Building resilience fund

Introduction

Welcome to the Building Resilience Fund! This is a closed grant programme designed to support small and medium-sized charitable organisations. It offers two-year grants to help strengthen the resilience of your organisation and create a positive impact in the communities you serve. For this round of the Building Resilience Fund, we will be targeting charitable organisations that work in the following areas:

• Organisations supporting refugee and asylum seekers
• Organisations working to mitigate health inequalities

Each successful grant holder will receive a grant of between £40,000 and £70,000 made up of 50% unrestricted funding and 50% restricted funding that is ring fenced to be used on building your organisational resilience. Alongside this, we will deliver a programme of support helping you to undertake this work including workshops, networking opportunities and access to advisory support. Please take time to read through the detail below about the programme and the application process. We have put together a full list of FAQs which you will find at the bottom of the page.

The application deadline is midday Monday 17 March 2025. 

What are the programme priorities? 

The programme’s purpose is to enable charitable organisations to become more resilient; that they will be able to provide support for the communities that they support into the future. We’re looking for organisations that want to positively impact these communities and are open to looking at how they can strengthen their strategic and working practices to ensure that they are able to undertake this work into the long term.

To be selected for the Building Resilience Fund, you will be asked to demonstrate:

• A clear understanding of the needs and challenges of the people you work with
• That the majority of your work is concentrated on either refugee and asylum seekers or working towards mitigating health inequalities, rather than this being a peripheral or incidental focus
• An excellent track record of creating better outcomes for the people you aim to support
• An operational and/or governance structure which provides opportunities for people with lived experience to have a voice in the design or delivery of your services, or to influence your organisational or advocacy strategy
• Some ideas around what you might need to do next to build your organisational resilience
• Annual accounts which illustrate the social impact of your organisation as well as a reasonable level of financial sustainability
• Staffing capacity to engage with and maximise the wider opportunities of the programme in a collaborative way

What do we mean by resilience?  

Building the resilience of social purpose organisations is core to our mission and purpose. Through a number of programmes, we have worked with grant holders to build their resilience and have identified six key characteristics that show a charity has the potential to be resilient. We will use these characteristics as a framework to help support our grant holders to reflect and prioritise areas for improvement.

What can you apply for?

You can apply for a grant between £40,000 and £70,000 and are asked to apply for a size of grant that is proportionate to the size of your organisation.

If you are successful, 50% of the grant will be unrestricted and 50% will be restricted to undertake work supporting resilience building within your organisation. Grants will be paid in two annual instalments, likely to be paid in July 2025 and August 2026. Your grant should be used within 24 months of your first payment date.

The unrestricted grant will be yours to use as you think best, as long as it contributes to the mission and aims of your organisation. Although this part of your grant will not be restricted in the sense that it can only be used on specific projects, we will ask you to tell us how you’ve used the funds and will ask you to report on the impact this has had on your organisation and your community.

Please note that grants awarded to Community Interest Companies, and other non-registered charities, will not be able to have this element of their grant as unrestricted funding. All of their grant total requested will be restricted funding.

For the restricted part of the grant, we ask you to tell us about what you have identified that you need to work on to build the resilience of your organisation. This might include:

• Leadership time or additional external expertise to develop strategy, organisational capacity or evidencing your impact
• Increasing the capacity for user involvement or for people with lived experience to directly influence services or strategy
• Developing and testing operational policies and procedures
• Researching, training for or embedding technological or digital capabilities

Costs to enable any of these activities might include staff, equipment, training, marketing or overhead costs. Your total request should also provide sufficient time to enable you to engage with and maximise the wider opportunities of the programme.

What we cannot fund

Organisations that:

• Are not fully registered as charitable in the UK
• Were established or registered as charitable after 1 July 2022
• Primarily promote political or religious viewpoints to the people they support
• Are unable to supply appropriate documents including charitable registration, governance and financial documents and personal details of trustees/directors if required

The fund cannot be used for:

• Expenditure which will have already taken place when the grant is offered
• Any grants, bursaries, sponsorship or financial donations to other organisations or individuals
• Capital projects or significant items to hire or purchase

Please note that grants awarded to Community Interest Companies, and other non-registered charities, will not be able to have the unrestricted element of the grant. They will be subject to some restriction of the use of the grant towards specific charitable activities, services or outcomes. In particular, funds must not be used to generate profit for activities not deemed as charitable under the guidelines set out by the Charities Act 2011, nor should funds or profits from funds be used to pay any bonuses or dividends to directors of your company.

Frequently asked questions 

How your data is being used

If you apply for this grant programme, you will be directed to CAF’s carefully selected service provider (Blackbaud) to enter the details of your grant application. Your data will only be used for the purposes of this programme. CAF will act as a data controller for the purposes of your data. Please refer to CAF’s privacy policy for more information on how your data will be used.