Please note: we will continue accepting holiday grant applications for trips taking place before the end of 2022. Grants will be awarded until available funding has been allocated.
The purpose of the Holiday Grants programme is to provide access to recreational trips or holidays for groups of children who experience disadvantage or who have disabilities. In particular we are interested in contributing to trips that would not take place without our funding.
Please note we have removed some of the temporary changes we made last year to the types of trips we will fund, please read the funding guidelines carefully to make sure your trip is eligible.
Grant size:
£500 – £2,500
Length:
One-off short grants
Decision timescale:
6 weeks
Deadlines:
Submission dates vary depending when trips or holidays take place
Location of work:
UK only, with priority to the 20% most deprived areas
Funding covers:
Short holidays and recreational trips
Organisation type:
Schools, small charities and not-for-profit organisations
We award grants to those charities that are able to demonstrate quantifiable outcomes to beneficiaries. Typically, grants of up to £5,000 are regularly made and occasional larger sums are given to charities where high impact can be achieved. Similarly, smaller charities often benefit from smaller grants of £250 upwards.
You should meet the following criteria:
You are a small- to mid-size UK registered charity
Your application is not for salaries, building construction, general running costs, transport, financial deficits or overseas projects
Your application is not on behalf of a church, museum or an individual
You have not received a previous grant from The Foundation within the last 2 years (or submitted an application which was unsuccessful within the last 12 months)
When to apply
The Trustees meet four times per year to review grant applications. These should be received in good time before each meeting and at least 6 weeks before the meeting date. The forthcoming meetings are as follows:
02 November 2022
25 January 2023
26 April 2023
26 July 2023
Tips to aid successful applications
The Foundation receives over 1000 applications per year of which around 250 are successful. As a guide, you should:
complete the application concisely
include a breakdown of costs showing how the grant would be spent
clearly state the anticipated outcome or impact, together with who and how many people would benefit
ensure your contact details are accurate, specifically email and contact telephone numbers
include a copy of your most recent Statement of Financial Activities showing income, expenditure and a Balance Sheet
include a copy of the charity’s recent bank statement showing the bank account number and sort code
How to apply
Download the application form below, complete and post with any supporting documentation (including audited accounts) to:
If you would like to be part of the Warm Spaces initiative and have expressed interest to having a warm space for your local community during the winter, then please check out our page on the Essex Map.
The Essex Alliance and Essex Map are working with the county and warm spaces to provide the community with information on where they can find warm space in their area.
If you’re an organisation who would like to add your listing in relation to the warm space’s initiative you can do this be reviewing the information on our warm spaces page.
Or if you’re working with a client who would like information about warm spaces in their area please search the key word ‘warm spaces’ or search the category which is under halls & venues.
For further support and assistance on how to ‘add a listing’ to the Essex Map please email [email protected]
The Curve is a series of free, 90-minute workshops for third sector organisations. These online workshops aim to build knowledge around best digital practices, raise awareness of digital tools and ultimately help increase impact with digital. Workshops are open to anyone working or volunteering with a third sector organisation in the UK.
If you have any questions relating to The Curve, please contact Jenn at [email protected]
Training includes; fundraising, Mailchimp, Canva, Design and Accessibility.
To apply for a grant, the following conditions must be met..
The committee must be officially recognised by the landlord of the site.
Must have a written and signed constitution.
Have a bank account with 3 signatories.
Have a forwarding address and named contact.
The Board of Trustees meet 4 times each year and any application for funding is discussed and decided upon at these meetings.
The amount of funding that can be applied for will be on the scale of £250 (Minimum) to £2,000 (Maximum) per applicant.
The amount of funding that is awarded to each applicant will be at the discretion of the Board of Trustees and may not necessarily be the total sum that is applied for.
If your completed application form is accepted it may be necessary for one of the trustees to contact the committee submitting the application so a telephone contact number should be shown.
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip) to create a guide titled A Warm Welcome, which sets out tips and guidance for libraries who want to offer themselves as warm banks.
