funders, difficulties diversifying income, and challenges recruiting and retaining talented people.
Making space for strategy when you’re already stretched
One of the points in Angela’s presentation that particularly resonated with me was the need to invest not only in strategy, but in “headspace”.
That’s important because pressure can create a vicious circle. When demand is high and resources are stretched, everyone’s attention naturally moves towards the immediate problem. Leaders spend more time firefighting, teams concentrate on delivery and tomorrow’s urgent issue takes priority over thinking about next year.
Yet that is precisely when strategic thinking becomes most important. If an organisation is trying to do too much, where should it focus? Which activities create the greatest impact? Which services are financially sustainable? Where is the organisation overly dependent on a particular source of income? What needs to change now rather than when the situation becomes critical?
Creating time to answer those questions can feel like a luxury when the diary is full. In reality, it may be one of the most important responsibilities of leadership.
Values matter most when choices become difficult
Advonet has articulated five organisational values: being kind, inclusive, accountable, diverse and empowering. Angela’s slides went beyond simply listing them and posed questions about whether the organisation genuinely demonstrates those values to clients, colleagues, funders and the public.
That matters because values are relatively easy to uphold when circumstances are comfortable. Their real test comes when difficult decisions have to be made.
How do you remain kind while telling someone that a service can no longer support them? How do you empower employees while also asking teams to change established ways of working? How do you remain accountable to beneficiaries while also recognising that continuing an unsustainable service could threaten the organisation as a whole?
There may not always be a perfect answer. Values don’t remove the need for difficult decisions, but they can provide a framework for how those decisions are made and communicated.
Sustainability requires more than cutting costs
Angela’s response to the challenges wasn’t presented as a single solution. Her slides identified a combination of strategic investment, cultural change, better systems and processes, income diversification, governance and pro-bono support.
That feels significant. When finances become tight, the instinct can be to concentrate almost entirely on expenditure. Sometimes costs do need to come down, but an organisation cannot necessarily cut its way to long-term sustainability.
Improving processes can release capacity. Better governance can improve decision-making. Breaking down silos can help people work more effectively together. Diversifying income can reduce dependency on a single funder. External and pro-bono expertise can bring capabilities that the organisation could not otherwise afford.
The challenge is deciding which changes genuinely improve the organisation rather than simply adding another initiative to an already overloaded to-do list.
The leadership challenge of choosing
Perhaps the strongest theme I took away from Angela’s session was that leadership is often portrayed as being about growth, ambition and saying yes to opportunities. Sometimes it is. But leadership can also mean recognising that resources are finite and making choices that nobody particularly wants to make.
For organisations such as Advonet, that means continually balancing purpose with financial sustainability. Trying to help everyone today is of little value if doing so makes the organisation incapable of helping anyone tomorrow.
And perhaps that’s why Angela’s presentation has relevance well beyond the charity sector. Whether we run a charity, SME, public-sector organisation or large company, there will always be more things we could do than we have time, money and people to deliver. Strategy therefore isn’t simply a plan for what we’re going to do. It is also the discipline of deciding what we’re not going to do, so that the things that matter most can continue.
That can be one of the hardest decisions a leader has to make.
This article was inspired by Angela Ellis’s presentation, The Charity Challenge, at Connect Over A Cuppa. Angela is CEO of The Advonet Group, which provides independent advocacy and develops user-led services.