You must be a local Camden based charity or not-for-profit organisation with your main base in Camden and the majority of your organisation’s time and money spent on delivering for Camden residents. 

You must be a not-for-profit organisation listed below. We are unable to consider applications from private companies e.g. companies limited by shares, private partnerships or sole traders  

Your organisation's total income in the last financial year

How long your organisation has been operating

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Camden’s VCS Organisational Development Fund

Eligibility criteria 

You must be a local Camden based charity or not-for-profit organisation with your main base in Camden and the majority of your organisation’s focus, time and money spent on delivering for Camden residents. If no, you will need to demonstrate a strong track record of delivery in Camden in your response to the 'About your organisation' section of this application.

Are you Camden based?

You must be one of the not-for-profit organisations from the drop-down list below. We are unable to consider applications from private companies e.g. companies limited by shares, private partnerships or sole traders

What is your organisational structure?

Minimum requirements

If your application is successful, you will be asked to sign a grant agreement confirming that you meet Camden’s minimum requirements for funding. We will not be able to offer a grant to organisations that don't meet these requirements.  Please confirm whether you currently meet the following minimum requirements by ticking the below checkboxes. If you need advice or support in relation to the minimum requirements, please contact us at VCS@Camden.gov.uk 

A governing document would include your memorandum and articles of association, or constitution.

Governing document

If you are registered on the Charity Commission, we will be able to take a look at your latest set of accounts for the last financial period. If your accounts aren’t available to view on the Charity Commission, we will ask you to submit this as part of your application. You will need at least one year’s accounts to be eligible to apply. Please tick to confirm if you have a finalised set of accounts.

Latest set of accounts

You are responsible for ensuring that you have Public Liability Insurance to cover your activities.

Public liability insurance

You will need to confirm that you have undertaken all the relevant DBS checks where required.

Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS)

You will be asked to provide a copy of your safeguarding policy, including a named Safeguarding Lead and their contact details.

Safeguarding Adults policy

Safeguarding Children Policy

You should have your own organisational bank account with at least two unrelated signatories.

Bank account

You should have annual accounts with proper accounting systems and arrangements for income tax (PAYE); National Insurance and VAT where applicable.

Accounting

We will check that you have a minimum of three unrelated directors / trustees on Companies House / Charity Commission

Governance

Any employees and/or contractors whose salaries are funded through this grant should be paid London Living Wage as a minimum.

London Living wage

You should have an up to date and transparent complaints procedure for service users.

Complaints

You have a Data Protection policy or GDPR statement, ensuring you handle personal data responsibly.

Data protection

You have an equalities policy or statement that commits to non-discrimination and is compliant with the Equality Act 2010.

Equalities

If you’ve answered no to any of these, please tell us about your plans to get these things in place, including expected dates.

Organisation details 

Organisation name

Registered address 

Registered post code

Charity or Company number

Website link (if you have one)

Main contact details

Name - main contact

Job title - main contact 

Telephone - main contact 

Email address - main contact 

Secondary contact details

Name - secondary contact

Job title - secondary contact

Telephone - secondary contact

Email address - secondary contact

Name of person submitting application

Email address of person submitting application

This can be wards in Camden that you have service users from, or run projects in. You can select multiple wards to accurately reflect the breadth of your work across the borough.

Select the wards

Document upload

Please attach the documents or include links to the documents listed below. If you are unable for any reason to provide these documents, please email vcs@camden.gov.uk or your existing contact in the Community Partnership Team. 

Governing document – Constitution, trust deed or articles and memorandum of association

Your latest annual report and accounts

Safeguarding policy - Adults 

Criteria 1: About your organisation and your community impact 

You might want to consider: 

Where you work, who you work with, what kind of activities you deliver, your mission, values, and the difference your organisation makes. 

You may want to include information about the number of people you work with and any evidence you have about the difference your work makes. 

How you engage and are accountable to the community and your commitments to equity and inclusion.

Please tell us about your organisation and the community impact you have

Criteria 2: Organisational needs and challenges

Please outline your organisation's current strengths (governance, finance, people, systems, strategy, etc)

Identify key risks and challenges to sustainability and how they have arisen (including internal/external factors)

Criteria 3.1: Quality and feasibility of the proposal 

Please describe how your organisation plans to use the grant for organisational development, capacity building or strategic change, ensuring it is clear, realistic and achievable

Please outline the planned activities and timeframes of your proposal

Please outline the challenges, risks or opportunities that may arise in delivering your proposal and how you will address and respond to these

Criteria 3.2: Financial position 

How much funding are you applying for in total?

Please include all the costs you are applying for. Refer to the Handy Guide (What can be funded) for further guidance.

Please set out your project budget

Please provide a clear summary of your organisation’s financial income and expenditure, including reserves, deficits, liabilities etc

Will your initiative result in ongoing costs beyond the grant period? If so, please tell us how you will continue to meet these costs.

