Community Spaces aims to support local communities experiencing poverty and trauma in Scotland and is for registered charities with an annual income of between £30,000 and £500,000. Applicants can apply at any time and there is no set closing date for applications.
With our guidance now available, the fund will provide revenue funding of between £5,000 and £20,000 per year, for up to 3 years, to support the costs of community centres, hubs and anchor organisations that are delivering and/or hosting a range of services and activities to meet the needs of their community. Applicants should show how the various services they deliver and/or host relate to preventing or reducing poverty and trauma for local people.
By community, we mean a geographic community. This could be in an urban or rural area experiencing high rates of poverty and trauma.
We are particularly interested in supporting applications from organisations that can show how they reach out to and remove barriers for groups of people in their community who are at higher risk of experiencing poverty and trauma, such as disabled people, people experiencing racial inequity and asylum seekers and refugees, to ensure that they know about and can access the services and activities on offer.
The opening of our Community Spaces Grants marks the end of our phased return to Our Funds, following our pause last year. We will continue to embed cycles of learning and continuous improvement across our work, including how we consider applications to our Nurturing Relationships funding theme, which we will review after communicating decisions on applications made to our Open Call, which closed last month. We will always aim to do so in a way which is fair and transparent, in keeping with the IVAR Open and Trusting principles for flexible funding.
Each of our funds are designed to be clear, transparent, and accessible to meet the needs of potential applicants. We’ve worked hard behind the scenes to provide concise information on who and what we will fund under our Our Funds, however, if you have any feedback on this, we’d welcome the chance to talk to you about it.
We encourage all applicants to read through our guidance documents in the first instance before completing our application form, as this will increase the likelihood of a successful funding outcome.
We understand however that you may still have questions that cannot be answered by our guidance, and we accept enquiries by email to funding@therobertsontrust.org.uk or you can call us on 0141 353 4321. We are a small team but try to respond to enquiries as soon as possible.
