(6 minute read)
Published: 1 July 2025
Written by: Sufina Ahmad, Director and Kate Hitchcock, Senior Grants Manager
In June 2025, we launched our new strategy for 2025 to 2030. You can read more about the strategy by clicking here to access the blog we shared about it. This talks in more depth about some of the changes we have made, including no longer restricting applicants to specific funding categories, focusing our support on changemaking and justice based organisations, and offering longer and larger grants.
The process of designing a strategy in this age interconnected global threats affecting people, society and the natural world, has been clarifying. It’s been difficult too, especially as we began to realise the kinds of changes we needed to consider and ultimately make as an organisation.
Our hope for our next strategy has been to retain and learn from the best of what we do as a Foundation. However, it is also a commitment to bold transitions, and this means that we will advance our aim by focussing our strategy on work that acts on the following in just and equitable ways:
- Tackling the triple planetary crisis by mitigating and adapting to climate impacts, reducing pollution and protecting and restoring nature.
- Building greater trust and connection, reducing polarisation within society and increasing the levels of participation and influence in the political process (which is sometimes referred to as political equality).
- Promoting the development and adoption of economic models and systems that support people and planet and reduce wealth inequalities.
- Advancing equity and justice for marginalised communities impacted by the issues above.
Our new strategy also means new funding guidelines.
We are not accepting applications based on our former funding guidelines.
Our new funding guidelines – The key headlines
We will remain primarily a core costs funder, but will be focussing our grantmaking in the areas where we feel we can make the most impact. In a rapidly changing funding landscape and operating context, we have seen the ways in which supporting campaigning work adds value and supports civil society to respond to the biggest challenges and opportunities experienced by people, society and the natural world. We have also realised that many of our peers are uncomfortable with supporting campaigning work, and we have been keen to advocate for the importance of independent funders supporting this kind of work. As such, going forward our grantmaking will prioritise:
- Supporting changemaking organisations. We particularly want to work with organisations that demonstrate a clear understanding of their role within existing and/or new systems and a clear strategy on how they intend to make change.
- Working with organisations that are committed to advancing justice through the active involvement of individuals and communities with personal or direct experience of the issues they tackle. This approach is building on the learning from work delivered in our last strategy.
We define both of these points in more detail in our Funding Guidelines, which can be accessed by clicking here. The guidelines also explain that we will be looking to support organisations that can demonstrate throughout the application process that they are ‘well run’, and explain what we mean by this term.
It’s also important to note that we will continue to support work in the UK Overseas Territories, specifically related to our ‘triple planetary crisis’ strategic area. We have funded environmental work across the UKOTs for over a decade, and have taken an active role in trying to increase the levels of environmental funding being directed to the UK Overseas Territories by us and other funders. We feel there is still more we can do in this area. We are continuing our fundraising efforts for a dedicated UKOTs pooled fund, but in the meantime organisations can apply to us for work in the UKOTs via our main grants programme.
Updated eligibility criteria
Our eligibility criteria are very similar to those under our past funding guidelines. However, there are a few small changes. Applicants must meet ALL of the following eligibility criteria, in order to be considered for a grant:
- Size of organisation: Applicants must have an annual income of between £100,000 and £10,000,000, and have published accounts that evidence this. The main change from our past guidelines is that we will no longer have flexibility in this area, due to the high levels of demand. As such, we strictly cannot fund organisations below or above this income range. The only exception to this is for environmental organisations acting as intermediaries for work happening in the UK Overseas Territories.
- Legal structure: Applicants must be a UK registered charity. Campaigning organisations that have strong and clear reasons for not being a UK-registered charity, including not being able to register, then we will accept organisations that are a company limited by guarantee, including CICs, with an asset lock or as a fiscally hosted organisation.
- Geographic remit: Applicants must have an impact at a national or UK level and be based in the UK. This is slightly different from our previous funding guidelines, which were focused on UK level work only. Now, we can accept applications for organisations whose work is having an impact at a national level e.g. across Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland or England only. UK level impact means your work has an impact across two or more of the nations. If you are a local organisation making a difference locally only, without having any influence nationally or at a UK level, then your application will not be successful – which is the same as our previous guidelines. We will also accept applications for envinromental work happening in the UK Overseas territories – if this is the case for your organisation, we recommend you reach out to the Grants Team before submitting an application.
What applicants can ask for
We are retaining our approach of offering multi-year core costs funding. We will accept applications of £180k over up to five years – applicants can request a maximum of £60k per year, meaning that an organisation applying for £180k would need to ask for this over a minimum of three years.
We will be directing all our funding to support organisations that are doing work in relation to the four strategic areas outlined above i.e. the triple planetary crisis, polarisation and political equality, economic systems and wealth inequalities, and equity and justice for marginalised communities impacted by these issues. We feel that many of the challenges facing people, society and the natural world are systemic, which means that we want to fund work that will reform or replace those systems. Applicants can be working across one or more of these areas – there is no preference on that account. However, we will expect that this work is at the heart of what your organisation does, rather than a standalone project.
How can you learn more about our funding guidelines
Our Funding Guidelines, which can be accessed by clicking here, provide far more detail than we can here in this blog. The 11 page document (including a Contents Page) includes information relating to what we want to fund, who can apply, what we do not fund, details relating to our application process, our values and approach to diversity, equity and inclusion, and a list of frequently asked questions and useful links. This information can also be accessed by visiting the pages on our website under our ‘Apply for funding’ tab by clicking here.
We are running weekly question and answer sessions relating to the new funding guidelines between June and August. We may continue these sessions beyond August if the demand for them remains high. Our first session had over 90 people sign up. You can find the list of dates and booking links for these sessions by clicking here. As a team of three staff working on our grantmaking full time, and our Director working on grantmaking part time, we do not have the capacity to offer this many one to one meetings – hence only offering the weekly Q&A sessions at this time. But prospective applicants can attend multiple question and answer sessions and we have worked hard to make the information on our website as clear as we can. We will return to offering one to one pre-application meetings when the level of interest in our Funding Guidelines settles down and returns to the levels that we are more used to.
If you are struggling to get the information you need then please do contact the Grants Team; their contact details can be found on our website by clicking here.