| Making it work
II Funding and resourcing: trusts as
supporters
Heather Swailes
Executive Secretary of the Allen Lane Foundation
I am going to talk about a different piece of the
jig-saw: funding from private trusts and foundations. I work for the Allen
Lane Foundation, a middle sized foundation, making grants of about
£.5m a year. Previously I worked, when it was being set up, for the
National Lottery Charities Board, which is by far the biggest of all
funders in the UK. Before that I worked for some time for the Joseph
Rowntree Charitable Trust in York, which some of you may know.
In this session I want to talk about just two primary
issues. One is how you find the right funder and other is about how you
see and describe the work that you do.
Starting with the funding world, I would like to set
the context. There are something like 8,000 private trusts and foundations
in this country. People think, when they think of trusts, of ones like
Rowntree and the Charities Board; but, of those 8,000 only something like
250 have any paid staff. Most trusts are very small and are run entirely
by their trustees, who are doing the grant-making "on the kitchen
table".
I explain this simply to warn you of the time that it
may take to get a response from a trust and of the pressure the trusts are
under. I get very little sympathy when I say how hard it is giving away
money for a living! It is quite hard, though, to do it well. It is
particularly hard for those trusts who do not have any paid staff to do
it. Trustees are ordinary people and they fit their trust work in around
their jobs. Trustees will meet maybe twice or three times a year and they
will often receive vastly more applications than they can meet. Take the
example of Allen Lane: we get on average about 1500 applications a year
and we can only make 120 to 130 grants. We are turning down 9 out of 10.
If you get turned down, it may well not be because there is anything
particularly awful about your application, it is simply that there is not
enough money to go around. Do not despair!
I think the message that I really want to get across is
that the various trusts are very, very different. There is a spectrum ranging
from the National Lottery Charities Board at one end of the spectrum to
the tiny family trust, giving away perhaps a few thousand pounds a year.
The critical thing is identifying the right ones to approach.
In terms of religion and inter faith work, as some of
you may be aware, most trusts in this country do not mention religion.
They give you no clues at all whether they would be sympathetic or not to
applications for work with this dimension. Some trusts will mention
particular religions - primarily Christianity or Judaism. Such trusts,
though, usually mention these because, as some of you would know, probably
from bitter experience, they exist to help promote their particular brand
of religion. They were set up by people who had particular interest in
supporting Jewish or Christian causes, and usually one particular
denomination. It is very hard to judge with these trusts whether they
would be likely to be interested in applications with a wider or different
religious dimension. Some – and particularly the ones that were set up
in the last century – may in fact have modernised. Their strap-line may
still be the promotion of the Christian religion but you will find when
you look at their grants that they are doing all kinds of interesting
work, including inter faith work.
There are some trusts which will say specifically:
"We do not want anything to do with anything with a religious label
on it". My advice is not to waste your time. If they say ‘We don’t
do religion’ then it probably means that they do not. Some trusts, like
ourselves at Allen Lane, try to be more specific. We struggled for ages
with what to say in our "exclusions". We do not make grants for
the promotion of sectarian religion. I am not sure philosophically
or theologically if that stands up, but what we were trying to say is that
we are not interested in funding Christians pushing Christianity, or
Muslims pushing Islam, but we do not exclude inter faith work or work that
is being done by a faith group for a particular social or community
project or whatever. It is quite hard to get this message across.
The vast majority of the 8,000 trusts will not give you
any clues and you will have to find out more about them to decide whether
they are likely to be able to help. You may have seen the big directories
of grant making trusts. Some of you may be all too familiar with them,
especially if you have started with ‘a’ and worked your way through
them to ‘z’! These directories are very useful. The Directory of
Social Change ones are, I think, more useful then the Charities Aid ones.
One of the advantages of them is that you can buy the ones relating to
your geographical area rather then working through everything in the UK.
A useful shortcut to know about is a computer programme
called ‘Funder Finder’, which, again, some of you may have used. The
advantage of Funder Finder is that is has references from all the
directories in its data base. You can say to it: ’We are a group based
in Bristol, we are interested in inter faith work, we are working with
women or young people" or whatever, and it will spit you out a list
of trusts which match what you fed in. This at least gives you 10, 20 or
30 to start with rather then having to look at thousands in the various
directories and wondering where on earth to start. However, like all
information technology, the results it produces are only as good as the
information you put in and you may find that you need to play around with
it a little bit.
The information that is in directories of trusts is
primarily what is published or provided to them by the trusts and the
depressing thing is that for many of the 8,000 all you will get is the
names of the trustees, a correspondence address and its remit or general
charitable purposes, which may tell you almost nothing about what they
really want to fund. Some trusts have a very limited geographical area and
that is important to check. They may only fund a particular parish or a
particular town or a particular county, and that can be to your advantage.
