Vital for Berkshire Funding

Applications close on Thursday 17th August.
The BCF’s Vital for Berkshire fund aims to support charities, community groups and projects that work to tackle the most salient and pressing issues within Berkshire’s communities at any given time. We invite applications from charities, community groups and projects that support vital needs in Berkshire, such as (but not limited to): physical and mental health, supporting young and vulnerable people or groups, combating isolation, tackling poverty and disadvantage, offering equal opportunities for all, and more. More details here.

GSK Health Inequalities Programme

About Us: Supporting small charities that are working to tackle health inequalities in their communities.
Criteria: The new GSK Health Inequalities Programme supports small charities with total annual income between £20,000 and £150,000.
Grant Size: up to £10,000
Deadline for applications: Monday 14 August 2023

Find out more about it here.

£1 million defibrillator fund

About Us: Organisations across England are being invited to bid for a share of £1 million of government funding to buy life-saving defibrillators for community spaces like town halls, local parks or post offices.
Criteria: Organisations must demonstrate that defibrillators will be placed in areas where they are most needed, such as places with high footfall, vulnerable people, rural areas or due to the nature of activity at the site.
Grant Size: An estimated 1,000 new defibrillators are to be provided by the fund
Deadline for applications: Rolling. Click here for more details.

Tesco Stronger Starts

Tesco Stronger Starts supports thousands of local community projects and good causes across the UK.

The scheme is open to all schools, registered charities and not-for-profit organisations, with priority given to projects that provide food and support to young people. Since 2016 Tesco grants have supported over 50,000 community groups with more than £100 million in grants. The funding aims to make a positive difference – because where our communities thrive, our business and our colleagues thrive too.

Examples of eligible applications with a focus on food security, children and young people could be:

A school providing pupils with food for breakfast clubs or snacks throughout the day.
A school wanting to buy equipment for outdoor or indoor activities.
A school wanting to develop a food growing area.
A school supporting an after school club.
A voluntary organisation working with families to run a food bank.
An organisation addressing holiday hunger.
A healthy eating project that supports families to cook healthy meals on a budget.
A Brownie or Scout group needing funding for new play equipment or activities.

Tesco Stronger Starts is open to charities and community organisations to apply for a grant of up to £1,500. Every three months, three local good causes are selected to be in the blue token customer vote in Tesco stores throughout the UK.

Tesco Stronger Starts (tescocommunitygrants.org.uk)

Deadline: Rolling

The Helen Hamlyn Trust

The Helen Hamlyn Trust is an independent grant-making Trust. The trust initiates medium and long-term major projects linked to the shared interests of Lady Hamlyn and her late husband Lord Hamlyn. Its core ethos is to develop innovative projects, which aim to effect lasting change, improve quality of life and create opportunity for the benefit of the public.

PHF has made a number of grants to support the Trust’s work. The Trust’s activities fall within the mission and broad objectives of the Foundation.

The Trust’s grant-making is in the fields of medicine, arts and culture, education and welfare, healthy ageing, international humanitarian affairs and heritage and conservation in India. Small grants are made to local and regional charities up to £10,000. The Trust develops lasting relationships with leading organisations and individuals to enable new areas of work by creating connections between organisations, and introducing new ideas.

For further information, please contact:

The Helen Hamlyn Trust
129 Old Church Street
London
SW3 6EB

Total trust spend in 2021-22 was £7,602,088: Charity overview, THE HELEN HAMLYN TRUST – 1084839, Register of Charities – The Charity Commission

Helen Hamlyn Trust – Paul Hamlyn Foundation (phf.org.uk)

Deadline: Rolling

The Gisela Graham Foundation

The Gisela Graham Foundation is a small charity which reflects the wishes and support of the proprietor, Gisela Graham, together with her fellow Trustees. The Foundation aims to provide financial benefit to those in need through the provision of grants and other payments to provide assistance in specific cases of poverty and poor education; it will also help to further the advancement of public health and safety and to provide education and cultural life for the general benefit of society.