The guide says that warm spaces need to “be free to use and encourage people to stay as long as they want”. The space also “needs to be a friendly, comfortable environment where people feel at ease and at home”. Safety is also key, and the space should be accessible to everyone with those considering becoming a warm bank looking “at barriers that may prevent this, not just for wheelchair users, but also for visitors with additional or special needs”.
A survey earlier this year by Libraries Connected, a charity which represents public libraries, found that nearly 60% are actively considering taking part in a warm bank scheme. However, just 4% of library leaders expect to receive any extra funding for this activity.
Is your organisation thinking of setting up a warm space this year?
The Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing Team, part of Essex County Council, are running another Men4MentalHealth course starting in November. It is for any man feeling low, experiencing a lack of motivation, loss of direction, struggling in their relationships or struggling in any other way with their mental health.
The course is open to any man living in Essex (excluding Southend and Thurrock) aged between 18 and 65.
The course will be running on Tuesdays, between 5pm-7pm, held over 6 consecutive weeks. Start date yet to be confirmed.
Men can either attend in person or virtually. If wanting to join virtually, they can attend the session using their mobile/laptop/computer/tablet from the comfort of their own home and join with members at the in person session.
The location for the face to face sessions will be in Chelmsford near the train station.
We’ve already had some fantastic feedback from previous cohorts:
“the course gave me useful strategies for coping with mental health”
“it helped hearing other people’s stories and how even though we had different circumstances, we still helped and supported each other and had similar issues”
“I thought it was facilitated extremely well”
“I liked the fact that the group was online, because I was in the safety of my own environment, it was less anxiety provoking”
“it made me feel that I wasn’t alone. I now know that there are other people in the same boat”
“I was really in a bad place and now I’m out of that place, I’ve made friends and learnt a lot of things about my mental health, and learnt about other people’s mental health”
“I really can’t stress what a difference to my life you and Lucy have made… I can’t thank you enough.”
If you know of men who would like to attend, all we ask is for them to contact the team as soon as possible. The number is 0333 032 2958 and email is [email protected].
If you have any questions please feel free in get in contact with them.
Supporting the arts, culture and creative industries in Essex.
The Essex County Council Arts and Cultural fund has been designed to help organisations and practitioners to deliver a broad and exciting range of work and activity to engage with and bring communities together.
*Open for Expressions of Interest for 2023 from Saturday 1 October to Monday 31 October 2022*
The arts, cultural and creative projects, such as festivals and exhibitions, all contribute to helping communities recover from the pandemic and play an integral part in enabling the objectives of Essex County Council’s wider objectives as set out in Everyone’s Essex.
Creative and cultural sectors are at the forefront of economic and social regeneration in our region. One of the aims of the fund is to provide a boost for the creative and cultural sector which will enable organisations and practioners to develop long term and sustainable future for arts and culture in the county.
The ECC Arts and Cultural Fund will offer artists and cultural organisations grants from £2,500 to £30,000 to deliver projects to help support and rejuvenate the Essex arts and culture sector, as well as the county’s towns and city high streets.
The fund will support projects, which will contribute to ECC’s Everyone’s Essex: The Plan for Essex 2021-2025 within the music, theatre, dance, visual arts, literature, combined arts, including festivals and carnivals, museums and the wider creative sectors.
Help Finder enables charities to save money on goods and services they normally have to pay for and to source expert support they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. It searches 100s and 100s of organisation to find advice, pro bono support and free goods & services. There are 19 search categories, with everything from fundraising support, consultancy and IT through to volunteering, legal and consumer goods. Watch the 2 min demo video to see how it works and find out more here. If you wish to be included in Help Finder, just send me a link and 50 words. It doesn’t matter, if your support is only country or region specific, as I can tag your location, and it helps if you include your services in the text, as the directory has a key word search.
It’s just part of our comprehensive free programme to support non-profits through the cost-of-living crisis. Charities are really struggling, and we need you to help us help as many as possible by sharing this e mail, including the details below on your website or in your newsletter and posting on social media.
