Grants for Charities in the UK: A Practical Guide
Where UK charities can find grant funding, from national trusts to community foundations, what funders expect, and how to work out which ones are worth your time.
There is a lot of grant money available to UK charities, and a lot of ways to waste a fortnight applying for the wrong thing. This guide covers who funds charities, how much they give, what they ask for, and how to tell early on whether a fund is a realistic prospect for you.
What counts as a charity grant?
A charity grant is money given to your organisation to do something, with no expectation of repayment. That makes it different from a loan, and different again from a contract, where a public body pays you to deliver a service it has specified.
Most funders will want you to be one of the following:
- A charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Scottish Charity Regulator, or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
- A charitable incorporated organisation (CIO)
- An unincorporated association or community group with a written constitution
- A community interest company or community benefit society, for some funds
Smaller local funds are often happy with a constitution, a bank account in your organisation's name, and two unrelated signatories. Larger national funders usually want a registered charity number and at least one year of accounts. If you do not have a charity number yet, look at the community organisation grants guide as well, because a good number of funds are open to unregistered groups.
Who funds UK charities?
National trusts and foundations
These are the biggest single source of unrestricted money for charities, and the most competitive.
Garfield Weston Foundation is one of the more approachable large funders. Its Regular Grant programme takes applications on a rolling basis for amounts up to £99,999, across welfare, youth, education, health, arts, and community work. There are no deadlines, which removes a lot of the usual pressure.
Lloyds Bank Foundation funds smaller charities working on complex social issues, and is unusual in offering long-term core funding rather than project money. The Good Place to Live: New Beginnings Fund offers up to £200,000.
Paul Hamlyn Foundation runs several themed programmes. The Youth Fund gives up to £150,000 to organisations led by and for young people, the Arts-based Learning Fund goes up to £300,000, and the Migration Fund up to £60,000.
Corporate foundations sit somewhere between a trust and a company giving programme. The Greggs Foundation Community Action Fund offers up to £20,000, and Tesco Fruit & Veg Grants offers up to £1,500 for food and healthy eating work.
Community foundations
Every region of the UK has a community foundation. They pool money from local donors and give it out in small, place-based grants. Because they know their area, they are usually easier to talk to than a national funder, and the forms are shorter.
Examples of what they run:
- Digital Inclusion Fund, Suffolk Community Foundation, up to £25,000
- Building Better Lives, Heart of England Community Foundation, up to £20,000
- Pencarrie Community Grants, Devon Community Foundation, up to £3,000
- Small and Vital, Berkshire Community Foundation, up to £1,000
If you have never won a grant before, a community foundation is the sensible first application. The amounts are smaller, but a funded project and a completed report make every later application stronger.
The National Lottery
The National Lottery is the largest funder of charitable work in the UK, split across several distributors. The National Lottery Heritage Fund covers heritage in its widest sense, including buildings, landscapes, industrial history, and cultural traditions, with grants from £10,000 to £250,000 and a separate tier running from £250,000 to £10 million.
Cause-specific funders
If your work fits a defined group, a specialist funder is usually a better bet than a general one, because the pool of eligible applicants is smaller.
The Veterans' Foundation is a good illustration of a funder with tiers to suit different sizes of organisation:
| Grant | What it funds | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Small Grants | Short projects and one-off costs | Up to £5,000 |
| Standard Grants | Project delivery | Up to £30,000 |
| Salary Grants | Staff posts | Up to £75,000 |
The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust works in the same space, with the Together for Service Families place-based grants programme offering up to £250,000.
How much can you realistically ask for?
Roughly speaking, funding falls into four bands, and the amount of work involved rises sharply as you go up.
- Under £2,000. Local authority ward funds, parish councils, small community foundation pots. Often a one-page form. Frequently the fastest route to getting something started.
- £2,000 to £10,000. The bulk of community foundation grants and small trust funding. Expect to supply a budget and recent accounts.
- £10,000 to £100,000. National trusts and lottery programmes. Expect a full application, a project plan, an outcomes framework, and a wait of three to six months.
- £100,000 and above. Multi-year strategic funding. Usually needs a track record at the tier below, and often an invitation or an expression of interest first.
Apply one band above where you are, not three. Funders are looking for evidence that you can handle the money, and the best evidence is having handled slightly less of it before.
What funders actually want to see
Having read a lot of guidance from a lot of funders, the same four things come up:
- A specific problem, described with local evidence. Not "young people in our area face challenges" but "the nearest youth provision is a 40-minute bus ride, and 60 of the 200 young people on our estate told us they do not go".
- A clear plan with real numbers. Who does what, when, and what it costs. Budgets that end in round thousands look estimated, because they usually are.
- Outcomes rather than activities. How many sessions you run is an activity. What changes as a result is an outcome. Funders pay for the second one.
- A realistic answer on what happens after the grant. You do not need a guaranteed future income stream. You do need to show you have thought about it.
Working out what to apply for
A few practical filters that save time:
- Read the exclusions first, not the aims. Most funds list what they will not pay for. That page rules you out faster than the aims page rules you in.
- Check the geography properly. Plenty of funds that look national are tied to a specific area, a set of postcodes, or the catchment of a particular wind farm or trust.
- Check whether they fund core costs. Many charities need salaries and overheads rather than a new project. Funders that pay for core costs are rarer and worth prioritising.
- Look at who they funded last year. Nearly all funders publish this. If every grantee has ten times your income, you are in the wrong queue.
Where to look next
Browse the charities and non-profit grants listing to see what is currently open, and the grants for charities page to filter by organisation type. If you want to check whether a specific fund fits your charity before you commit an afternoon to the form, run it through the eligibility check on any grant page.