• Applications will only be considered from corporate bodies and registered charities.
• Any donations may be for a general or particular purpose of the corporate body or registered charity.
• There are no geographical limits on the provision of aid.
• Grants may be by means of a single payment, regular payment or an on-going commitment to a specific project over a period of time.
• Grants awarded are normally for sums under £10,000, but most donations are for less than £5,000.

Funding will be provided to support one or more of the specific objectives of the Foundation, which are listed below.

• To promote the advancement of health, through research and treatment, in areas such as:
  • Cancer
  • Dementia
  • Genetic mental disabilities
• To promote and support the benefit of adults with learning disabilities, and contribute towards the provision of property for the accommodation of such adults.
• To promote the benefit of homeless people and, in particular, the young, to help them become self-sufficient.
• To provide for the education and care of children in the less developed countries and to support their families through UK registered charities.
• To provide donations to corporate bodies concerned with the propagation of the plastic and performing arts, and in particular, concerned with training and equipping young performers and artists.
• To support any charity or other recognised body, which has similar objectives to the above.

Gisela Graham Foundation (ggrahamfoundation.org)

Deadline: Rolling

Sport England Small Grants

Our Small Grants Programme seeks to develop opportunities for communities to get more people physically active and we’ll support new projects through providing National Lottery funding of between £300 and £15,000.

We want to support projects that bring communities together and provide sport and physical activities for people who may be less physically active.
We also particularly want to support projects focusing on environmental sustainability.
We believe that communities that work together and share resources provide a stronger and more sustainable impact.
Therefore, we want applications from projects that demonstrate how they connect with their communities, make best use of the existing skills and assets in an area, and will provide the biggest possible impact to those who need it most.
We also want projects to show how they’ve sought to reduce their impact on the environment through the goods and services they use to deliver the activity.
Please be aware that we always have more applications than we’re able to fund, so our priority is to support projects working with people in disadvantaged communities.
More details here.

Deadline: The closing date for applications is 31 March 2024

Congregational and General Charitable Trust Grants

Grants are available to support the provisions and repair of church buildings, particularly those of the United Reformed and Congregational denominations. Further details.

Heathrow Community Trust – Projects for Young People

About Us: Are you working to improve the lives of young people aged up to 24 years old? Do you have an idea to give young people new skills and self-confidence? Perhaps getting them into training, work or more involved in their community? Alternatively, you may have a project to increase young people’s resilience? If so, you could qualify for a grant from our Projects for Young People programme.

Criteria: The programme has 3 themes, and projects must demonstrate a fit with one theme:
• Y1 Supporting the local community by creating opportunities for young people up to age 24 to make a positive change to their behaviour about their future (e.g. raised aspirations, improved attitude to learning, increased knowledge of progression opportunities).
• Y2 Supporting the local community by creating opportunities for young people up to age 24 to break down barriers to employment through skills development.
• Y3 Supporting the local community by creating opportunities for young people up to age 24 to improve their quality of life (e.g. increased resilience, improved mental health)
Grant Size: up to £15,000 for projects with a total cost of up to £60,000
Deadline for applications: 10am on 11 September 2023

Find out more about the Heathrow Community Trust

John Sykes Foundation

Applications accepted on a rolling basis.
We support a wide range of organisations and causes within 5 miles of Reading (including parts of the Wokingham Borough such as Woodley, Twyford, Winnersh, Earley and Arborfield)
that make a positive impact. Our grants vary depending on the type and length of support required; please read some case studies
to obtain a greater understanding of the difference our funding and support makes.
Please ensure you read our application guidelines and try our eligibility quiz. Once you are ready, you can apply online.

