Small grants scheme
Eligibility criteria
In order to be eligible, you must demonstrate that your organisation:
- Is a voluntary, community or faith group
- Is properly constituted
- Has a bank account
- Is open and accessible to the community you serve
- Has a planned approach to safeguarding issues, if you are working with children, young people and vulnerable adults.
You must then show that the way you want to spend the grant is eligible too. Eligible expenditure is:
- For the benefit of people who live in, work in or visit Calderdale
- Able to be spent within 12 months of the date of the award.
If you are applying for changes or improvements to property, you must also demonstrate security of tenure, i.e. you must show that you have a right to stay in the property for a reasonable length of time. If you rent the property from someone else, you must have a proper lease in place, with time remaining on the lease. If you own the property, this is more straightforward, and you just need to tell us that you own it.
When deciding upon awards for applications to the Small Grants scheme the Panel takes an interest in an organisation’s ability to achieve financial sustainability. The level of membership fees and/or attendance fees being charged by an organisation will be taken into account. The Small Grants Panel would expect organisations to make appropriate charges for their services and the Panel may recommend to an organisation’s management that it considers adjusting its fees where the Small Grants Panel has assessed that they are not in line with current or comparable activities available.
Exclusions
There are some things that the scheme will not fund.
Please note: these are different from previous schemes we have run. If you have received funding from us in the past from other schemes, you should not assume you can reapply on the same basis as your project might not still be eligible under this new scheme.
For voluntary community sector groups only. Not for schools.
If your project is in partnership with a school, it may still be eligible. You need to be able to demonstrate how it meets our priorities and explain why the project should be supported by this scheme and why it is not supported through mainstream school budgets.
The scheme will not fund:
- Anything that primarily benefits people or causes outside of Calderdale,
- Anything that promotes religion or support for a particular political party.
Faith groups can still be funded for their community work, eg we will not fund a church to buy new hymn books, but we will consider funding its luncheon club; groups can still be funded for campaigns that aren’t linked to political parties, projects can still encourage involvement in civic life, e.g. town twinning, - Retrospectively.
So it will not give a grant to repay money that has already been spent, - Food or hospitality,
- Personal equipment.
Any equipment bought with the grant must remain the property of the organisation, and must be available for more than one member to use, within reason. We will not fund sporting equipment that can only be used by one player and would not realistically be available to other members – so for example, in a football team, we would not fund football boots, but we would consider applications for balls, nets, team strips etc.
