Running a charity off the kitchen table

We've got a blog going on our charity's (Stay Up Late) website so why the need for this blog?

When Stay Up Late started we were in the highly unusual situation of being featured in a documentary feature film which went out on the BBC in the UK and IFC in the US as well as cinemas and film festivals. The result was that we reached a huge audience of people with whom the issues we were raising resonated. So we set about trying to support as many people as possible and make our tiny little charity work as hard as possible.

We're now in the position of having two awesome part-time members of staff and over 50 volunteers but that's it. No IT, human resources or finance departments and up until earlier this year we didn't have a place to call home. The charity really lived on my back-room table and still does to a great extent.

My back table

This got me thinking that we really probably aren't alone in working in this way and there must be thousands of people working all hours up and down the country running charities for loads of worthwhile causes of their kitchen tables. So the idea for this blog is to

• Lift the lid off our charity and enable people to see how we do things
• Reach out and get support from people who can suggest better ways of doing things
• Discuss issues and share any ideas as they come up

At the moment it seems like life is a rollercoaster of highs and lows in waiting for funding application decisions so we'll share our successes and challenges around this.

For a small charity we're quite well known in the learning disability sector, and other organisations have taken the name 'Stay Up Late' and run their own events (something we actively encourage) but also means people think we're a lot bigger than we are. 

Hopefully this blog will help show how we manage to do things (rightly or wrongly) and that we're a lot smaller than people think, which may explain why I sometimes take a long time to respond to emails. (I always will reply though - eventually).

Hope you enjoy reading - and even if nobody does I figure getting all this stuff out of my head will be good for my mental health if nothing else.