Barchester’s Charitable Foundation

We help people and groups based in England, Scotland and Wales.
Our funding focus is about connecting or re-connecting people with others in their local community. We support applications that combat loneliness and enable people to be active and engaged.
We help individuals, but please note that all applications for named individuals must be completed by a third party who knows the individual in a professional or community-based capacity.
We help individuals with:
• Manual and powered wheelchairs
• Mobility scooters
• Specialised trikes / ebikes / bikes
• Car adaptations
Our grants for individuals range from £100 up to £600.
We also help small community groups and small local charities. We do not have a formal definition for a small charity, but if a charity has financial reserves in the hundreds of thousands or millions, it is very unlikely that we would be able to help.
We help groups with:
• Activity projects
• Equipment and materials for use by members
• Member transport
• Day trips, outings and group holidays in the UK
Our grants for groups range from £100 up to £2,000.
Apply for a grant | Barchester Charitable Foundation (bhcfoundation.org.uk)
Deadline: Rolling

Moto Foundation Community Grants

Our charity aims to make a difference to communities around the UK. We focus our attention on the local communities around Moto’s locations, however we also partner with a national charity in order to help make a difference to a wider community audience. For further details of this fund please click here.

Morrisons Foundation

The Morrisons Foundation supports registered charities making a positive difference in local communities across England, Scotland, and Wales.
Grants are available for up to £10,000 for capital spend or direct project delivery.

The Morrisons Foundation prioritises applications from small charities, those with an income of less than £1m, but applications from larger charities are welcome.

Applications should deliver on (at least) one of three objectives to be considered for support, these are:

1. Tackling the cost of living;
2. Enhancing community spaces, facilities and services;
3. Improving health and wellbeing.
   Grant Funding Request | Morrisons Foundation
   

Thank you to our Berkshire CVS’s for providing the information contained in this article – Volunteer Centre West Berkshire, Wokingham & Bracknell InVolve and Slough CVS.

Lush Charity Pot Funding
Applications accepted on a rolling basis. Small charitable grants are available to small grass-roots organisations working in
the areas of the environment, animal protection and human rights, with priority for less popular causes that aim to create long-term change and struggle to find funding. Learn more.

CLA Charitable Trust
Applications close on Thurs 31st August.
We support charitable organisations that access the benefits of the countryside to pursue the health and wellbeing of people and to provide opportunities for education about the countryside in England and Wales. Small and medium sized charities and not for profit organisations such as CIC’s with clear social purpose can apply for up to approximately £5000. Find out more.

School Nature Grants
Applications close Friday 8th September.
What do birdboxes, bee hotels, fire woks and nature experts all have in common? They are all available free to schools as part of Learning through Landscapes Local School Nature Grants Programme, supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery. The grants provide an assortment of nature equipment up to the value of £500 and a two hour training session. The packages are customisable, enabling Early Years settings*, Infant, Primary and Secondary schools to choose from a menu of items which best suit their learners and their setting. Further info.

One Stop Partnerships
Applications accepted on a rolling basis.
Groundwork is working with One Stop Stores
Ltd to administer the One Stop Community Partnership programme. Successful applicants will receive an initial grant of up to £1,000 and begin a partnership with their local One Stop store. This programme is designed to support community groups or organisations operating within two miles of a One Stop store and which are either tackling food poverty; supporting the vulnerable; supporting the elderly; supporting low-income families; running youth sports teams; reducing / recycling waste; and/or; improving the environment. The program provides partnership as well as financial assistance. Find out more.

Community Organisations Cost of Living Fund

One-off grants are available for front-line charities, voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations based in England that are struggling to meet increased demand for their critical services due to the increased cost of living. For further details please click here.

Application deadline :16 October 2023 (12 noon).

We just wanted to let you know about an exciting opportunity to get a little bit involved with our charity Connecting Communities in Berkshire.

We are an independent charity with almost 50 years’ of experience in community development work.

We help people who live and work in Berkshire to make things better for themselves and for their community.

We work with communities to develop, deliver and support projects and services which help people overcome challenges, improve their quality of life and strengthen communities in the county.

Becoming a member of CCB is an effective and rewarding route to building connections, accessing information and support, and helping to ensure that the needs and priorities of the community you are part of are being heard.

