In this blog, Susan, Deputy Director, shares the thought processes which go on behind our public grant guidelines and reflects on what is important to her and her grants team as we seek to become more strategic in our work.
Within the grants team, we have been reflecting on how our way of working is changing since we launched our new strategy last year. In August 2024, we published our intention to bring a more pro-active and strategic approach to our work, along with a more focussed set of guidelines, to help us have greater impact across a smaller range of topics. We envisaged this would create more space to build relationships and seek out the work we want to fund. The reality has been somewhat more mixed.
Difference in approach across our programme areas
The thread across all our grant-making is that we fund work which approaches issues differently, enables innovation and has potential for wider application, adding to sector expertise and leadership.
Each of our programme areas is starting from a different place. With children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, we have a strong history of grant-making to draw upon. We have already been funding great work supporting children and young people who are care-experienced and have developed relationships with a wide range of excellent charity partners who we are learning from. Our work on early years is newer and we are still refining where our focus will be; we have recently been exploring the needs of new parents who have experience of the care system.
Better Careers for Better Care, part of our later life programme, was launched from the outset as a strategic and collaborative programme. We are proud of the way that we have listened to and worked with the sector to explore where the barriers are in supporting the care workforce’s professional development. We are excited by the grants we have made to different types of organisations, including local authorities, an NHS Trust and even one commercial provider, testing new ways in which grant funding might help these organisations overcome the barriers they face in making change and ultimately improve the quality of care for people in later life. We are also drawing on expert advisors, convening, providing shared learning opportunities and evaluating the work carefully.
While Better Careers for Better Care is thinking about the social care workforce, our open grants programme in later life focuses on improving care through community approaches. We are interested in how people drawing on care and support in later life, along with their carers and the organisations providing care, might come together to strengthen and increase access to a network of support at the community level. This programme only reopened in December so it is early days; our only observation is that it is unlikely that any one organisation has the whole solution and so we hope to see more collaborative proposals.
With refugees and asylum seekers, this is a new area of focus for us as a Foundation, although we have made occasional grants for this group in the past. We have learned that the sector is made up of a small number of large organisations and lots of small and medium-sized organisations. This makes things interesting in terms of thinking how and where we can fund that has potential to have wider ripples across the sector. Particularly against a backdrop of what has been a challenging policy environment for many years. Nonetheless, we already have some relationships with key employment and specialist mental health organisations on which to build. We expect to make more small grants (for us £20,000 and under) in this sector than we would normally, recognising the number of smaller organisations.
The arts and creativity remain a strong theme across all of our programmes and we are keen not to lose sight of this as we narrow our focus. We will continue to fund arts and social change organisations which challenge current thinking on how best to connect with and support people in our priority groups.
Keeping an open application process
We are committed to keeping an open grants programme so that we do not miss the great ideas we might not find through our own research and relationships. However, we also need capacity to build our understanding and relationships within our priority areas so that we can become a strategic partner.
The move to online applications and an expression of interest approach has helped us to reduce the time it takes to enter and assess applications; we hope it is also a simpler and less time-consuming process for you, our applicants. Despite this, the numbers of applications have nearly doubled – rising from 50-60 per month in 2023-24 to over 100 per month in 2024-25. We can see clearly for the first time those applications which are outside of our priority areas; sadly, approximately 20% of everything we receive does not serve one of our priority groups and is therefore ineligible. We are also rejecting 85% of all applications, the most common reason being that the proposal will not deliver the wider impact that we seek. We acknowledge that the current funding environment is extremely difficult for many voluntary and community organisations. We know that many funders are tightening their criteria but equally want to be as clear as possible so that we do not waste your time.
With that in mind, we are evolving our thinking, based on the many applications received since August last year, about things which are less likely to be funded by us and how we communicate this effectively.
What are we looking for from you when we talk about wider application?
We know that no one organisation has the solution to any given problem. We are therefore looking to fund organisations who know what else is going on nationally and how their work adds to learning about what works. You will not just be providing a good local or national service but will be challenging how things are done and actively sharing learning beyond your organisation or place. If your work is local, your ambition will be national. If you are a national organisation, you will be seeking funding to do more than business as usual.
Successful applicants will be actively engaged with making change specifically for our priority groups. If your primary objective is to serve a wider cohort of people but you have small numbers of people with care experience, or people in later life, or refugees, or indeed offering a service which encompasses all three, then we are probably not the right funder for you. There will of course be exceptions to this but it is hard to define exactly where we might see them.
If your organisation has been running its service for a number of years, you will be able to articulate clearly the change that you are hoping to make to take this work to a new level, and how this has potential to transform thinking about how people in our priority groups are supported.
Improvements to our advice and guidance
We know that we need to find a way to communicate this thinking as clearly as we can and will be making some revisions to our guidance in the coming months. We have been giving some thought to other ways we might improve our advice-giving and in the early autumn hope to test out a webinar in which we can speak to you about your particular queries. We also encourage you to ring us for a conversation if you are unsure about applying, particularly if you feel that your work might be at the edge of our criteria.