Improving Lives

The Improving Lives grant programme provides grants to charitable organisations that help people when other sources of support have failed, are inappropriate, or are simply not available.

We support established organisations delivering services directly to beneficiaries. We are looking for services which can demonstrate a track record of success, and evidence the effectiveness of the work.

This is our largest grants programme, through which the majority of our funds are distributed.

– Nearly all our grants in this programme are made to organisations with an annual income of between £50k and £3m. In exceptional circumstances we will consider applications from organisations with income of up to £5m. If your organisation has an income of over £3m and you wish to apply you will need to demonstrate that your organisation is uniquely well placed to deliver the work and that you are unable to source funding from elsewhere. If you are in this category, please contact us before making an application – We fund established organisations (by this we mean at least 18 months old and have published their first set of annual accounts) that have a track record. We are looking for applicants that have the necessary expertise and experience and are well placed to deliver the work for which funding is sought – We make grants to fund charitable work. We primarily fund registered charities but are willing to make grants to other types of not for profit organisations, such as Community Interest Companies (CICs) or constituted community groups if they can explain how you would use our funding for charitable purposes. Please note: if your organisation is not a registered charity, we require you to submit a constitution, which shows your charitable purpose. If you are a CIC we require you to provide details of how your constitution prevents funds being removed from the organisation (asset lock)

The types of service we fund:

– We fund work with people for whom other sources of support have failed, been inappropriate or are simply not available. We want to support people who are excluded, vulnerable, or facing other forms of hardship – All the applications we fund must be able to clearly demonstrate the need for the service(s) they deliver. We want to understand the problems or circumstances that make your work necessary. It may be that people are lacking particular resources or facing certain barriers in accessing the support, information or care that they need – When writing your application we will ask you to identify the priority area(s) you are working towards and how the outcomes of the service(s) you are delivering fit with the grid of funding priorities on page two. Some organisations may achieve outcomes across several priority areas Please note that your application will not be assessed on the number of priorities you are working towards. An application that meets one priority will not be at a disadvantage to an applicant working across several priority areas. It is more important to explain how you will meet one priority well than to make small contributions to several priority areas. Therefore, please do not select priorities that are not directly linked to your work. Some organisations may be applying for a service that works towards one (or more) of the listed priorities but also delivers services that are outside of our priorities. In this case the organisation would be eligible to apply to us, but must clearly state how they would use our funding to work towards our specified outcomes.