What will trusts fund?

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This page is for beginners. If you have three years’ experience, the following page is for you.

There are trusts out there whose overall giving policies cover just about every geographic location and every type of work that’s charitable. If you’re working for a charity, you probably don’t have to worry too much whether the basic nature of the charity’s work is fundable – of the more than 30 charities I’ve worked at, there was only one which didn’t seem to fit anyone’s criteria. (Its work was to create an “olympics” for leading artists from around the globe, selling their artworks and thereby funding a national gallery for Namibia).

However, if you think about your and your family/friends’ own philanthropy – gifts and volunteering – over the years, it’s probably ideosyncratic, with different levels of commitment to different subjects. (For example, for years I was a very committed Buddhist and my giving to causes in Tibet was at a much higher level than my giving to, say, Oxfam.) You couldn’t just look at your giving and say, “Oh, they supports work with disadvantaged young people, we could send them anything and they’d fund it.” Trusts are the same – if there’s time, it’s better to look into their giving a bit.

A couple of caveats, though:

After starting up, trusts quickly develop a set of stated, or unstated, policies that this is what they do fund and what they don’t and they tend to follow it for years. (Occasionally trust have reviews and make changes, but carrying on funding what was funded in the past is the norm.) Possibly this is a natural human reaction to being swamped with applications – which is the norm at most trusts.
If something sounds like the state normally funds it (e.g., care services, teachers’ salaries, medical operations) that can put a lot of trusts off. (However, there may be things around those state costs – such as volunteers, or capital costs – that you can still get trust funding for.)
There’s a preference for the more practical and tangible (maybe because if you’re trying quickly to identify how you can have the most impact with your money, it’s an easy result to come to). However, some trust will contribute to the costs of charities as a whole, so this can be a way to raise (some) money towards the less popular costs like administrators or the rent.

Trusts usually give some combination of the following kinds of funding:

Short term funding, to get something off the ground (e.g., a new service, or an expansion of a service into a new area)
Funding towards the ongoing costs of a specific service (salaries, project expenses, probably a contribution towards overheads)
Funding a discrete project (e.g., a volunteer recruitment campaign to grow a specific volunteer-led service)
Funding for the overall costs of the charity as a whole
Costs of building: e.g., construction, purchase, refurbishment
Costs of equipment/equipment: such as a new scanner for a hospital; a minibus; a lot of bits of small equipment, applied for together. If a trust specifically rules out funding salary costs, bundling up the equipment costs for the project can sometimes provide you an alternative request