News
Announcements and updates.
Funding notices, changes to how we work, and notes on what we are learning. We publish the decisions as well as the results.
Latest
Learning note: what we got wrong in our first cycles
A published account of the design decisions that did not work, and the changes made in response.
We under-budgeted for regulatory and legal work, asked for data that cost more to collect than it was worth, and set deadlines that suited our calendar rather than our applicants'.
The full note is available in the resource library.
Archive
More updates
- Funding
Climate Adaptation Partnerships extends to three-year terms
Adaptation work rarely completes inside twelve months. The programme now commits for three years with an annual check-in rather than an annual reapplication.
Communities adapting to environmental change told us the same thing: short grants force them to design short projects.
- Governance
Publishing assessment criteria before applications open
Every opportunity now publishes its scoring criteria, review stages and decision timeline before the first application is submitted.
Applicants spend real effort on applications. The least we can do is tell them how those applications will be judged, and when they will hear back.
- Funding
Practitioner Fellowship opens its first review cycle
Twelve months of protected time for practitioners documenting and testing methods already working in the field.
The Practitioner Fellowship exists for the person who has built something that works and has never had the time to write it down.
- Practice
How we simplified grantee reporting
We removed two thirds of the fields in our reporting template after grantees told us what the old one cost them in staff time.
Reporting should tell us whether the work is going well and what support is needed. It should not consume the capacity that the grant was intended to create.
- Funding
The Community Futures Fund opens for applications
Multi-year, flexible support for locally led organizations is now open, with rolling review and a simplified first-stage form.
The Community Futures Fund is now open. It offers flexible support over two years for organizations rooted in the communities they serve, with a deliberately short first-stage form.