In 2023 for the first time, we are offering individuals that would like to know a little bit more about us the chance to become a free member of our organisation for one year.

CCB Members will.
• Receive our e-bulletin direct to your inbox every month.
• Have the opportunity to share your community news across our network.
• Be one of the first to hear about our new activities and events.
• Have an annual invitation to join us at our charity AGM and training workshops.
• Be able to influence the future of our charitable work and attend focus groups.
• The chance to become a CCB Trustee and to nominate and elect members to our Board.

As a member, you form a vital part of the foundations of our charity, underpinning our governance, guiding the use of our charitable funds, and influencing the focus and direction of our work.

Along with our other members, you collectively provide us with eyes, ears, and a strong voice right at the grassroots of rural communities in Berkshire.

Our members are really important to us and are always at the core of what we do and why we do it.

Click here to sign up; https://ccberks.org.uk/ccb-membership/

We look forward to welcoming you!

John Heselwood, Policy & Development Manager for Cheshire Community Action, provided a guest blog for our national network ACRE as part of Rural Housing Week this month. In this article, John describes the circumstances that make it difficult for rural communities to secure the homes they need and what can be done about it – an issue that all rural communities have no matter which county they are in.

In Cheshire, similar to many other rural areas, there are some challenging issues that are creating barriers to the delivery of affordable rural housing.

A surge in rural house prices in recent years combined with stagnant wages and a cost of living crisis has further exacerbated a decades-old problem of housing affordability in rural areas. In Cheshire, the gap between earnings and house prices has continued to grow over the past two decades; a trend that is repeated across the country.

Part of the problem is that current solutions defined as ‘affordable tenures’ (such as affordable or social rent, shared ownership, discounted sales, First Homes and Rent to Buy) are anything but in today’s overheated housing market. The feedback we receive from communities increasingly points towards an awareness that the affordable tenures available are merely ‘workarounds for a broken system’ which don’t seem to plug the gap between wages and housing costs.

This viewpoint is also reflected in the evidence we see captured in housing needs surveys. These are research projects that we support, which document local residents’ need for housing. In recent years, surveys produced in Cheshire have shown a significant drop in demand for shared ownership tenures. Affordability assessments also show that in many rural areas, affordable rent set at 80% of market rates and sales discounted at a similar rate are simply not affordable to lower-income households.

Another challenge for smaller rural settlements is that large strategic developments are thought to ‘absorb’ housing need across rural areas by volume developers. Yet, our surveys still demonstrate parish-level housing need, despite their proximity to large developments, which raises the question whether larger sites are sufficiently meeting the local need in smaller rural settlements.

The same proliferation of larger housing developments in Cheshire is also creating more opposition to housing developments from local communities. But this is not about traditional ‘NIMBYs’. In our experience, the rural communities we engage are not necessarily against housing developments. Rather they are concerned about what gets built and where.

People are asking legitimate questions about the true affordability of housing – not just the strategic numbers needed, but whether it is genuinely affordable and provides an appropriate mix, type, tenure to meet local community need. Many communities we work with have produced neighbourhood plans, which support (quite rightly) more granular, small-scale applications for housing development which fit in with the needs and circumstances of the local area. The evidence generated by neighbourhood plan groups is often at odds with the large-scale commercial housing that gets built.

Larger volume developments also create a gravitational pull for over-stretched development teams. In other words, development of a 10 unit site in a small village is much less attractive to the finance directors of housing associations than a 200-300 unit site that can deliver bigger economies of scale. This makes financial sense in the context of increased construction costs and delivers much higher numbers, thereby providing a faster route to achieving local authority housing targets. But this also creates another hurdle for rural communities to deliver the mix of homes that are needed. Combined with the tendency for planning policy to direct residential developments towards larger villages and settlements deemed sustainable (due to the presence of certain services) they have accelerated the decline of some smaller rural settlements in Cheshire.

