What work do we support?

Within our four areas of interest – the arts, education and learning, the environment and enabling disadvantaged people to participate fully in society – we will prioritise work that:

• Addresses a significant gap in provision
• Develops or strengthens good practice
• Challenges convention or takes a risk in order to address a difficult issue
• Tests out new ideas or practices
• Takes an enterprising approach to achieving its aims
• Sets out to influence policy or change behaviour more widely.

These guidance notes and the rest of our website aim to give a flavour of what we fund and why we support the work we do.  Our final decisions on grants are based on the evidence of a close fit with at least one, and often more than one, of these priorities.  

However, these priorities are broad and within a limited budget we have to make judgments that ensure a rich and diverse mix of high quality work across the topic areas.  For example, we receive many more applications than we can fund from excellent organisations addressing significant gaps in provision in local areas.  When we do make grants to local organisations under this heading it is when their application offers something distinctive, demonstrates a high impact and achieves positive and long-lasting change. 

There are examples of grants we have made and how we have interpreted the match with our priorities on our website. We strongly advise you to consult the website before applying to get a better sense of the sort of applications we favour.

We are happy to consider requests to fund core or project costs. These may include running costs such as staff salaries and overheads but not equipment. We do not fund capital costs for building work or refurbishment. You do not have to be a registered charity to apply but we can only fund work that is legally charitable. Your constitution must also allow you to carry out the work you propose.

More information about the kind of work we support is in our Main Fund Examples.

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