We had a successful team day at Witton Lakes Eco Hub in February, reflecting on Birmingham Community Matters’ past year and working through strategies for the next year. One huge realisation was that, when we add up our working days, we comprise just 3.6 FTE (full time equivalent) employees per week. That’s to cover all 69 Birmingham wards!

As a collective, we’re immensely proud of BCM and how much we achieve together on limited resources. We’re also hugely grateful to our volunteers (BCM helpers and trustees) who help us to do more for Birmingham’s small and micro community organisations. In 2023, they contributed 180 hours of support.

Doing a lot with a little

We know BCM is not alone in trying to do a lot with little. And it seems inevitable that public budget cuts will put further strain on small organisations like ours, as well as staff and volunteers. At BCM our approach is to focus our efforts on the activities that truly serve our mission, and look after one another.

We’ve been sharing this from Locality: ‘What to do if your local authority makes budget cuts’ as it contains lots of wisdom about campaigning and community ownership, and working collectively.

Pictured: Modelling clay avatars of the BCM team, that we made at the start of our team day. at Witton Lakes.

We published a version of this blog post in our March 2024 newsletter.