Find the crisis funding and help you need with our #SurviveAndThrive programme – a one-stop-shop that enables anyone to find the grant funding, advice, resources, pro bono support, data and free goods and services their charity needs. There are 3 very simple to use databases:
Funding Finder – click through to more funders than any other grants directory, including categories for Crisis Funding, Core Funding and Small Charities & Community Groups.
Help Finder – searches 100s of organisations to find advice, pro bono support and free goods and services to save you money.
Data Finder – finds data for funding bids, fundraising research, impact reporting, planning and campaigning.
We are very excited to announce the launch of the VVU Community Grants funding for 2023-2024.
As a partnership, our strategic goal is to reduce serious violence, the harm it causes, and to safeguard those at risk (relating to county lines, gangs and knife crime). We recognise that local organisations and groups are at the forefront of some amazing work that takes place to address these issues and we would like to support this work further as much as we can.
Our 2022-2024 VVCS grant round is for local *’not for profit’ voluntary or community clubs or organisations based in (and therefore delivering in) Essex, Southend and Thurrock only, and we are looking to fund projects that meet our stated aims and can run from April 2023- 31st March 2024.
Groups can apply for up to **£20,000 to deliver support and interventions for children, young people, young adults and families (families must include children and young people, and ‘young person’ is defined as up to the age of 25). Projects must demonstrate how they have a positive impact on issues relating to crime and anti-social behaviour and violence and vulnerability. This may include early intervention work, gang & ‘county lines’, and child criminal exploitation projects.
**Our grants funding this year has a total pot of just under £156,000 that we will look to distribute as evenly as possible across the 12 ECC districts/ Quadrants plus Southend & Thurrock. Please bear this is mind when completing your applications.
We would be particularly interested in projects that can evidence they are meeting needs as highlighted by young people and local residents in our Listening Project 2021-2022.
You can read the full report here https://ecvys.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/vvu-listening-2021-2022-youth-report-final.pdf The report only focuses on 7 Districts in Essex, but the fund is open to all (including Southend & Thurrock). Some examples of need highlighted in the report are-
Indoor/ outdoor safe spaces with affordable & inclusive activities for young people to socialise (this can include a one off cost for lighting the outside of voluntary group spaces to create a safer space for young people, additional staff or youth activities).
• Opportunities for young people to learn life skills, participate in community based or volunteering projects and undertake work experience
• Work with young people and their families to raise awareness of youth violence
• Projects that promote greater communication and positive engagement between the police, youth groups and schools
• Targeted youth work aimed at those young people most at risk of exploitation
• Support for victims of youth violence
• Drugs education in informal settings or led by voluntary groups in schools with evidenced links to how drug use relates to young people becoming involved in serious violence
The fund is open to work of all ages from 0-25 but we would especially like to see some applications for creative work around risk taking behaviours with primary school age children and their families.
Please do read the listening report and try to evidence the need for your intervention within your application, referencing the listening report or local needs if your district is not one of the 7 listed.
All applications must demonstrate how their project enables children & young people to-
• Make positive choices that keep them safe
• Raise self-esteem and confidence
• Build resilience
• Improve emotional and physical health and mental wellbeing
• Have a letter of support from the local CSP
*PLEASE NOTE THAT: Your organisation MUST have a recognised constitution and be a- not for profit voluntary or community club or organisation, a registered Charity, A not for profit company or community interest company or other social enterprise. company limited by guarantee, charitable incorporated organisation or Registered society.
Applications open: 15th August 2022 Applications close: 31st October 2022 Completed applications to be sent to [email protected]and[email protected] Short listing, due diligence checks and final panel decisions will happen from November 2022-February 2023 Applicants made aware of grant decisions: End of February 2023 Funds to be with groups For the project start date in April 2023
To download an application form with further guidance on applying please click the link below:
You can also apply online using this link https://forms.gle/qLaoT2atPZMvrioD8 (please note though that any due diligence forms requested will need to be emailed separately to Rachel and Jim (emails above).