Paying for the Plumbing: Making Core Costs Legible in Welsh Community Funding Bids

There is a familiar moment in the life of a Welsh community group. A funding deadline is three weeks away, the draft budget is complete, and someone suggests taking out the coordinator's hours because the funder 'will not pay for that'. The application goes in looking lean. Eleven months later the same group is explaining why the summer programme ran short, why the volunteer rota collapsed, and why the monitoring return is late.

The instinct behind that edit is understandable. Community organisations in Wales have spent years being told to demonstrate value for money, and the easiest way to appear efficient is to show a budget almost entirely composed of things participants can see: equipment, room hire, refreshments, sessional tutors, printing. What gets removed is the unglamorous connective tissue — the phone calls, the risk assessments, the volunteer coordination, the booking systems, the ten hours a week that hold everything together.

Why the lean bid so often fails in practice

A budget is not a marketing document. It is a description of how the work will happen. When coordination time is stripped out, the application is not simply more competitive; it is describing a different project from the one the group intends to run. The delivery plan silently assumes that somebody will absorb the coordination, usually a committee member, often unpaid, frequently already stretched.

Funders have become more alert to this. Several trusts and lottery distributors now ask directly whether applications include the costs of managing and administering the work, and some publish guidance encouraging full cost recovery. The gap is less often funder resistance than applicant reticence. Groups presume a rule that is not written down, and then budget against an imaginary restriction.

Presenting core costs as delivery costs

The single most useful shift is linguistic and methodological at the same time. Rather than adding a line labelled 'core costs' or 'overheads' at the bottom of a budget, describe each cost in terms of what it delivers. A part-time coordinator becomes the mechanism by which 40 weekly sessions are booked, safeguarded and staffed. An administrator becomes the reason monitoring returns are submitted on time and volunteers are reimbursed promptly.

This is not spin. It is accuracy. Every funded project in Wales has an administrative spine, and naming it helps an assessor see that the group understands its own delivery model. A useful test is to ask, for each line in the budget, what would stop if this cost were removed. If the honest answer is 'the project', then it belongs in the budget as a delivery cost, not an optional extra.

Building the evidence: time and activity

Assertion alone will not persuade a cautious funder. Groups need a simple, proportionate evidence base, and the good news is that most of it already exists in diaries and inboxes.

• Time logs. Ask staff and key volunteers to record, for four weeks, the hours they spend on coordination, safeguarding, volunteer support, finance and reporting. A four-week snapshot is sufficient to establish a pattern and is far less burdensome than a year-long exercise.
• Activity mapping. Match those hours to outputs: the number of sessions, referrals, volunteer shifts or partner meetings they support. This produces a unit cost that assessors can understand — for example, the coordination hours behind each weekly session.
• The cost of the alternative. Where work is currently unpaid, record it honestly. If a treasurer spends six hours a month on payroll and Gift Aid, that is a real cost, currently absorbed by goodwill, and it belongs in the narrative.

Present this as a short annex or a single clear paragraph in the application. Two pages of well-labelled evidence will do more than a lengthy defence of overheads.

Talking to funders before the form is written

Most funding officers will take a short phone call or email enquiry, and this is where the conversation should begin. A straightforward question works well: 'Our project needs coordination time to run safely; how would you like that to be presented in the budget?' The answer is often more permissive than groups expect, and it establishes a shared understanding before assessment.

Where a funder genuinely does not cover such costs, ask what they would accept instead. Some will fund a delivery post but not an administrative one; others will accept a proportion of management time apportioned to the project. Knowing this in advance prevents the familiar scramble of reframing costs after an award.

It is also worth asking about restricted and unrestricted income. A small number of grants in Wales are explicitly flexible, and using that flexibility for coordination time is legitimate. Where funding is restricted, apportionment should be transparent: a clear percentage of a manager's time, justified by the proportion of their work the project consumes.

The honesty dividend

Groups sometimes fear that a fuller budget makes them look expensive. In practice, experienced assessors compare like with like, and an application that includes realistic coordination costs stands out as credible. It also reduces the risk of a more damaging outcome: a grant that is spent on activity while the organisation quietly absorbs an unsustainable workload.

The longer-term benefit is organisational. Groups that routinely cost their coordination are better placed to negotiate with local authorities, to move into commissioning, and to survive the departure of a single indispensable volunteer. The work that makes the work possible deserves to be visible in the budget, not hidden in someone's kitchen table diary.

For community organisations across Wales preparing applications in 2026, the practical recommendation is modest: before the next submission, run the four-week time log, name the delivery infrastructure, and put the question to the funder directly. Courage on core costs is, in the end, a form of accuracy — and accuracy is what makes a funded project last.