Community Spaces Application Form

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Guidance

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Before completing this form please make sure you have read our Community Spaces grants guidance.

If you have any communication support needs that make reading or completing an application form difficult or impossible, please get in touch with us at funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk or call us on 0141 353 4321 to discuss alternative ways you can apply.


This form works best when using Chrome or Microsoft Edge.  You may experience issues if you are trying to complete this form using a tablet or Apple Mac and we would advise using a computer/laptop where possible. 


By unconnected we mean these people should not be related; married or in a civil partnership with each other; in a long-term relationship with each other; or living together at the same address.
Please Note
We consider it good practice for organisations to have at least three unconnected Trustees on their Board. As you have advised that you do not have this, we cannot consider an application from you. 

OSCR and SCVO have useful resources on good governance. 
Your local Third Sector Interface may also be able to provide some guidance around this. 


If your work involves children, young people or vulnerable adults we need to know that you have policies in place to keep them safe. We might also ask to see these.
Please Note
If your organisation’s work involves children, young people or vulnerable adults, we can only accept an application from you if you have policies in place that set out how you will keep them safe.  

You can find more information on safeguarding, including useful resources and guidance, on the OSCR website.  Your local Third Sector Interface may also be able to provide some guidance around this.

Please provide the name of your charity as registered with OSCR or the Charity Commission.
Please provide your Charity number as registered with OSCR or the Charity Commission. If you are a Scottish Charity, please enter this in the format SC012345.
Please provide the address your organisation is registered at:

Pick from one of the options below:
- Most people (at least 75% of your Board/Management Committee and/or at least 50% of senior staff who report directly to your Board).
- Around half (50% of your Board/Management Committee and one person who reports directly to your Board).
- A small number (one or two people on your Board/Management Committee).
- None
- I don’t know

We will not use this information for assessment purposes.  We are interested in understanding the profile of the organisations we fund and will report on this figure annually as part of our Equity, Diversity, Participation and Rights (EDPR) Commitment.

By paid members of staff, we mean Trustees who are employed by your organisation and receive a salary.

Please tell us their name(s), position within the organisation and their role on the board, e.g. Chair. Do you have a conflict of interest policy in place? Please also tell us about any plans to change your Board structure, for example if the post holder will be stepping down as a Trustee.


Please provide, in your own words, a brief overview of what your organisation does and who it supports. Are there any specific groups of people that you work with? We are particularly interested in understanding how you reach out to and remove barriers for individuals in your community who are at higher risk of experiencing poverty and trauma, such as disabled people or people experiencing racial inequity, to ensure they can access your services.  Please also give us an indication of the total number of people who accessed your services and activities in the past 12 months.  Further information on this and the types of work we are looking to support through our Community Spaces fund can be found in our guidance.

Examples of this might include: gathering feedback through regular chats with the people you support, in person or on social media, to gain their views; using surveys to gather feedback and taking action on this; including those you support on your Board, on steering groups or as volunteers.  We are also interested to know how you involve people from diverse communities (for example disabled people or people experiencing racial inequity) and remove barriers to their participation.

If your application is successful, we will normally offer unrestricted funding towards your organisation's overall running costs.  As this funding can be used to support all/any of your work, it's helpful if you can provide details of the range of services and activities you deliver and/or host, including what these are, who/how many people access these and how frequently they take place.  If you would like us to consider restricted funding for a specific salary or project, please detail this above, including the activities and services to be delivered by the postholder or through the project, who/how many people access these and how frequently they take place.    

Please tell us about how you link in with other services and community facilities in your area to ensure you meet the needs of your community.  Examples of this may include: receiving referrals from other organisations/community facilities; making onward referrals to other organisations for further or more specialist support; hosting information sessions led by specialist organisations; partnership working on projects; attending working groups of other organisations or local networks.

We want our funding to help reduce and prevent poverty and trauma in Scotland. To help us achieve this, we need to understand what differences our funding is helping to make for individuals, families and/or communities. These differences are sometimes called outcomes or impact. By knowing what differences you hope to achieve through your work, it will help us to see how your proposed work aligns to our own strategy.  Please note, we are not asking you to write formal outcome statements specifically for your application, (although you may already have these and measure them for your own purposes).  We are interested to know generally what differences your work will help to make for the people you support.   

We want to know what monitoring and evaluation plans you have in place which will help you to understand what differences your work is contributing to for individuals, families and/or communities, and what is leading to those differences.  The information you gather should include a mixture of numbers and stories and might involve carrying out surveys, interviews, observations, or any other way that you think will show what differences your work has helped to make.  If your application is successful, we will ask you to include this information in your End of Year and End of Grant reports.  We also hope that you will use the information you gather to make continuous improvements to your work and ensure you are having the biggest impact that you can.  

The majority of our Community Spaces grants are for 3 years.  You can also request funding for a shorter period. If successful, your funding year will run for 12 months from the date we pay your award. In most cases this will be different to the dates of your financial year.

As our revenue awards are released annually, each column year should represent a full 12 months' expenditure. 

Please try to include all the associated costs of your planned work and not just those you are requesting from us. Group expenditure under summary headings, e.g. staff salaries, travel costs, volunteer expenses, rent/utilities.  Small items of capital expenditure, e.g. equipment or materials costs, can also be included.  
 
If you expect costs to increase year on year, e.g. due to salary increments or inflation, please show this in your budget.   



Please confirm the total amount of funding you would like from us for the full funding period requested, which should be between £5,000 and £20,000 per year. Please provide a figure to the nearest thousand and enter only numbers.  For example, if you are requesting £20,000 each year for three years, you should enter 60000.

