UK Small Grants
Guidelines
Thank you for your interest in our UK Small Grants programme.
This programme is designed to support excellent local organisations and projects that work with:
- disabled children and young people;
- children and young people with life-limiting conditions;
- and their families.
It provides grants of up to £10,000, although many grants are smaller than this.
The programme is open to applications at any time. We aim to respond to your application with a final decision within six weeks.
We aim to support as many organisations as possible, and therefore are unlikely to fund any organisation in consecutive years. If you are successful in receiving a grant, please wait at least a year after the completion of your project before reapplying. If you are unsuccessful, we also ask that you wait at least one year from the date of your application before reapplying.
What we fund
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Every grant we make is intended to support disabled children and children with life-limiting conditions and their families.
We will consider applications from organisations working with children and young people aged from 0 – 25 years.
Projects:
- Activities for disabled children, children with life-limiting conditions and their families.
- Activities which support siblings of disabled children or siblings of children with life-limiting conditions.
- Bereavement support for children and young people.
- Family support / parent-led peer support for parents of disabled children.
- Respite which supports the whole family.
- Support for disabled children and children with life-limiting conditions who are shielding or unable to return to school due to Covid-19.
Equipment and Materials:
- Adaptations to services including PPE, digital service provision and physical changes to spaces to make projects Covid-19 compliant.
- Technology to support children and families who are isolated due to Covid-19. (We are unable to make grants to individuals).
- Renovation, upgrading and additional equipment for hydrotherapy pools and multi-sensory rooms.
- Minibuses.
- Specialised play equipment / access to play and leisure for disabled children, children with life-limiting conditions and their families.
Who we fund
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- We fund UK registered charitable organisations and CICs which are delivering projects in the UK.
- We fund organisations whose annual income is less than £350,000.
- We are committed to working towards a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. We will fund organisations which share our goal and which are open to children and families of all faiths, backgrounds and cultures.
- We are particularly keen to receive applications from organisations which operate in areas of high deprivation.
We regret that we cannot consider applications from the following:
- Local authorities
- Organisations which have received a small grant from us within the last 12 months
- Residential schemes
- Schools
- Condition-specific organisations
- Organisations seeking funding for wish-granting activities
- Organisations which are registered outside the UK
- Projects taking place outside the UK
The Application Process
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Please apply using the application form which can be found here.
Tips on how to complete the form can be found here.
You will receive an acknowledgement email to confirm safe receipt of your application within a week of submission.
We aim to respond to your application with a final decision within six weeks. Due to the number of applications received, we are unable to provide feedback on individual applications, but we will contact you to advise you whether or not you have been successful.
Please be assured that we will contact you if there is any additional information we need to support your application, or if we have any questions.
If possible, please avoid submitting applications by post.
What happens if your application is successful
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If you are awarded a grant, we will write to you with details of the grant conditions.
If you would like to proceed with the grant, we ask that you contact us to accept the conditions and let us know when you would like to receive payment. It is very helpful if you could contact us within six weeks of receiving our award letter and we ask that you draw down payment of the grant within 12 months of the award being made.
It is a condition of all our grants that you provide a report on the use of the grant within 12 months of the payment being made.
Organisations in receipt of a grant must adhere to the Trust’s safeguarding policy which can be found here.
Covid-19
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All our grants are awarded for a specific purpose. However, we recognise that these are uncertain and challenging times. If your local situation and/or government guidance on Covid-19 changes and makes it difficult for you to use a grant in the way you hoped, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can discuss the best way forward.
True Colours is a signatory to the London Funders’ Statement on Covid-19, March 2020 and to the follow-up statement ‘Still Standing with the Sector’ in November 2020. We take this commitment seriously and are keen to be as flexible as possible in order to support the voluntary sector at this very difficult time.
If you are seeking information on our Africa Small Grants programme, please click here.
