If you are looking for funding you might want to start your route on this site from our special looking for funding section.

Grants and donations are gifts of money, and they form a major source of income for voluntary and community groups. They can also form part of the funding mix for social enterprises, especially for start-up costs and major developments.

Grants come from

• Charitable Trusts and Foundations,
• Public Bodies, and the
• Corporate Sector.

Grants are gifts of money - they are generally tax exempt and do not have to be re-paid. But they may come with conditions; commonly these would include:

• to be spent on a particular activity
• to be spent within a particular timescale
• to achieve particular results or outcomes
• any underspend to be paid back to the funder

Failure to meet any specified conditions may lead to the funder asking for the money back.

Grants from the public sector will almost always have conditions, and sometimes these may be quite demanding. Grants from other sources will vary more widely.

Donations generally come from individuals or companies and may be regular or one off, raised through events, or left as a legacy in a will. They are often given to benefit the work of the organisation generally, or they may be given in response to a particular ‘appeal’ for a specific project. In this case, the donation must be spent on this project, unless permission is given by the donor to apply the funds to other work.

In this section you will find Introductory overviews to a range of topics listed under Grants and donations on the left. In each overview you will also find

• a formatted pdf leaflet of the text which you can download and print
• a resources section containing links to other resources on the topic.

Some topics will also offer links to relevant case studies and some of the more technical topics have expert guides.