Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Grants: How to Apply

Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is an independent funder that backs work aiming for long-term, systemic change. It is open to applications on a rolling basis, but it is selective: it says demand is very high and that in 2025, 5% of the Expressions of Interest it received through its website went on to be awarded a grant. This guide explains what Esmée funds, who can apply, how the three-stage process works and how to give your application the best chance. Everything here comes from the Foundation's own guidance, checked on the date shown on this page.

What Esmée funds

Esmée offers grants and social investment. This guide covers grants. The Foundation says it focuses on a small number of longer-term grants for organisations and work that fit its strategy, making around 200 grants a year.

Its grants can support:

• costs: core or project costs, including staff salaries and overheads. It also provides unrestricted funding for charities.
• amount: a minimum of £30,000, with no maximum.
• time: most grants run for three to five years, but there is no minimum or maximum term.
• organisations: constituted organisations, including charities and non-charities doing charitable work.

It looks for work that is a strong fit for its strategy, aims for wider influence, centres lived experience, justice and equity, and takes a collaborative approach. In practice that means work that goes beyond delivering a service: influencing policy or practice, or having the potential to be scaled up, replicated or spread.

The three aims and 13 funding priorities

Esmée only accepts applications for work that fits one or more of its funding priorities. They sit under three aims:

Aim	Funding priorities
Our Natural World	Peat; Space for nature; Freshwater; Nature friendly farming; Fishing in tandem with nature
A Fairer Future	Arts and creativity making change; Children and young people's rights; Racial justice; Gender justice; Migrant justice
Creative, Confident Communities	Communities working together for change; Community driven enterprise and regeneration; Community-led art and creativity

Each priority has a set of long-term outcomes, and those outcomes are what Esmée uses to assess fit. Some outcomes are closed to applications. When we checked, these included the early years outcome and the outcome on support for young people leaving care, both under Children and young people's rights. Youth-led creativity has its own separate application process.

For Creative, Confident Communities, Esmée means communities connected by a place. Across every priority, it says it commits to funding more organisations led by communities experiencing racial inequity, and it is keen to support work that addresses the causes and impacts of climate change.

Read the outcomes for your priority before you write a word. If you cannot point to the specific outcome your work contributes to, that is a sign Esmée is not the right funder.

Who cannot apply, and what Esmée will not fund

Esmée's exclusions are specific. It does not fund:

• organisations with a turnover of less than £100,000, as shown in the latest set of accounts
• organisations that are not constituted
• organisations without measures in place to guard against disproportionate personal benefit
• capital costs, including building work, renovations and equipment
• grants to individuals, or grants for less than £30,000
• work that is not legally charitable, or that does not have a direct benefit in the UK
• work that is primarily the responsibility of statutory authorities using public funds
• academic research, unless it can demonstrate practical outcomes
• independent education delivered by fee-paying schools
• healthcare, including clinical, counselling, hospices, therapy, addiction services and medical research
• the promotion of religion

The turnover rule rules out many small groups. If your income is under £100,000, look at our small grants for community groups and community foundation grants instead. If you are not a charity, the personal benefit point matters: Esmée will look at the measures in your governing document. Our guide to CICs limited by shares or guarantee explains why structure matters to funders.

How the application process works

There are three stages. Unless a priority says otherwise, Esmée accepts applications on a rolling basis with no deadlines. It says the full process for a successful application usually takes six to eight months, and smaller requests can move more quickly.

1. Expression of Interest

You submit a short Expression of Interest (EOI) through Esmée's online portal. It asks about your organisation, the priority your work fits most strongly, and two questions about your work, with 300 words in total to answer them:

1. What do you want Esmée to support, what impact are you aiming for, and how does it fit Esmée's priorities?
2. How is your organisation or partnership well placed to do this work, and does it centre lived experience or take a collaborative or community-led approach?

You choose one aim and one main priority, and can add up to two more priorities. Esmée will also look at your website and your impact or annual report, so make sure both are up to date before you submit. After the EOI, you complete a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) form about your leadership and the communities you support.

The form cannot be saved, so draft your answers elsewhere first. Esmée publishes sample EOI and DEI forms you can download.

Esmée aims to tell you the outcome within four weeks for A Fairer Future, and six weeks for Creative, Confident Communities and Our Natural World. Because the EOI is short, it says detailed feedback at this stage is difficult.

2. Assessment call

If your EOI is taken forward, you are invited to a call. Esmée tells you beforehand what it wants to cover. The topics include fit with its strategy, potential impact and risks, how your organisation works and its impact so far, governance and leadership, your approach to DEI and safeguarding, and any major financial concerns. It aims to give you an outcome within two weeks of the call, and it offers feedback if it does not take you forward.

3. Proposal

If you progress, you submit a proposal. If you already have a business, project or strategic plan that shows how your work fits, Esmée asks you to use it rather than write something new. It will also ask for up to three outcomes with indicators of progress, whether you pay all staff the real Living Wage (Esmée is a Living Wage Funder), and documents that may include:

• your latest approved annual report and accounts
• an income and expenditure budget for the current year
• your safeguarding policy
• a project budget, if you are applying for a project, with other funding approached or secured
• your governing document, if you are not a registered charity

You have three months to provide the information. If you ask for several years of funding, Esmée encourages you to build inflation into the annual amounts.

Who decides, and how long it takes

Decisions depend on the size of the request. At the time of checking:

• grants up to £120,000 are decided by the Executive Team
• grants up to £300,000 go to an Executive and Trustee committee that meets every six weeks
• grants over £300,000 go to the Trustee Board, which meets six times a year

Esmée aims to give you a decision within three months of receiving your proposal, and decisions are usually faster for grants of £120,000 or less.

What Esmée looks for at each stage

Esmée publishes how it makes decisions, under six headings: fit to strategy, impact and reach, governance and leadership, finances, DEI and safeguarding. A few points stand out:

• Fit to strategy is checked at every stage, and Esmée also considers how your work complements other work it funds.
• Finances are reviewed in detail at proposal stage, including your budget, management accounts, cashflow forecast and reserves position. It wants a realistic and sustainable funding model.
• Governance includes how decisions such as salaries are made and how conflicts of interest are handled.
• Safeguarding is discussed on the call if you work with children or adults at risk, and your policy is reviewed at proposal stage.

Our guides to how funders assess grant applications, safeguarding policies and equality, diversity and inclusion in grant applications cover each of these in more depth.

Tips for a strong Expression of Interest

With 300 words, every sentence has to work. Name the priority and the long-term outcome in the first line. Describe the change you want to see, not a list of activities. Give one concrete example of how people with lived experience shape your work. Mention who you work with, because collaboration is one of Esmée's tests. A clear theory of change behind the scenes makes this much easier to write.

You can see the live listing on our Esmée Fairbairn Foundation grants page, and compare other core funders in our charity grants listings.