STOP! Right here
​Don't even think about applying to us for money until you've read these Ten Reasons Why we Probably Won't Fund you.
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We don’t fund:
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individuals
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work that isn't exclusively charitable
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work outside England and Wales
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ongoing activities
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general fundraising appeals
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work that promotes religion
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work that doesn’t fit at least one of our four themes
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work that doesn’t bring identifiable outcomes and benefits
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applications that haven’t considered our four ways of working
- work that isn’t described comprehensively, accurately and convincingly.
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These are so important. We can easily spot applications that haven’t considered our grant criteria: every single one of them fails one or more of our Ten Reasons tests. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money if you ensure you don't join those failures.
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Another seven reasons . . .
But that’s not all. Passing the Ten Reasons test is necessary but not sufficient. We consider a range of other criteria, including:
We probably won’t fund:
11. Work that isn’t the strongest on Reasons 7 to 10 – for example, we’d favour a project that strongly fits one of our themes (a project giving advice on benefits to a vulnerable person, say) rather than a project that only weakly fits (a project about none of our themes except it uses a local wildlife centre for its meetings).
12. Me-too work: we’re less likely to fund a project, however worthy, that is similar to a project we’ve already funded
13. Work that is commonly delivered, such as general advice work or workshop delivery (though we might fund an aspect of such work that truly moves the practice on)
14. Projects with a planned life of more than two years. That is because we intend to spend out our assets within the next two or three years (see Who we are) and we need to wrap up all our grantees’ work before we close our doors
We may change or tweak our criteria:
15. for a variety of reasons, including to influence the spread or balance (not necessarily just geographic spread , but between types of work and themes, for instance) of our funding
16. for example by focusing a funding round on a particular theme which has been under-represented (or, on the other hand, wildly popular)
And finally:
17. we have limited amount of money and all our grants are at the discretion of our trustees, who may at any time set new criteria for what they want to fund.
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Jul19