Our Finances
SCPA is funded entirely through donations, grants, church support and project funding, with finances held separately under the oversight of SKC Church. Core and project costs are met through trusts, individual giving, partner churches and occasional events. This mixed model enables SCPA to offer all services free of charge and sustain vital community work.
We are often asked how we fund SCPA and how this interacts with the way that Christians Against Poverty (CAP) is funded. So, we thought it would be a good idea to set out the position for Church partners and supporters to see.
Suffolk Coastal Poverty Action (SCPA)
is a partnership between around 20 churches in East Suffolk. It is not a distinct charity but currently works under the auspices of SKC Church in Saxmundham, which is a registered charity (1171576). In addition to providing voluntary leadership support to SCPA, SKC also provides some administrative services to SCPA.
The SCPA financial resources are held in separate bank accounts and its accounts are in a partitioned section of the SKC Church’s own accounts. SCPA is therefore financially and largely operationally independent of SKC Church. Our Annual Report and Monthly Management Accounts are available to those with a legitimate interest in our work.
SCPA Costs
SCPA’s costs are split into core running costs and project costs (approximate 2026 forecast costs, based on year to June actuals, throughout):
- Core running costs include the salary and related costs of the Manager – £19,900
- Expenses – mainly transport – £2,200
- Office, Admin and other costs – £3,100
These costs cover management, service user triage, referrer management and a proportion of the Debt Help work.
Core costs total around £25,200 in the 2026 forecast.
The rest of our costs are categorised by the activity supported and include:
- Debt Help – £21,700 mainly the cost of our main Debt Coach and CAP subscriptions
- Employment Support – £16,300 mainly the cost of our Employment Support Manager
- Life Skills* – £1,200
- Adult Money coaching* – £400
- Schools work – £9,500, our Schools worker and associated sessional fees
- Counselling – £2,000 in 2026 but rising steeply
- The SCPA Relief Fund – £3,300
- Other costs – £2,400
* Wholly run by volunteer team members.
In 2026, these specific activity costs are forecast to be around £56,000 in total.
In addition to our monetary costs, we are blessed with around 30 volunteers. Valuing their time commitment using the REAL Living Wage, we estimate that the equivalent salary cost would be around an additional £120,000 per annum without taking into account imputed Pension and NI add-ons.
SCPA Income
SCPA (like CAP) does not charge anything to its clients. So, we have no income as such. The core costs of running SCPA are therefore met entirely by donations and there are five broad sources of those donations.
Grant-making trusts – this has historically been the largest single source of financial support for SCPA, covering around half of our costs. We make grant applications (historically with a high success rate) on a steady basis to manage the resources of SCPA.
Recent Trusts and other organisations supporting the work of SCPA include:
Valhalla Ventures
The Rope Trust
The Adnams Community Trust
The MSE Charity
The Iken Trust*,
The Suffolk Giving Fund*,
The Brooks Fund*,
The Diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich Centenary Fund*
And the Ganzoni Trust.
*These funds are administered by the Suffolk Community Foundation.
Personal donations – this has accounted for 10-15% of our financial support.
Individual Christians have given one-off and recurring donations to support our work. We have not made specific appeals but the Holy Spirit seems to work in the hearts of Christians and we are blessed.
If you would like to make a personal donation please use this link
And to Gift Aid your donation, please use this link
Partner Churches – accounting for around 10% of the support
A number of partner churches across East Suffolk have blessed us with individual Sunday collections or as part of their own Church giving to missional activity. Some make a regular monthly donation. We have set great store by the fact that we have never made an appeal for funds from any of our many partner churches: we make a point of not asking for money (volunteers are much more valuable for our work!). However, we are always very grateful when churches raise collections for us or include us in their own giving programmes. If that’s your church, thank you!
Project funding – accounting for around 25% of our income
Our local authorities, Suffolk Council and East Suffolk District Councils, both support community work, especially related to poverty and disadvantage and often our policy and projects align with their funding priorities. When this happens, we are invited to make proposals for projects for the Councils to fund, which we do with a high rate of success. Particular recent funding priority projects include our Schools-based work and our support for Counselling and mental health.
One-off events – accounting for less than 10% of our financial support
Occasionally we will organise specific one-off fundraising events. Whilst the proceeds of these account for less than ten per cent of our financial support, if any church would like to organise such an event, we would gladly provide speaker support, seeing the increased awareness as being at least as important as the financial benefit.
Details of Grant-making Trusts and Partner Churches can be found here.
That has been our approach to funding over the nine years since we started active planning for SCPA. God has blessed us richly and we seek to ensure that our resources are sufficient to cover us at least six months into the future – a position that is true currently.
Finally, our SCPA Relief Fund – a dedicated pool of money that we use to support those in extreme poverty and especially those facing emergency needs – has historically come primarily from individual supporters. Before it was largely withdrawn, a number of generous recipients of Winter Fuel Payments donated their payments to us to use to support those in greater need. We have, however, also received Local Authority funding for our Relief Fund and a major grant from Suffolk Community Foundations’ Surviving Winter Appeal.
The activity of funding the various streams of our work is therefore both complex and time-consuming and we would welcome greater volunteer involvement in this area. We have never (and nor do we intend to) engaged any form of paid fundraising.