Deadline: 3-Mar-23
The Lloyds Bank Foundation is seeking applications for the Specialist Programme to support small, local, specialist charities with an income of £25,000–£500,000.
They’ll support charities that understand the complexity of the issues people face and are best placed to make a genuine difference to people’s lives.
Thematical Focus
- Addiction: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people whose everyday lives are significantly affected by their addiction; this includes all forms of addiction. This may also include working with their families, but they do not fund charities where the focus is predominately on families.
- Asylum Seekers and Refugees: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people who arrived in the UK and have applied for asylum. You may also be supporting people who have been granted refugee status in the last two years.
- Care Leavers: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people aged 17 to 25, who are planning to leave care or who have left care and have support needs.
- You will provide a range of interventions, relationships and referral routes into specialist support, which enables people to leave care and live independently.
- Domestic Abuse: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people who have experienced an incident or pattern of controlling, coercive, threatening, degrading and/or violent behaviour. Your charity can also be working with perpetrators to reduce harm to others and challenge cycles of behaviour.
- Homelessness: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people who do not have a permanent home and are living on the streets, “sofa surfing” (i.e., staying with friends or family) staying in a hostel, night shelter, or B&B.
- Offending: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people with a history of offending which significantly impacts on everyday life. Your charity will focus on the rehabilitation of and prevention of reoffending for people with a custodial or community sentence.
- Sexual abuse and exploitation: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people who are survivors of sexual abuse and exploitation where their experiences significantly impact on their everyday life.
- This includes sexual slavery, pornography, and sexual assault and sexual exploitation for financial gain.
- Trafficking and Modern Slavery: The primary purpose of your charity is to support people who have been trafficked or are survivors of modern slavery.
- You will provide a range of interventions and support directly and through partnerships and referral routes to ensure people can safely exit either or both international and domestic trafficking, support with asylum and immigration claims (if necessary), provide routes into safe accommodation, provide safety planning and mental health support to address trauma.
Funding Information
- The three-year unrestricted £75,000 grant and support to develop, can make the greatest impact.
As a specialist charity you will be able to demonstrate
- In-depth services: They do not fund one-off support where there is no long-term relationship, for example, a helpline, one-off activities, drop-in only, or signposting to other services.
- They will consider applications where short-term support leads to continued engagement. They understand that these activities help build trust, you must also provide the next stage in longer-term support, with a plan which helps people to positively move on.
- Person-centred services: They know that, as a single charity or service, you can’t be expected to meet all the needs of the people you support; however, you should have trusted relationships with providers or agencies which can help people to overcome the challenges they face and meet their basic needs, (like benefits, health care, domestic abuse services, etc). When you refer someone for support, you track their progress to ensure their needs are being addressed.
- Personal plans: You will work together with the people you support to understand the challenges they may be experiencing and agree with them, how to help them to find a way to overcome them. You will keep written or electronic records or case files of each person you are supporting, noting progress against activities. Your charity should be able to demonstrate the difference you are making through these records.
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to apply for a grant from them, your charity needs to meet all the following criteria:
- Be registered as a charity or as a charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) with the Charity Commission. They will ask for your charity registration number at the start of your application
- Have at least one set of annual accounts showing as ‘received’ on the Charity Commission website, covering a twelve-month operating period
- Have an annual income of between £25,000 and £500,000 in your last accounts published on the Charity Commission website. This is total income and, in the case of consolidated accounts, should cover all entities within those accounts
- Have a bank account in the name of the charity with unrelated signatories. If the application is successful, the grant must be paid into this account
- Have a board of at least three unrelated trustees in place, with their names appearing on your Charity Commission records
- The majority of people in positions of power (including trustees, the CEO and senior managers) must not be related nor live at the same address. Where there are related parties, they will consider the relationship, conflicts of interest and loyalty, the balance of power of the related trustees, and how this is managed
- Not make any payments to trustees, except for out-of-pocket expenses
- Have a track record of delivering services, for at least one year, to people aged 17 and over. You must also currently be delivering these services. If your charity has recently merged, then this must apply to at least one charity pre-merger
- Have a safeguarding policy in place. They will assess your understanding of this policy as well as the approach to safeguarding across your organisation
- Hold Public Liability Insurance
- Be an independent organisation. They will look at any formal associations you have with other organisations, parent bodies, or group structures. They will check that the board of the applicant charity has full control over its work and any conflicts of interest
- Not have a live grant with Lloyds Bank Foundation with more than twelve months to run at the time of submitting the application
- Operate mainly in England and/or Wales. Most of your charity’s time and money is spent on activities in England and/or Wales and helping people living in England and/or Wales
- Not include religious activity as a part of the services delivered unless the charity has been established to support people specifically of that faith.
Prioritise Applications
- Understanding of additional barriers
- They will prioritise charities that demonstrate a deep understanding of, and have a strong track record of, delivering specialist services to people experiencing additional barriers because of age, gender, or gender reassignment, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant, disability, race, religion or belief or sexual orientation.
- Commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion
- They will partner with charities that can demonstrate that everyone who could benefit from their services can access them.
- This means that you will have a clear and agreed approach that enables all people to feel included and welcome to receive your services including those with protected characteristics.
- Lived experience/service user involvement
- They will prioritise charities that demonstrate that they incorporate lived experience into their governance and service delivery, and charities that can strongly demonstrate they wish to develop their practice in this area. The people you support should be at the centre of designing, developing, and managing the services you provide.
- Understanding of trauma
- To address the needs of the people you support, it is important to understand and appreciate the impact of past trauma on that person. This trauma could be because of adverse childhood experiences including experience of the care system, domestic abuse, or the impact of sustained mental ill health, for example.
- They will partner with charities that understand the widespread impact of trauma, and the symptoms of trauma in clients.
- Strengths-based practice
- They will partner with charities that place individual needs at the heart of any support, focusing on identifying strengths and goals and allowing the person to take responsibility for their journey of change. The charity will focus on an individual’s identified goals – building positive relationships between the staff of the charity and the people they support as equal partners.
- They are particularly interested in funding charities that help people to build their own positive support networks outside of the charity.
- Organisational development support
- They want to work with charities that can benefit the most from their partnership which includes funding, support to develop, and access to resources.
- Therefore, they will only fund charities that can demonstrate an understanding of their own organisational needs and have the interest and the time to address these.
- This will require time and effort from the charity leaders and the Trustees and could be anything from improving governance, funding plans, or introducing a database.
- It is important to them that they develop a trusted relationship with you and your charity so that they can provide the support that is best suited to your needs. To do this they will speak to you or visit your charity a few times per year.
Ineligible
- They do not provide funding for the following organisations:
- Community Interest Companies, or any other organisations that are not charities or CIOs registered in England and Wales
- Infrastructure or ‘umbrella’ organisations
- Organisations whose primary purpose is to give funds to individuals or other organisations. This means organisations that use more than 50% of their annual expenditure as grants
- Charities working predominantly outside England and Wales
- Organisations that require people to take part in a religious activity as part of the support provided.
- Hospitals, health authorities, or hospices
- Rescue services
- Schools, colleges, or universities
For more information, visit Lloyds Bank Foundation.