However, despite these challenges, there are examples of housing associations working in partnership with community-led housing groups to overcome these barriers and deliver genuinely affordable homes. A growing number of CLH developments are being brought about by groups that have worked against the odds to deliver more affordable homes such as the Tattenhall Community Land Trust (CLT) in Cheshire.

The CLH sector has great potential to grow – by up to 30,000 homes on rural exceptions sites according to the latest CLT State of the Sector Report. By itself, CLH is unlikely to meet the scale of demand being felt across the country, but it can positively disrupt the current trend of growing unaffordability and become a viable mainstream option for communities with the right support and investment for the sector.

These are difficult issues to solve but not insurmountable with a concerted effort from stakeholders and policy makers to work together to increase the supply of genuinely affordable housing, help tackle poverty, and boost the economy in rural areas. Based on my experience, the following policy measures would help:
• A review of affordable tenures that simplifies rent and home ownership options for households and enables developments to better respond to local need with a more flexible funding regime that accounts for local income levels and circumstances.
• Policy incentives for landowners, developers and housing associations to develop small rural housing sites that respond to local need in terms of affordability, mix, type and tenure. E.g. Rural Exception Site Planning Passports as supported by ACRE and CLA, and Community-led Exception sites as proposed by the CLT Network.
• Renewing the Community Housing Fund to provide the resources needed to stimulate and support the growth in community-led developments.
• Local Plans to place more emphasis on housing need in terms of mix, size, type and tenure, and how this is being met (including how large developments impact and contribute to local infrastructure and services) to enable more accountability of planning decisions and developers.
• Continued financial and technical support for neighbourhood plan groups to enable communities to create and influence planning policy more effectively within their local areas.
The recent government announcement of funding for rural housing enablers is a welcome and timely injection of resources to help boost delivery of affordable rural homes. But with many marginal rural constituencies set to be key battlegrounds in the upcoming general election, it will be interesting to see whether the hopeful politicians will take decisive action on the more structural policy and funding issues to address this most pressing rural concern.

Thanks to John for this informative article, many of the issues mentioned resonate in Berkshire too. If you live within a rural community in Berkshire and would like to discuss running a Housing Need Survey do get in touch with us or @TimParry

By Tim Parry, CEO at CCB

In June, the Government made an announcement setting out how it will ‘unleash rural opportunity’. Their publication sets out a series of cross-departmental ambitions to grow the rural economy, improve digital communications, increase the supply of affordable housing, improve access to health and social care services and tackle rural crime.

Generally speaking, the announcement has been welcomed. Much of the report serves as a reminder of the already significant investment made by government into the rural economy, for example in farming, broadband and the Rural England Prosperity Fund. However, the announcement includes new initiatives and investment, not least in rural affordable housing.

Both Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) and the Rural Services Network (albeit cautiously) welcomed the news of new investment in increasing the supply of affordable housing in rural areas. Richard Quallington, ACRE’s Executive Director highlights the importance of communities having a proper say in the homes that are built. The new funding from Government promises investment in a network of Rural Housing Enablers who will fulfill the essential role of ‘honest brokers’ helping to unlock small sites and bring forward developments where truly affordable homes can be built for people with a local connection to their community.  

As always though, the devil is in the detail. Many of the ambitions in the publication are subject to future consultations and as-yet unpublished reports to reveal how they will be implemented. A big question for us locally is how will communities in Berkshire benefit?

The Unleashing Rural Opportunity publication identifies jobs and skills as key to growing the rural economy. The document includes details of employment and pay, highlighting Berkshire and much of the South East as having high levels of both. However, we know that many families in Berkshire struggle on low incomes and could really benefit from intensive support, but will perceptions of general affluence get in the way of this?

A critical ambition in the publication is to Review and build understanding of how deprivation in rural areas is measured so that policies can be better designed to tackle it. This may be the most important ambition of all, as, without a much-improved process for measuring actual numbers of people impacted by deprivation rather than proportions or percentages, the often dispersed nature of rural deprivation will remain hidden from view.