Each year we are able to award main programme grants of about £150,000.
We do not exceed grants of £25,000 and do not often give grants of this maximum amount. We do not donate to the same project for more than 3 years.
This means we can support up to 5 new projects or organisations each year and are inevitably unable to support all the applications we receive, even if they are from charities which operate in our areas of interest.
Our trustees often visit charities which have applied to us, especially those which most closely fit our criteria, in order to find out more about their work and to learn about what different people are doing. We also keep in touch with those organisations we support and try to encourage networking between them to find ways they can work together or share ideas. This also means that we concentrate on charities in London – very occasionally we help those outside London but this is rare.
To help charities decide whether to apply, we provide the following guidance:
- Our focus is on young people (normally aged 14 – 21) who are not in employment, education or training, or who are at risk becoming so. We are particularly interested in organisations which help young people to become fully involved with society, particularly through education, assistance with finding work or helping such young people become interested in enterprise.
- We work almost exclusively with charities doing work in London
- We like to encourage new ways of doing things and have supported new charities, new projects and new ways of working. We will not normally support large and established charities but will exceptionally consider applications where such charities apply for new or innovative projects. Our goal is to allow projects to be road-tested with a view to being able to find longer term funding once our involvement has come to an end.
- We also look favourably on projects which can help those beyond the immediate recipients of the funding, such as projects which provide training to young people to allow them to help others.
- Our general preference is to fund independent voluntary organisations and not to replace or subsidise statutory funding.
- We do not support individuals
- We will not make grants to organisations which promote a particular religious belief but will exceptionally consider applications from faith-based organisations where the work is not for religious purposes and clearly fits our funding guidelines.
- We do not generally fund medical charities
- We consider the number of people helped in relation to the cost of the activity. This means that activities which have multiple benefits or which help young people to help others are often viewed favourably.
If you think your project fits these criteria, then please fill in the application form which can be found below. Submission details are on the document.
You might also want to find out what sort of organisations we support; we provide information on a selection of our grantees on our Projects page and more detailed information in our accounts.
If your organisation and the project fit our criteria and you would like to make an application, our form is attached. Please feel free to use your own documents as long as you address all the questions in our form.
Once we have received the applications, we follow the following process:
- All applications are read. If they meet our criteria, they are included in the long list for consideration at our grant meeting; if not, we notify the applicant that they will not be considered. To save our time and your time, please read this website carefully to see if your work genuinely meets our criteria.
- The qualifying applications are then summarised for the board. At this stage, you may be contacted for further information or clarification. You should not read anything into such contact.
- We then meet and rank the applications based on a range of considerations including how closely they meet our criteria. Following this meeting, those at the bottom of this ranking are informed that the application has been unsuccessful.
- We then meet with applicants at the top of the ranking – this is to explore the application in more detail and to meet the management teams. We generally meet 4 – 5 charities at this stage. Occasionally we inform some further applicants that we may come back to them later depending on the outcome of this stage.
- We then have a further board meeting to finalise who will receive grants, how much and how we will assess the grant. At this meeting, we also consider second and third year grants for previous grantees, based on reports received from them. We aim to finalise the grant process and make payment within three months of the application closing date.