Criteria 3.3: Impact and learning 

Your answer should explain how the funded work will strengthen sustainability, adaptability and effectiveness

In the long term, this proposal should help your organisation run well and sustainably. Please detail the change and outcomes you expect from your proposed initiative. Where possible, please outline the impact you expect this to have on Camden’s communities

How will your organisation learn from what does / doesn’t work?

Please explain how you will ensure that this initiative enables learning, reflection and the shared insights (including engagement peer learning, evaluation etc)

Please select from the below areas of organisational development that are of interest

As part of this funding programme, we plan to host opportunities for peer learning and training for Camden’s VCS. What other learning and development needs does your organisation have that could be the focus of peer learning sessions

If you selected other, please let us know here what you would like to the focus of a peer learning session to be

Is there anything else that you want to tell us that hasn’t been covered in the other questions?

Declaration and consent to share application 

The panel members reviewing applications could include representatives from VCS Infrastructure partners including Voluntary Action Camden and Young Camden Foundation. Do you consent for your application to be shared with them? 

If you don’t have one or more of these policies or procedures in place already, there may be organisations who can support you to develop these. Please see our website for further information about support available https://www.camden.gov.uk/voluntary-and-community-sector-in-camden#bztr

Safeguarding policy - Children

If you are successful in this grant application, we may ask for documents detailed in the minimum requirements (see Handy Guide) to be supplied. 

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Feedback on the application process  

Thank you for completing your application. We'd love to hear your feedback on the application process. Please fill in this short feedback survey to help us improve our approach for future rounds: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=NEqPXtsrVEi7QrTQx9AkbH4pEADmpItNjv1dGsTNAx5UOTZBSlZLUTg1TVQyRDVRREI1VDc4STE3Ti4u  

Declaration

In submitting this Application Form, the named contact is agreeing to the following statement on behalf of your organisation: I confirm that the information provided within this form is true to the best of my knowledge. I agree to update you if any of the contact details change, or if our circumstances change and we no longer require funding. 

Declaration 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: understanding your organisation

We would like to ask some questions about your organisation and the people you work with, to help us to understand our applicants and funding better. This information is being used to make sure we’re reaching the diversity of Camden’s communities. The responses you provide in this section may be included in data published about our grants to support our transparency and accountability on our grantmaking. If this may cause any issues, there is an opportunity to tell us in the questions below that you don’t want this data to be shared externally.

 https://www.funderscollaborativehub.org.uk/collaborations/dei-data-standard

The questions below are part of the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) Data Standard, agreed and adopted by a group of UK funders. By asking these questions in a similar way across grant programmes, we hope to make it easier for applicants to complete, and easier for funders to compare their programme data.

You can select multiple options. If you are a general / universal community organisation or project, please tick ‘not targeted to a specific community or group’

Is there a specific community that your organisation is dedicating to serving? This might be referenced in the governing documents, strategy or public facing materials.

 If you work with all communities experiencing racial inequity, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do so here. You can select more than one option.

 If you work with all disabled people, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. 

 If you work with all faith communities, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do here. You can select more than one option. 

 If you work with all LGBT+ people, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. 

 If you work with all migrants, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. 

 If you work with all children and young people, please skip this question. If you would like to select a more specific group, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. 

Is your organisation dedicated to serving people with other types of lived experience that are not included above? Please describe below

About the leadership of your organisation

We would like to understand more about the leadership of your organisations and how representative it is of the community that you serve. In particular, we want to identify where organisations are 'led by and for' a specific community.  As an indication, this might be 75% or more of the Board of Trustees/ Management Committee AND 50% or more of senior staff self-identify as from a certain community or characteristic. 

Does the majority of the leadership of your organisation identify as residents of the London Borough of Camden?

Does the majority of the leadership of your organisation identify in any of the following areas: 

If you would like to select a more specific group within communities experiencing racial inequity, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

If you would like to select a more specific group within disabled people, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

If you would like to select a more specific group within faith communities, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

If you would like to select a more specific group within LGBT+ people, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

If you would like to select a more specific group within migrants, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

If you would like to select a more specific group within children and young people, you can do so here. You can select more than one option. If not, you can skip this question.

Does the leadership of your organisation identify with other types of lived experience that are not included above? Please describe below.

At the beginning of this section we described the use of this data to support our own monitoring and strategy, but also for our external reporting on our grants as part of our transparency and accountability. In the next question, you can choose to opt out of this information being shared externally if you have any concerns – for example, if the information about the people you support or your leadership may disclose sensitive information that should not be shared externally (e.g. about identifiable individuals).

I agree that this data can be published by the London Borough of Camden as part of our commitment to transparency and reporting to the DEI data standard.

Camden’s VCS Organisational Development Fund

Application Form

Aims of the Fund

Available Funding