In May, Hunts Forum held its first informal online drop-in session called ‘Fuddies’.  These sessions are a safe space to speak about any funding application issues (big or small) and to help charities and voluntary enterprises get back into the flow of writing their applications.

A lot of areas were raised during the one hour session. Kathy Shaw, our Senior Development Officer who hosted the meeting has summarised the key topics discussed, with links to help you find further information and assistance.

Firstly, the priorities for the Healthier Futures Fund and the type of projects the Integrated Care System is looking to fund and the issues they are looking to address.

Further information can be found here: https://www.cambscf.org.uk/healthier_futures_fund

We were able to discuss the type of projects that groups were thinking about, the innovative aspects and how a wider collaboration may also work.

We then discussed the need for core funding and the funders who are currently open to fund it, Core (Organisational) Costs Funding Stream – BBC Children in Need and Home – Garfield Weston Foundation were both identified as potential funders.

Applying for grants through statutory bodies such as local parish and town councils was seen as both a source of untapped funding and quite an onerous process for the amount of funding asked for.  Where community grant pots existed, it was felt that these could be underspent and worth applying for, additionally where funded projects had big impact upon a community, influencing your local tier of governance through public campaigning to raise monies (through local powers) could be another option.

Crowd funding was another topic and from a particular organisation’s experience we could see how the public were keener to help in an actual crisis than support a generic appeal for people in crisis. We felt the more visual and tangible the cause the better crowdfunding may work.

Repeated rejections from funders can be demoralising, especially when funders aren’t prepared to give feedback, in this group we were able to encourage each other to have another go, but look at the original application to see what may have gone wrong.

It was good to hear that National Lottery Awards for All England | The National Lottery Community Fund (tnlcommunityfund.org.uk)  was still supporting local groups in tough times and in my opinion one of the most useful funds and easiest application processes any group/organisation can tap into.

We talked about the mystery of the Cambridgeshire Community Foundation | Inspiring Donors. Enabling Change. (cambscf.org.uk) funnel- how do they match your application with the correct funder?!  Apparently, they may suggest splitting the amount applied for across more than one of the funding pots if you have not identified a specific fund. Additionally, they will take more than one application in a funding round if your different projects can apply to a variety of funders.However, this is just we what we discussed, so please check first directly with CCF.

Feedback from one of the attendees stated, “Thanks for that, really helpful to get some ideas”.

These sessions are scheduled to be held monthly on the first Monday of every month.

The next Fuddies session 3^rd July 1pm to 2pm , email kathy@huntsofrum.org.uk for the link. Let’s talk about nasty funder questions and how to answer them.