Every day, I am lucky to see kind-hearted people across Britain reach out to help other people.
It can be easy to assume in these tough times that the cost of living means people do not want to dig deep and help out, but we continue to be astounded by the generosity of Britons.
Brits are stepping up to help wherever they are in the UK, from Manchester and Merseyside to London and Glasgow. We have seen this outpouring of generosity grow over the last few years, with people fundraising 236 per cent more for each other since 2021 – even as household budgets tighten.
That paradox tells you something very important about Britain right now, and also about where generosity really begins. Giving has not gone away. It has simply evolved.
It is striking how, in the most difficult moments, in a tough economy, people turn up for one another. Neighbours helping neighbours. Parents rallying around other parents. Communities reaching into their own pockets, often when money is tight, to lift someone else up. It is deliberate, local and personal – the kind of generosity that knows the name of the person it is helping.
We see it up and down the country, and it is why we say generosity starts at home. GoFundMe named Liverpool as the UK’s most generous city for the second year running, and it is in good company, with Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Belfast
and Wrexham close behind. Over this conference there will be plenty of talk and promise about handing power back to places like these.
Pride in place already lives in postcodes that get noticed and the ones that don’t. Look at where people actually put their own money – freely and without being asked – and that pride becomes visible: carried by neighbours, not handed down from centralised structures.
The most powerful help is rarely the kind that waits to be organised. It tends to start with one person who hears that someone nearby is in trouble and quietly decides to do something about it.
Community isn’t just about where you live, but where you belong – and we are always struck by how people club together for a shared cause, wherever they are from. When Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy spoke openly about his stage four cancer diagnosis, he set out to bring people together for a cycle ride, to show there is life beyond a terminal illness. Thousands took part. Among them were seasoned cyclists and people who had never ridden in an event in their lives, many touched by cancer themselves. Strangers riding side by side in Glasgow for something bigger than any of them. Together they raised more than £3.1m for cancer charities.
That same spirit shows up far from the big events. In cities such as Manchester, community fundraising rose by more than a third last year. This isn’t an anomaly, but a growing trend. In 2024, more than £275,000 was donated through GoFundMe to save the Salford Lads and Girls Club. This generosity resulted in the club reopening to the public earlier this year. Since our crowdfunding platform began, people have raised more than £32bn for one another across the world – a total made up almost entirely of small acts of everyday kindness.
Sometimes that help arrives exactly when it is needed most. Last winter, as families were finishing their Christmas preparations, a huge sinkhole opened beneath a canal in Shropshire and sent several narrowboats – homes to people like Bob Wood – to the bottom. A stranger set up a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to raise £3,000. Within days, it had passed £101,000. Most of the people who gave had never heard of Bob, but they still stepped in to help. That is community at its best: people who owe each other nothing, and yet are willing to give something.
The help that reaches people fastest is the help closest to home – the roof of a village hall, a local club kept alive, a family who lost everything to a storm, a neighbour helped back onto their feet. Fast, personal and people-powered.
We see that power in our own numbers. The number of people coming to us for help has soared over recent years – nearly doubling since 2021, when the cost-of-living crisis took hold. No one starts a fundraiser lightly, so a rise on that scale tells you how much pressure households are under – and how many people are turning to each other to get through it. The Charity Commission found this summer that cost-of-living pressures are pushing people to give less to established charities, as grocery bills, energy costs and rent eat into the same budgets that once found a regular donation. That makes what is happening in our communities all the more remarkable – when money is tight, people are still reaching into their own pockets for someone else.
Ask why people give when they have least to spare, and more often than not the answer is pride. Pride in their street, their town, the people they live alongside. Day after day we watch Britons back their own communities with their own money – not because anyone asked them to, but because these are their people and their places, and that still means something.
Fundamentally, generosity starts at home – but “home” takes many forms. Community is also the people who share your fight, wherever they happen to be. Jordan and Cian Adams grew up in Redditch knowing that the inherited Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) that took their mother, Geraldine, at just 52 might one day be theirs. Both brothers have since learned they carry the gene. Rather than let that define the years ahead of them, they ran at it. Jordan completed 33 marathons in 33 days, and together, as the FTD Brothers, they have raised almost £2m for dementia research and the Alzheimer Society of Ireland: for their family, and for every family facing the same road.
That is what community looks like. It is the absolute best of us. It does not wait for permission, a strategy document or a minister’s announcement. It simply turns up and sets to work.
Plenty will be said this week about restoring pride in people’s home towns and handing power back to their regions. But that pride was never missing. It already sits in the pockets of people who choose to open them for a stranger – in postcodes that rarely make the news, among neighbours who did not wait to be asked.
People have always helped each other. GoFundMe is proud to enable it.
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