We are planning alterations to install new heating,
lighting, and lavatories, which will also help our local primary
school, which needs space. We have done the planning and are ready
to apply for a faculty. We plan to apply to trusts, but we can see
that the Charity Commission website is a daunting maze; how do we
find good trust sources?
I WOULD definitely not recommend the Charity Commission
website as a route to finding trusts.
Your longer email mentioned several trusts that may be of help.
Each of them has a website; so go online and fill in any inquiry
forms, and review the application, guidelines, and forms.
For further grant-making trusts, there will be both local and
national trusts who may be useful. Churches near you may have run
their own campaigns to raise money - ask them which trusts
helped.
The charity Directory of Social Change publishes directories of
grant-making trusts, and, among them, includes regional guides
broken down further into counties. You might well find locally
relevant charities, as well as national ones.
Because yours is a large project, it might be a good idea to
subscribe to one of the main online trust-search engines. I have
found Trustfunding (trustfunding.org.uk) the most helpful for
capital fund-raising for churches, and that the free search engine
Funding Central (fundingcentral.org.uk) is not geared well towards
church capital projects.
There is what seems to be, at first glance, a hefty subscription
cost for searching; so you may prefer to start with books. In the
medium term, however, the search engines more than pay off. Please
note that they do not include the Landfill Community Funds, and a
few other sources related to local and national government: for
example, Coalfields Community Grants, the new grant scheme for
roofs and gutters, or Section 106. The latter is administered
through local authorities; so, if it might be relevant to you,
contact officers at you local council.
Recent contacts with the Landfill Communities Fund suggest that
the processes are becoming more rigorous: for example, the project
has to be under way within a year of the grant award; so you may be
advised to approach them later in your fund-raising, when you are
nearer your total.
With a very large project, such as your church's, you may find a
way to break it into phases. This will allow you to apply to the
same external sources a second time, as the first phase is
completed. It is better to have a phased project than one that has
an unachievable target.
Send your issues and questions to maggiedurran@virginmedia.com.