They will also probably say which kind of beneficiaries they want their
money to help and they may mention the kind of work that they want to do,
whether they fund individuals, and so on. I think the chances of getting
funding from a local trust, that focuses on your area, is much better
because on the whole the local trusts are under much less pressure then
those of us who fund nationally. I know some local trusts which actually
give something to almost anybody that applies to them, but that would not
be the same for all of them.
That brings me to the second part of what I want to
talk about: how you see the work that you do and how you describe it. Many
trusts will have trustees who have little or no interest in religion,
faith or anything of that nature. Some of them may even be sceptical if
not actually hostile. I have to say that all my trustees are secular to a
man and woman. I am a Quaker and they regard this as rather like having a
strange interest in Morris dancing in that it is not actually offensive
and as long as it does not get in the way they do not have a problem with
it, but they do regard it as a rather strange hobby! I think what you need
to do is try to put yourself into the place of trustees reading an
application. If, when they read it, they think: ‘Here is a bunch of
people who want to sit down and talk about God’, and they themselves do
not believe in God, it will seem to them a bit like stamp collecting or
Morris dancing. I think you need to be looking at what the effect is that
you hope your work will have. Why are you doing it? What is the
importance? I have sat down and done some brain storming myself and I
think it is quite a useful thing for a group of people to do, for you to
do yourselves, in terms of: Is it about community relations? Is it about
education? Does it relate to a particular group: a women’s group or a
group for young people? There are all kinds of ways you can angle an
application to a trust. I am not in any way suggesting that you should lie
about what you do, but I do think the terms or words you use and the way
the work is presented is important.
It is interesting to see what key words come up in
trust literature, particularly if you are using something like Funder
Finder. I actually did a little sleuthing before this conference. I
thought, "Right, let’s imagine I am a local inter faith group in
Birmingham". I put in ‘Birmingham’ and ‘inter faith’ and was
quite surprised to get nine charities out. This was more than I expected,
I have to say. I had rather expected to get none. Then I tried different
criteria and described it in a variety of ways. There was one trust, which
I am not going to name because it would be unfair, which came out on every
one. The important point, though, is that as you increase the number of
characteristics that you put in, the number of charities that Funder
Finder spits out increases.
I think a lot of trusts will see their prime interests
in community relations, in work countering racism, and in improving
understanding between communities. It seems to me that that is quite a
large area in which inter faith work can connect with what trusts want to
fund. I think also you will find there are trusts who are interested in
"culture". I am never quite sure how offensive it is to people’s
religion that other people think of it as a matter of culture - I always
think of ‘culture’ as going to the opera – and it might sound a bit
as if someone is saying that one’s faith is on a par with belonging to
the Morris Dancing Group. That sounds a little offensive, but I am sure it
is not meant to do. Equally, some trusts will see what you are doing in
terms of cultural activities or cultural understanding and from where you
are you need to play their game.
When it actually comes to writing an application, a lot
of Councils of Voluntary Service, a lot of local authority funding bodies
will run workshops on this and help with preparing their applications and
most of them are well worth going to. I would certainly encourage people
to do that rather than hire a fund raising consultant or pay somebody
individually. There are an awful lot of people making a lot of money
telling people how to apply to the Lottery and the whole point of the
Charities Board is that it was set up trying to be an open straight
forward process. I know it is a big application form, but it is
nevertheless a form which, taken like income tax forms box by box, is
quite straight forward. People who want large amounts of money to tell you
how to fill it in are not my favourite people. The sort of funding
workshops that the Councils of Voluntary Service provide I think you would
find very helpful.
It is important to do lots and lots of applications. As
I say, we turn down all but 10% just because of the number we receive. In
any round of applying for funding you will be turned down a lot and the
answer is just to apply a lot. Practice makes perfect.
So I think the conclusion of what I am saying is:
Remember that trusts are very varied, there are 8,000 of them and they
vary hugely. Try and identify the ones which match most closely the work
that you do and try to find out more about them. Ring them up and ask for
their guidelines. If people produce guidelines, it is because they want
you to know what they are doing. By the way, if they do not put in a phone
number, do not do your Sherlock Holmes bit and try to find their
phone number from directory enquiries (which most smart people can do,
especially if it is a local one). If trusts have not put their phone
number then it is because they really do not want phone calls.
Nothing annoys funders more, particularly the ones with no staff whose
Trustees are working from their own homes, than to be phoned up by people
wanting money. But find out more about them, and if they produce
guidelines get them. And then, have a go, and apply to as many as you can,
because funders expect people to apply simultaneously. And good luck!
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