Deadline: 12-Feb-21
The Leeds Community Foundation has announced a call for applications for Strategic Grants that will address resilience for Third Sector Organisations. The Leeds Fund accepts contributions from individuals and companies wanting to support the city in which they live and work. The funds for this round are from a combination of donors: individuals, companies and foundations all seeking to support small community organisations.
This fund, therefore, is designed to cover the core costs of Community Organisations and encourage strategic development work alongside daily delivery. In developing The Leeds Fund in this way, they hope that it gives sector the best chance of both delivering effectively – and surviving – in the years ahead.
This funding programme is designed to cover the cost of community organisations being able to take the time and space to step back from delivery and undertake strategic development work. It gives busy leaders and teams the support and resources to:
- Reflect on their successes and understand what makes them resilient;
- Unpick challenges to understand root causes;
- Identify priority development objectives to support long term resilience;
- Plan and work towards achieving those objectives;
- Learn and adapt throughout the programme.
Funding Information
- Grant Size: £30,000 over 2 years (£15,000 per year).
Activities that can be funded
Examples of development areas the programme can support:
- Operational Change
- Developing/changing your delivery/operating model in response to external environment.
- Adapting the ways you work to make you more sustainable (eg. IT infrastructure).
- Developing new services.
- Staff Development
- Understanding organisation needs.
- Training and development needs analysis and planning.
- Restructuring staff teams.
- Funding and Finance
- Getting a grip on your financial position.
- Reshaping/identifying funding model.
- Financial planning and budget-setting.
- Purpose and Culture
- Developing/articulating your mission, vision, values.
- Reflecting on organisational culture and impact.
- Governance
- Reviewing current governance arrangements.
- Rebalancing and/or restructuring governance model.
- Improving working relationships between staff and board.
- Strategy and Planning
- Developing greater awareness of the external environment (political, economic, local and national).
- Developing a multi-year organisational strategy.
- Annual planning and review cycle.
- Horizon scanning and SWOT analysis etc.
- Monitoring and Evaluation (MEL)
- Measuring activity and impact.
- Demonstrating value.
- Using MEL as a learning tool to drive future change.
- Partnerships and Collaboration
- Stakeholder mapping to identify existing networks and opportunities.
- Identifying, assessing and developing new partnerships.
What the Fund not support?
Grants will not be awarded to or for:
- For-profit organisations, statutory organisations (e.g. schools and hospitals) or overseas organisations.
- Retrospective funding (activity and costs that have already taken place).
- Grant-making to other organisations and/or individuals.
- Projects or other forms of delivery: this funding is instead to complement your delivery work and support core costs.
- Activity targeted at a particular group (ethnic, gender, religious etc.) without a good justification for this.
- Activity that promotes a particular political or religious point of view.
- Activity primarily for the benefit of animals.
- Organisations that do not have an annual income in your last accounts between £75k and £300k per annum, unless the specific circumstances noted above apply.
- Individuals.
- Expeditions or overseas travel.
- Capital appeals for building projects.
Eligibility Criteria
Charities, social enterprises or other charitable organisations from the third sector that:
- Are registered with the Charity Commission or Companies House.
- Have an annual income in your last accounts between £75k and £300k per annum.
- Are delivering work that meets needs and has a clear impact on communities (evidenced by whatever you already collect: this could be impact data, case studies or testimonies of people who benefit from your work).
- Want to learn and adapt to become a more stable and resilient organisation in the long-term and to work with other community organisations to do the same with buy-in to this programme from trustees as well as staff and volunteers.
- Are based in and delivering the majority of your work in Leeds.
- Have been operating for at least 2 years.
- Have at least one paid member of staff who can commit a proportion of their time to the strategic development work this programme will fund (they will want to know who this person is, and have regular contact with them: but they can be hired once your application is successful).
- Have a management committee/board of directors/trustees of at least three unrelated people.
- Have a bank account under the name of the group with at least two unrelated signatories (if your organisation doesn’t have its own bank account, but does meet all of the other criteria, please contact them to discuss how they can work around this).
What reporting will be required?
- They will ask your nominated person to attend a few learning and development events each year as part of the programme and you can use the grant funds to cover the time of this: these events will be about addressing key shared problems and challenges, and will help them as a funder learn and adapt.
- They will ask for a short written update at the end of each quarter against the development plan you’ve set yourself: they won’t be looking for any set outcomes and this won’t be linked to future funding: it will simply be so they can learn how it’s going and support you in making progress against your plan. This also allows them to share any wins you have had with donors to the Leeds Fund so that they can secure future funding for other community organisations by showing that that money is really making a difference.
- There will be a longer monitoring report to fill in at the end of your first and second year of funding where they will ask you how you’ve spent the grant, what you’ve learnt and how much progress you’ve made against your development plan.
For more information, visit https://leedscf.org.uk/grants/the-leeds-fund-strategic-grants-resilience/