Wakeham Trust Grants

"We usually make VERY SMALL grants to VERY SMALL projects."

Small grants are available to community and voluntary groups to support small-scale projects with a community emphasis that would find it hard to obtain funding elsewhere.

"We don’t have formal grant criteria, but we are normally looking for leverage (in the sense that we make small contributions to projects nobody else will touch, in the hope that they can sometimes turn into something big). So about 50 years ago we started backing pregnancy advisory services, women’s shelters and rape crisis centres, because they were new and unpopular with other funders (indeed, we had a run-in with the Charity Commission at that stage, which did not like pregnancy advisory services); now, we seldom back them, because they have become mainstream. If things are new in a particular area then they can still meet our criteria – a lot of community action is intensely local, and the fact that something has been done elsewhere does not mean it is well-established in the places that apply to us."