This contact must be a Trustee, and someone who is authorised to apply on behalf of the organisation.  Their details will be used as a contact point for all automated emails from The Robertson Trust, including confirming receipt of the application and our final funding decision.













This is the person we will contact with any queries about the application and who we expect to be the main point of contact throughout the assessment process.  If there is a chance that they might not be available for an extended period during the 8-10 week assessment timeframe, you may wish to consider nominating another person.

 

Their details will be used as a contact point for all automated emails from The Robertson Trust, including confirming receipt of the application and our final funding decision.

This contact MUST be a different person to the Organisation contact noted previously.
The application contact provided must be different to the organisation contact above.
The emails provided on this form must be different.









If you are a newly registered Charity and haven't yet produced Annual Accounts we can still consider your application and will ask you to provide details of an independent referee and a recent copy bank statement dated within 3 months.  Please also send us a projection showing your organisation's expected income for its first year.
If your accounts are more than 12 months old, please also provide a copy of your recent management accounts in the additional documents section.
It is helpful for our assessment if you can tell us here about:                                                                       - any one-off or unusual items in the accounts provided which would not normally                 feature on a year-to-year basis;                                                                                                               - any large surplus or deficit recorded during the financial year;                                                     - high levels of Net Current Assets – if these are close to, or in excess of, your annual                 expenditure, it would be helpful to know if this is linked to increased planned                         expenditure in the next financial year;                                                                                                  - any investments listed - it is useful for us to know whether these are property                        based, or whether your organisation could access them relatively quickly to meet                  expenditure needs.

Please provide details of an Independent Referee below.

This is someone who knows the work of your organisation but is not directly connected to it.  This might be a local community worker, MSP or Councillor, teacher, health professional or someone from your local Third Sector Interface.


Having someone from your community vouch for your work lets us know that you are well linked in within your local community and are known to others.      


We may contact the independent referee as part of the assessment of your application or during the period of any funding we award. Please make sure you have permission to provide their details and that they are happy for us to contact them. We will store their details until any grant we award comes to an end.











If you need to include more files with your application, please contact funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk 
If you are having trouble uploading files you can email them to us at
onlineapplications@therobertsontrust.org.uk.  Please tell us your organisation's name and provide your application reference number, if you have one.  If you are unable to send us this form as a result of issues uploading files, please call us on 0141 353 4321.


* This could be a local authority funding fayre, Robertson Trust event or another funders’ event 

** Third Sector Interfaces (TSIs) provide a single point of access for support and advice for the third sector within local areas. There is a TSI in each local authority area in Scotland.  

Grant Terms and Conditions 

By making an application to the Robertson Trust, you acknowledge that you are authorised to apply on behalf of your organisation and agree to the following terms and conditions:


Use of data:

  1. Your organisation unconditionally authorises The Robertson Trust to:
    1. Retain, store and use the information you give us in your application and future reporting for administration, analysis, research and promotional purposes;
    2. Publish details of any financial or non-financial support given to your organisation;
    3. Pass any details obtained about your organisation through this application or through subsequent assessment procedures to external agencies, including other grant-making bodies;
    4. Use such information as part of any survey undertaken by The Robertson Trust and/or use any such details as part of any press release or publication without the need at any time to obtain the further consent or agreement from your organisation.

Use of funds:

  1. If awarded funding, the grant will be spent on only the purposes approved by The Robertson Trust, and only by the organisation to which we awarded funding;
  2. Where the grant is unrestricted, this money can be used towards any of the day to day operational costs of the organisation;
  3. The grant will not be paid until you have provided your bank details, a copy of a bank statement/letter no older than three months and you have met any other specific conditions of release, as detailed in your Grant Welcome Pack.
  4. The grant period commences upon release of the first payment. Each grant year runs for a period of 12 months from the date of release.
  5. Any (annual) instalment of the grant must be used within 12 months of release.
  6. You will send us a progress report if documented/requested in your Grant Welcome Pack.
  7. We reserve the right to contact and/or visit you to see the funded work during the life of the grant.
  8. You will inform us, in advance where possible, of any significant change to the funded work, proposal or your organisation throughout the grant period (even if you have not yet drawn down the grant). A ‘significant change’ includes:
    1. a consequential change to your grant’s expenditure;
    2. any changes in postholder or to their role/hours/salary costs;
    3. any change in your organisation’s legal status or constitution;
    4. any significant operational changes within the organisation that are likely to affect the funded work;
    5. any serious financial or governance issue facing your organisation;
    6. any safeguarding concern raised about your organisation, its staff or volunteers;
    7. any underspend of our award.
  9. If you are not sure whether you need to let us know about an issue or change within your organisation or the funded work, please contact your Funding Officer or email funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk.
  10. You will inform us of any concerns regarding your organisation raised with OSCR (Scotland) or the Charity Commission (England) during the lifetime of our grant.  A list of concerns which OSCR can investigate are listed here.
  11. Any underspend of our grant must be declared to us and may be refunded/repaid to the Robertson Trust.
  12. We reserve the right to withhold a grant or require repayment if:
    1. You have deliberately falsified information as part of your application or reporting;
    2. The work undertaken is not the work for which the funding was approved and where we have not approved these changes;
    3. Your organisation becomes insolvent or goes into administration, receivership or liquidation and the funding has not been spent on its intended purpose.

We will sometimes apply additional conditions to an individual grant, but these will be included in your Grant Welcome Pack.


Where the application and grant award are made electronically, the agreement between us shall be deemed to be in writing and your online acceptance of these Terms and Conditions shall be deemed to be a signature to that agreement.




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