Sometimes your project\idea may not be eligible for Council funding, as the Council can be quite specific as to what it wishes to support. Alternatively your request may be too large for the Council to support on its own, but either way you may need to get funding from elsewhere.
Brief tips on funding
To take advantage of these funding opportunities, the activities of a group or organisation might need to be divided into 'parcels' that might each be eligible for funding in their own right (projects). It is more difficulty to get grants to cover the cost of what you already do and it may require imaginative rethinking about the way your organisation delivers its activities.
It also opens up new possibilities of tapping in to a number of individual pots of money that may be used to finance important areas of work, which are impossible to fund from your normal operating budget.
Project-related funding usually requires a higher level of accountability to the funder. This inevitably comes with a surge in administration, to develop and submit your application, to keep administrative and financial records and to monitor and report on the success of your project. Whilst these may at first seem like obstacles deliberately put in your path, these very processes do in fact help you in the long-term by ensuring that your project is viable and will achieve its aims.
Each grant giving organisation has its own rules about which organisations are eligible to receive a grant, and about the types of project they are interested in helping (these rules are known as criteria). It may be that your organisation is eligible to apply to a particular grant giver, but a specific project may not be
There are literally thousands of organisations that offer grants to community and voluntary groups. Where you apply will depend principally on the following:
- whether you are a charity, community group, other voluntary organisation, statutory or public organisation;
- who will benefit from your project (children, young people, older people, people with disability, volunteers, etc
- the type of activity envisaged by your project (education & training, health, advocacy and giving people a voice, advice and information, environment, etc);
- the geographical location of your project;
- the amount of money you require – some grants have a minimum and maximum amount they can give, others have a ceiling on the total value of a project to which they will contribute;
- whether the funds are for capital items or running costs of a project;
- whether the grant is one-off (repairs or modifications to a building, staging an event, etc) or for on-going costs for the core service of your organisation
All of the above will also have a direct bearing on the way you need to put your application together and the people you need to involve in the actual development and delivery of the project.
In some cases you will be asked to submit a written application, in others there will be an application form only; major funding providers will often require you to complete an extensive application form and submit a business plan with a considerable volume of supporting documentation, particularly if yours is a large scale project.
Grant givers will usually provide details for applicants, setting out the criteria, the application process, the information they need from you, and how and when they make their decisions. Some will offer pre-application discussions or interviews - if they do, take them up on it if you possibly can - the advice is invaluable and can save you from a lot of unnecessary work and expense.
If you would like to learn more…
…Basingstoke and District Learning Partnership run various courses to help you make successful funding applications for further detail see Training for Community and Voluntary groups
… the Borough Council has funded a self access web portal which provides potential grant\funding sources. For more details see http://www.open4community.info/basingstoke/Default.aspx
…some central government grants can be found on http://www.governmentfunding.org.uk
…why not check out some reference materials in you local library – the Directory of Grant Making Trusts, 2003-04 (Directory of Social Change, 2003 - ISBN 1903991331) is often a good start
...contact the council's Voluntary Sector Liaison and Funding Officer (01256 845624) for more support
