Application Form

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A SUMMARY OF OUR GRANT MAKING

  • We offer grants only to registered charities with a total annual expenditure of less than £50,000. We do not fund CICs.

  • We will not fund work that does not focus specifically on one of our priority groups.

  • We only fund running costs.

  • We only fund charities that have been formally established for a minimum of three years. Newly registered charities may apply but the organisation must have appointed a management committee and adopted a governing document at least 3 years ago.

  • Our maximum grant is £9,000 (£3,000 per year for up to 3 years).

  • Most of our grants are for more than one year.

Please visit the What We Fund, What We Don't Fund and FAQs pages of our website to confirm your eligibility before starting an application.

Completing the form

You will find it helpful to have the charity’s most recent accounts/annual report and budget forecast to hand when completing our form.

You can save your application and return to it at any time. Nearly all questions require a response and most include guidance notes and a character limit. We may ask for further information when reviewing your application.

We ask for copies of the following supporting documents to be uploaded with your application:

  • governing document

  • latest approved accounts that have been filed with the Charity Commission

  • a recent (no more than 3 months old) unredacted bank statement

Deadlines and decision-making timescales

Trustees meet three times a year, in March, July and November. We typically accept applications for these meetings until the end of January, May and September, respectively. Depending on when you submit your application, it may take up to 5 months to receive a decision. For example, an application submitted in early June would be considered at the November meeting.

Assessment process

We will first check whether your application meets our eligibility criteria. If it does not, we will give the reason(s) why.

As the next Trustee meeting approaches, we will draw up a shortlist of eligible applications for the Trustees to consider. We will notify all applicants a few weeks before the meeting whether their funding request has been shortlisted. If your application is not shortlisted, we will explain why. This may simply be because other applications are a closer fit with our published criteria.

You can monitor the status of your application at any time by logging in to your Plinth account. During assessment, you will receive email alerts if we need further information about your organisation, its services or its finances. 

 

Managing expectations

Being shortlisted does not guarantee a grant award. It means your application aligns with our funding priorities, as do all others on the shortlist. With a very limited budget, we are unlikely to be able to fund them all.

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