Arley Youth Programme

Introduction

This is a closed grant programme that aims to support small to medium sized youth organisations by providing grants that are part restricted, part unrestricted. The 2-year grants will aim to build the resilience of your organisation.

We want to support the important work that you are doing providing positive outcomes for young people and bring about lasting change by supporting your organisation to become more resilient.

• We are looking to support up to nine organisations working with young people in and around the Bristol area.
• Each successful grant holder will receive a grant of £40,000 to £90,000 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 advice webinars.

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 on Tuesday 8th October 2024.

What are the programme priorities? 

The programme’s purpose is to enable youth organisations to become more resilient, so that they will be able to provide support into the future for young people. We’re looking for organisations that want to positively impact young lives and who 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 Arley Youth Programme, you will be asked to demonstrate:

• A clear understanding of the needs and challenges of the young people you work with
• That most of your work is concentrated on young people, rather than this being a peripheral or incidental focus
• An excellent track record of creating better outcomes for young people
• An operational and/or governance structure which provides opportunities for young people with lived experience to have a voice in the design or delivery of your services, or to influence your organisational or advocacy strategy
• A reasonably clear idea of what you 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 £90,000 and are asked to apply for a size of grant that is proportionate to the size of your organisation. Your grant request should be no more than 25% of your last filed income.

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 February 2025 and February 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 intend to use 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/young 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 January 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 

Please take a look through our FAQs below. If you need a more detailed answer, please email us via ayp@cafonline.org in the first instance.

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.