Discover Funding Opportunities

Community Grant Scheme

The Community Grant Scheme is an opportunity for voluntary and community sector organisations to apply for a grant to run projects to support Dover district residents. This grant scheme supports community organisations and groups based within the Dover District, or seeking grants for activities that will benefit a community within the Dover District. Applicants can apply for a grant between £100 and £5,000 to support various community projects. Applications are welcomed from registered charities, charitable incorporated organisations, community interest companies, social enterprises, constituted voluntary/community groups, constituted sports clubs, constituted youth clubs, constituted school-related groups, and constituted church/faith groups. Projects should be completed within 8 months of award, and the scheme cannot back-fund applications that have already started.

Mid Suffolk Town Centre Shopfront Scheme

Mid Suffolk District Council have launched a new grant scheme open to local businesses to apply for grant funding to help improve their existing premises. The scheme focuses on town centre shops or commercial properties within Mid Suffolk, with priorities including making vacant units more attractive to new occupiers, enhancing the aesthetic appeal and key frontages within town centres, encouraging increased footfall, and providing a vibrant and mixed retail offer. The fund supports shop improvements with a focus on high-visibility frontage works, including rebranding shops with new signage, vinyl graphics and signage, canopies, cladding, accessibility improvements, lighting, new windows/doors, shutters, external security, or reinstatement of traditional or historic features that have been lost. Priority areas include Eye, Debenham, Stowupland, Elmswell, Woolpit, Thurston, Needham Market, Great Blakenham, Claydon, and Stowmarket. The maximum grant is £10,000 per property with a 40% match funding requirement that can be decreased in exceptional circumstances. All payments are made at the end of the process; therefore, applicants need to fund the project fully themselves before any reimbursements are made. Funding cannot be used to pay for items purchased prior to the grant being determined.

Rural England Prosperity Fund

The Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF) is a capital-only fund offering support to small businesses and community infrastructure projects in rural England. The fund aims to improve productivity and strengthen the rural economy and rural communities. It provides grants of up to £10,000 per application for businesses and organizations within Babergh and Mid Suffolk districts, with exceptional grants of up to £15,000 for projects strongly supporting Net Zero Infrastructure or Farm Diversification priorities. The fund is a top-up to and complementary to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and succeeds EU funding from LEADER and the Growth Programme which were part of the Rural Development Programme for England. The fund operates at a 50% intervention rate, meaning projects must be match-funded at 50% of total project costs. All payments are made as reimbursements at the end of the process, so projects must be fully funded upfront. Priority areas include investment in net zero infrastructure, SME investments and diversification, farm diversification outside of agriculture, and visitor economy business expansion. For 2025/26, Babergh received £186,377 and Mid Suffolk received £246,455 in REPF allocations. All projects must be completed and grants claimed by 1 March 2026. Available funds are now extremely limited and close to fully committed. Potential applicants must first contact the Economic Development team on an invitation-only basis if their project meets the mandatory grant criteria, though funding availability cannot be guaranteed.

Help the Homeless Small Grants Programme

Help the Homeless is a small trust that provides capital grants to small homeless charities throughout the UK. The grant programme supports registered charities with an annual turnover of less than £500,000 that work wholly or mostly with homeless people. Funding is restricted to capital projects only and cannot be used for running costs, salaries, or IT equipment. The trust offers quarterly application deadlines throughout the year and aims to inform applicants of decisions within eight weeks. With limited funds available, the trust carefully evaluates each application against strict eligibility criteria to ensure support reaches organizations directly focused on addressing homelessness through capital improvements.

Peter Smith Award

The Peter Smith Award offers £1,000 to a team of second year undergraduate geography students undertaking fieldwork overseas. The award was launched in 2020 through the Society's Geographical Fieldwork Grants (now RGS Explore Grants) and is named after Peter Smith, a long-standing supporter and Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society with boundless enthusiasm for geography, the outdoors and for learning. The purpose of the award is to support the development of second year undergraduate geography students through international field-based research, with applications from across the breadth of the discipline welcomed. The first Award was delayed until 2022 because of the travel restrictions of Covid. Recipients have conducted diverse research projects including studies of mangrove ecosystems, coastal pollution assessment, oral histories of environmental crises, and glacier research.

The Yapp Charitable Trust Grant Programme

The Yapp Charitable Trust provides grants exclusively to small registered charities with total annual expenditure of less than £50,000. The Trust funds ongoing core costs associated with regular activities or services that have been operating for at least a year. Priority is given to charities working with elderly people, children and young people, people with physical impairments, learning difficulties or mental health challenges, people overcoming life-limiting social problems such as addiction or abuse, and education and learning particularly for the educationally disadvantaged. The Trust prioritises charities delivering services in areas of high deprivation, work that is unattractive to the general public or unpopular with other funders, services helping marginalised, disadvantaged or isolated people, and applicants demonstrating effective use of volunteers and elements of self-sustainability through user fees or subscriptions.

Major Grants

The Forte Charitable Foundation's Major Grants programme provides funding to voluntary sector organisations working in family support in areas of urban and rural deprivation. The programme offers single year grants between £10,000 and £50,000 for core costs, salaries, running and project costs, or multi-year grants for a maximum of 3 years not exceeding £100,000 in total. Organisations must focus on family support, which may include early intervention, families coping with addiction, and prisoners' families. The foundation's preference is for front line organisations working directly with families in need, and they are unlikely to support campaigning, fundraising, organisational development or capacity building. Eligible organisations must have a turnover up to £500,000 and their postcode or project area must be ranked within the most deprived 15% of the Index of Multiple Deprivation for urban areas or within the most deprived 50% for rural areas. The programme uses a two-stage application process and organisations cannot reapply for two years after completion of a grant.