Reach Volunteering is closing: what UK businesses and charities should do next

The charity's board says a shrinking, narrowly-targeted funding landscape has made the model unsustainable, and the closure will run as a managed 12-week process expected to conclude by the end of November.

It's a hard loss for the sector, and it's worth being honest about the scale of it. Last year alone, Reach helped place nearly 6,000 volunteers and trustees, saw over 16,000 people register to give their skills, and worked with 2,440 organisations — 96% of them charities with an annual income under £1 million. It was, by its own account, the single biggest source of trustees for UK charities. That's not a niche service disappearing quietly. It's a piece of national infrastructure.

So if you're a small charity that relied on Reach to find a treasurer, a marketing volunteer, or a board member with legal experience — or a business that used Reach to give your team's skills somewhere useful — the obvious question is: what now?

What Reach did:

Reach worked as a matching service between individual professionals and organisations that needed their expertise, largely on a goodwill basis. If you were an accountant, an architect, or an HR specialist with a few hours to spare, Reach helped you find a charity that needed exactly that skill. If you ran a small charity, Reach was often the only realistic way to reach beyond your own network and find people with the right experience — especially for trustee roles, where relying on personal contacts tends to produce the same kind of board, again and again.

The gap this leaves

Two groups are left with a genuine problem in the next few weeks:

Charities and VCSEs who now have no obvious route to skilled volunteers or trustees outside their existing networks. For smaller organisations especially, this closes off one of the few channels that didn't depend on who they already knew.

Businesses who were using Reach, directly or through their people, to give back — and who now need somewhere else to put that effort so it doesn't just quietly stop.

What to do next

If you're a charity or community group:

Don't wait until your Reach account closes to look for alternatives — start building relationships with local business networks, B Corp communities, and social value platforms now, while you still have time to plan a handover.

If you're currently recruiting a trustee or skilled volunteer through Reach, ask directly what support is available during the wind-down period, and get any in-progress matches confirmed as soon as possible.

Look for platforms that connect you not just to individuals, but to businesses that are actively looking to formalise their giving — that's often a more durable relationship than a one-off volunteer placement, because it's backed by a company's own social value commitments.

If you're a business:

If your team gave time through Reach, that's a habit worth keeping, not losing. The closure is a good moment to ask whether your current approach to giving back is actually visible anywhere that matters — in a tender response, an ESG report, or a B Corp recertification.

Consider moving to a platform built for the business side of this relationship: one where volunteering, skills-sharing, and social value aren't just goodwill, but tracked, reportable, and usable when a client or funder asks for evidence.

If you don't already have a formal channel for employee volunteering, this is a natural trigger to set one up — rather than letting the habit lapse along with the platform that supported it.

Where CommonGood fits

This is exactly the gap CommonGood was built for. We connect UK SMEs and local businesses directly with charities and VCSEs for volunteering, skills-sharing, and social value — and, unlike a pure matching service, everything is tracked in a way that produces procurement-grade reporting. That means the hours your team gives don't just happen and disappear; they become evidence you can use when a client, funder, or certification body asks what your business actually does for its community.

For charities, it means access to a growing network of businesses actively looking to give time and skills — not just individual volunteers browsing on their own initiative.

Reach's closure is a genuine loss for the sector, and it deserves to be recognised as one. But the need it was meeting hasn't gone away — if anything, the demand for skills-based giving is higher than it's ever been. The organisations that move quickly to build a new channel, rather than waiting for the old one to fully wind down, will be the ones that keep the momentum going.

If you're a charity or business affected by Reach Volunteering's closure and want to talk through what a replacement channel could look like, get in touch with CommonGood.