Planning a budget for your children s group

Lucy Moore

OK. For those who know me, including our church treasurer, now is the time to collapse in peals of raucous hilarity that I – I who would rather sauté my own entrails in goosefat than handle money – am proposing to tell others how to plan a budget.

The truth is, many of us who are in children’s work on a volunteer basis panic when faced with the annual letter from the treasurer demanding a proposal for next year’s budget. ‘What? How should I know?’ Frantic calculations as to how much a pencil costs, how many felt tips the children eat in a year, what teaching material might add up to (but there again, I got some in the sale last year and it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d been expecting…) and whether I should be working out what percentage of the candles I bring from home for worship are burnt up at church… isn’t it just easier to pay for it all myself?

But I am going to be strong and pull together some sensible advice for those of us who would love to twirl figures and sums on a fingertip with the ease of a plate-spinner in a circus, but somehow end up merely baffled. And subsequently out of pocket.

First things first.

1 Has your children’s work got a budget?
If your church hasn’t budgeted for its children’s work, you need to go and make noises at the elders’ meeting, the PCC or through the minister’s letterbox. Accept no excuses such as the classic, ‘The church has no money.’ (So where do the flowers come from, eh?) Or ‘Children’s work shouldn’t cost anything.’ If the church wants children, it costs and money must be found. Just because Mrs Frunghorn ran Sunday School for fifty years with nothing but half a chewed wax crayon and a cattle prod doesn’t mean that it is possible today. Another classic is ‘But we haven’t got any children!’ Why do you think we have no children? Is there any evidence in our current church budget that we are committed to children? Why not throw a little bread on the waters? If the work is to have dignity and worth, it needs investment of prayer, energy and time but also of money.

You will find your own reasoned arguments, but here are a few to throw into the debate.

• The Theological Implications: ‘Children are used to good quality resources at school and if the church gives them shoddy out of date books and grotty equipment, what are we saying about how important we think their Christian formation is?’
• The Practical: ‘Children learn best not just from sitting listening to a story but through seeing things, holding things, making things, experiencing things: these ‘things’ cost money.’
• The No-Nonsense: ‘Here’s a list of good quality books or teaching programmes I have been recommended (by the children’s adviser / a friend from St Bunion’s / the Barnabas website / the Christian bookshop). As you see, they start at £X. Who should pay for this?’
• The ‘I’ll make this easy for you’: ‘If X people in church could give just £X a month specifically for the children’s work, we’d have more than enough.’
• The Shaming: ‘Do you know? St Egbert’s down the road pay £X a year towards their children’s work…’
• The Financially Astute: divide the amount spent on children’s ministry by the number of children who come, and then by the number of weeks in the year, and then, shock horror, how much do you spend per child per week?

2 What should go into a budget?
The fundamentals are simple: decide what you need to spend money on in the next year, work out roughly how much each thing will cost, add up the total and that’s your budget.

Obviously you’ll want to customise your list of expenses but here are some items you might want to include:

• Teaching programme (books / termly magazines and photocopying)
• Music resources (books, CDs, instruments)
• Craft equipment (paper, pens, glue, glitter, holepunches etc)
• Membership fee for Craft / Resources Bank
• Worship / storytelling equipment (candles, matches, glass beads, puppets etc)
• Other equipment (tables, chairs, tents, parachutes, video projectors etc)
• Training budget for leaders’ team (£X per person)
• Subsidy for weekend away with children / trip out
• Room hire
• Special events / parties
• Juice and biscuits / other refreshments
• Christmas / birthday presents for children

If however, you are simply told: ‘You can have a budget of £X’, you have a choice: either accept gracefully and divide the money up between the items outlined above. Or respond: ‘Actually, that’s too much (ha!) / not enough (much more likely). I’ve worked out what we need and it comes to £Y. Here’s the itemised budget plan.’

