Foundation (small) Grants - for Maintenance

Grant for all christian places of worship.

The Foundation Grant Programme offers our small grants of between £500 and £5,000 towards urgent maintenance works and small repairs identified as high priority within a recent Quinquennial Inspection or Survey Report. Also, small investigative works and surveys. Project costs should be up to £10,000 excl. VAT and awards will never exceed 50% of the costs. Decisions are made on a rolling basis.

Please do watch our video about our Foundation Grant Programme.

Eligibility criteria:

We consider applications from listed and unlisted Christian places of worship, of any denomination, across the UK. We continue to encourage applications from our priority areas - North East England, Northern Ireland and Wales, but this is not to the exclusion of churches in other areas, and we will particularly welcome applications in 2021 from churches in Scotland.

The application process begins with an eligibility quiz. If you cannot answer yes to each question your application will not be successful.

The questions include:

• Is yours a Christian place of worship (but not a cathedral) within the UK, and open for at least six services of public worship each year?
• Do you own the building or have the right to carry out the work? If the church is not part of a major denomination then is the denomination registered with Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, or has it got charitable status?
• Was your place of worship built as a place of worship originally and is it more than 30 years old? And are the works that this phase will inform, be either directly to the building or attached to it?
• Is the building open to the public for a minimum of 100 days a year beyond worship use, or will be within 1 year of project completion?
• Have you already raised at least 50% of this phase of the total project cost?
• Is the project yet to start (we don't accept applications for projects that have already started)?
• Are two quotes in place for each element of the work in this application? (If not please take a look at our MaintenanceBooker services and register online to get a free quote if the services are available in your area)
• If already appointed - is the project being led by a qualified professional, with conservation accreditation from a recognised institution if it is a listed building? (please review the guidance note for more detail)