The Royal London Foundation is changing

We’re widening the threshold for applications and introducing continuation grants to provide even more support to the organisations helping your communities

The Royal London Foundation helps members support local not-for-profit organisations that make a difference in your communities.

Last year saw a record number of you nominate causes in your local areas to receive a donation. As a result, we made the decision to review the Royal London Foundation to ensure we’re providing the most effective support to your chosen local organisations. In order to do this, we’ve made key changes to how the Foundation works.

Widening the net

Unfortunately, we had to say no to some applications in 2017 because the organisations nominated were outside of our terms and conditions due to their turnover. So we worked with UK Community Foundations (UKCF), the national network for community foundations that helps us manage the Royal London Foundation, and agreed to increase our maximum turnover threshold from £500,000 to £1m. Doing so will enable us to reach more brilliant organisations doing amazing work in your communities, as well as helping some of those that we couldn’t help before.

So, if you previously haven’t applied to the Royal London Foundation because of turnover, please do look out for our application window, opening on 1 April and closing on 12 June.

Continuation grants

As well as helping a wider group of organisations, we’re also keen to continue working with some of those that we’ve assisted before. Therefore, we’re delighted to announce we’ll now be introducing something called ‘continuation grants’. These will provide a second grant of £10,000 to 10 of your nominated organisations, a year after they received the first one, in order to help them continue their good work.

How will it work?

A year after receiving their first grant, each organisation is asked to submit a report to UKCF about how it has spent that grant. UKCF will then shortlist 10 organisations to receive a continuation grant, based on their due diligence process, which looks at how effectively the first grant has been spent.

The new continuation grants will still be unrestricted, in terms of how the organisations use them. This means the grants can be used for core costs, such as the running of the group, rather than just for specific projects.

We’re extremely proud of the good use our grants have been put to by all these amazing organisations over the last few years. The aim of the continuation grants is to help your chosen organisations to continue to grow, supporting your local communities, and making a real difference to people’s lives.