FAQs

We focus on small, local charities and community organisations including:

• Organisations with charitable purposes
  • Registered, exempt and excepted charities, charitable incorporated organisations and charitable trusts
  • Unincorporated associations (most constituted voluntary organisations)
  • Companies limited by shares or guarantee with charitable objectives
  • Independent schools, academy or multi-academy trusts, faith or free schools that are charities
• Non-charity social enterprises
  • Social Enterprises including CICs or other types of limited companies set up for community benefit. Read more about applying as a CIC or other non-charitable social enterprise here.
• Co-operatives & Community Benefit Societies
• Community Amateur Sports Clubs (CASC)

We have some funds that support individuals. These funds have specific eligibility criteria so you should carefully read the call for applications and any associated guidelines. See the list here.

We do not have any funds for individuals that support cost-of-living related issues. If you need help with cost-of-living issues you can find information here.

We focus on small local charities and community organisations with income up to £1 million, with priority to those with income up to £0.5 million. We will consider applications from larger organisations where the donor is supportive or where they are the best organisation to meet an identified community need. Check the calls for applications for any income limits.

Our main area of benefit is Tyne & Wear (Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland) and Northumberland but we have some funds that support organisations across North East England and beyond. Check the current calls to see the areas covered by the fund or call us if you’re not sure.

Our minimum grant is £1,000, and, as a small grants funder we rarely make grants of over £10,000 unless we have a specific fund that offers larger grants. These will be listed on the fund pages. We try to include an average grant size for a fund to give you an idea of what you might expect.

Yes you can. We may have several funds open for applications which you are eligible to apply for but please bear in mind that:

• If you are a first-time grantee and would like to apply again, we expect you to have completed your first grant and submit monitoring before reapplying.
• If you have held a grant previously, please consider your funding needs carefully as we may take into account the range of applications you have in.
• If you want an application to be considered by more than one fund for the same activity or you’re unsure, please get in touch so we can advise you on the best approach.

We first check that your application is complete and eligible.   

If you have applied to a named Fund through our current opportunities, it will be considered for that Fund. If you apply through our general process, we will see if your application matches any of our available Funds.  

We will then assess applications and may contact you for more information. In most cases, a donor or advisory panel is involved in recommending which applications should be funded. We will decide whether to offer you a grant based on the recommendations from donors and panels.  

If we cannot consider your application at any stage, we will tell you as soon as we can.   

We aim to give you a decision within 12 weeks of receiving all the information we need, this includes your application and all supporting documents.

If we think a decision on your application will take more than 12 weeks, we will contact you.

There are more applications than we have money to support, and the success rate can vary a little year to year depending on what funds we have available. We try to indicate how many grants we may make from a fund where we can.

If your application is successful, we’ll write to:

• Confirm the grant amount we’re offering and which of our Fund(s) it’s coming from.
• Confirm up to three outcomes we’ve agreed to help assess the success of the grant.
• Ask you to accept our grant agreement and confirm you agree to our offer.
• Outline any additional conditions attached to the grant.

Once we receive your acceptance, and any conditions are closed, we usually pay the grant into your bank account within 14 days. If we don’t hear from you within a month, we’ll assume you no longer wish to proceed and will cancel the offer.

If you applied to us and were successful, you can apply again so long as you have completed any outstanding monitoring reports from previous grants.

For organisations receiving their first grant from us, you must submit satisfactory monitoring or a progress update before we will consider further applications.

Yes, and many organisations do go on to get funding from us. Sometimes we just don’t have enough funds but sometimes there may be things we will ask you to change or get advice about before you apply again.

If your grant is paid in instalments or spans more than a year we will ask you for interim monitoring but for all other grants we ask for a monitoring report at the end of the grant period. This is usually 12 months unless agreed otherwise.

We ask you to complete an online monitoring form reporting against the agreed outcomes and sharing any evidence of impact, such as stories, photos, or other materials. We also need a breakdown of how you spent the grant. Sometimes we may ask to visit to learn more about you and the work we supported.

Once we’ve reviewed your final monitoring, we’ll confirm the grant is closed and provide feedback on our view of the success of the grant.

We know that things don’t always go to plan. If there are any issues with the project or organisation that may affect delivery of the grant outcomes, please contact us as soon as possible. We can then work with you. We may agree amended outcomes, link you to other support or organisations, or extend the grant period to give you more time. If you don’t tell us about such changes, whilst it is rare, we may withdraw a grant or ask you to pay back some or all of the grant.

You must always let us know if there is a serious financial or governance issue affecting your organisation. Examples might include if senior people leave, you have financial or cash-flow problems, any incident of fraud, or if your organisation is reported to the police, Charity Commission or another regulatory or safeguarding authority.

Unlike many funders with a small number of thematic funding programmes, Community Foundation North East has over 300 funds. These funds support a wide range of charitable activities. You can see what some of our funds support in the ‘Funds open for applications’ section through our current calls for applications, and also look at the impact areas in our strategy where we aim to focus most attention.

Our funding is available for the costs of:

• running your organisation day to day, sometimes called core or running costs
• projects, which are specific activities that you deliver
• capital items, for example new equipment or building work

We can also offer unrestricted funding to Registered Charities but for non-registered charities, we can only offer restricted funding for any of the above costs.

We do not normally support CICs and other social enterprises to provide continuing services, as funding for this should come from trading activity. For more information on CICs and other social enterprises, click here.

Grants are usually offered for a period of 12 months, but you can choose a shorter or longer duration when applying. Some funds may have specific timescales so do check when applying. In all cases we will take into account the length of your grant using the grant outcomes you choose when applying.

There is a button to ‘reset password’ on the portal. If this doesn’t work, don’t worry, you can call us on 0191 222 0945 or email general@communityfoundation.org.uk and we will be able to reset it for you.

Community Foundation North East has an AI statement, available to read here.

Whilst Community Foundation North East is open to grant applicants using AI tools to assist with drafting applications, we encourage organisations to be mindful of the implications. This includes considerations in data security, the environmental impact of using AI, and the importance of verifying the accuracy of AI generated content.   

In regard to assessing applications, we recognise that AI tools can be used to support human decision-making, however human relationships remain at the heart of our work. The way that we assess applications has not changed and no final decisions are made by AI.