3 Using the money
You might find it easiest to open a bank account for your children’s work – it’s very painless and that way, you don’t have to keep running to the church treasurer waving receipts. Go and talk to your bank about how to do it. Sign up two or three or four signatories and put one person in charge of the chequebook. It’s actually quite a bonding exercise to open a bank account together. Especially when the bank clerk asks, ‘Where’s the money going to come from?’ and your keenie co-worker says brightly, ‘God’. As happened to us in Lloyds TSB not so long ago.

Get the church treasurer to pay the whole annual budget sum into the account all at once, then you’ll know exactly where you stand and how much you have to play with over the course of the year.

If the treasurer wants to deal with all your bills directly, ask if you can let her/him deal with the larger amounts but could you have a petty cash supply so that leaders can claim small amounts back. Leaders will be very reluctant to claim a couple of pounds back from the treasurer but would claim it back from the children’s group petty cash. Re-assure her/him that you will keep a record and receipts. A large marg tub for the cash… an envelope for the receipts … you’re sorted!

Encourage the whole children’s team to keep receipts and to ask to be reimbursed for what they spend. YOU need to do the same, very visibly, as they will learn by example. Create a culture of expecting expenses to be met, however small: ‘Ah, Mabel, I bought a packet of biscuits last week. Here’s the receipt for 47p. Could you reimburse me sometime please?’

You should nag your team if they try to pay for it themselves. Say ‘That’s really kind, but actually, if you want to give, why not Gift Aid that amount of money then the church can claim the extra 28% from the government. Go on, claim it back!’

Or ‘That’s really kind, but think how difficult you’re making it for the person who does the job after you – they might be put off helping because they can’t afford to give at the same level as you. Much better to claim for everything. Now how much was it?’

We should mention giving money away as well, as tithing is a good Biblical principle. Chances are, however, the source of your money has already tithed and it would be inappropriate to give a tenth of it away again, especially as it may be against the Charities Act. But you might want to include in your yearly programme a way of raising money among the children to give away to a good cause. One of the happiest times we had this year was raising money to buy a toilet and some bits and bobs for Africa through the World Vision scheme: the children really felt they’d made a difference through their cake and toy stalls. (They never really understood exactly how the goat was going to be posted to Africa.)

If you get to the end of the year and the budget allocation isn’t all spent, work out what you’ve missed out: has someone not done any training? Have you skimped on replenishing the equipment? Go and spend it joyfully – the fun of having a budget is that it is not just permission to spend but an obligation to spend.

4 But what if I run out of money?
Of course, you’ll need to make adjustments in the next year’s budget and try to be more realistic. One hopes that you have paid for the essentials, like teaching materials, training and equipment, and that you may just be short of desirable extras like parachutes and chocolate chip cookies. (Though there again, can a chocolate chip cookie ever be classed as a non-essential?)

It’s good stewardship to work out how much equipment you can borrow and share, either from your own congregation or from neighbouring churches. For larger items like CD players, either ask the Church to provide them or agree that if someone’s own equipment is used, that the Church will replace if damaged. Has St Egbert’s got a digital projector for the big event you’re running? Could you lend them your badge-making machine for their holiday club? St Guthlac’s have a fantastic set of disco lights – why don’t we plan our Christmas party the week after theirs, then we might be able to borrow them… Has the diocese got equipment you could hire? What about the youth department or Play Resource Centres of the local council? Ask around other low-budget play groups, childminders and schools and find out where the best value shops and suppliers are. It’s often far less hassle to borrow something than to work out how to store it safely, insure it and have someone responsible for its maintenance. But this subject of cutting costs isn’t what this article is about: most church children’s groups first have to make sure it’s the church who has the privilege of covering costs, not the individual.

So in short:

• You definitely need a budget for your children’s work.
• Oh yes you do.
  
• You need to have the money easily available. You need to spend it wisely, neither hoarding like the farmer with the barns so that the children never enjoy it, nor squandering it like the prodigal son so that you end up on your knees in a pigsty (metaphorically or literally).
• So now, I’d better just go and – gulp – take my own advice….
• Where did I put the goosefat?

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